Classical Reviews

Sonica 2015, Glasgow

David Kettle Sunday, 01 November 2015

Sometimes it’s visual art with a sonic slant; sometimes it’s music with a visual slant. Glasgow’s Sonica – created by producers Cryptic, now in its third year and bigger than ever – feels like a thoroughly modern festival, defying genre boundaries and instead focusing squarely on the intersection of the sonic and the visual. That might make some of its offerings hard to categorise, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

Classical CDs Weekly: Montanari, Sibelius, Stephen Kovacevich

graham Rickson Saturday, 31 October 2015

Montanari: Violin Concertos Johannes Pramsohler (violin and director), Ensemble Diderot (Audax Records)

Tchaikovsky Competition Winners Tour

Ismene Brown Friday, 30 October 2015

For a few very lucky competition winners there is a shopping trip where they are paraded around the world. A terrific opportunity, though a horrible experience, probably. Most competition winners have only a new line in their CV to stare at after the award ceremony, so the advantage of being a 2015 Tchaikovsky laureate, with a promise of an international tour with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra, is self-evident.

Fröst, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Chailly, Barbican

Gavin Dixon Saturday, 24 October 2015

Final thoughts: a fitting theme for the farewell concert of this year’s Gewandhaus Barbican residency. But the connections proved tenuous: Death and Transfiguration, the gloomy opener, was written when Strauss was only 25, and the Mozart Clarinet Concerto which followed, while it was one of his last works, shows little concern for mortality or summation.

Tetzlaff, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Chailly, Barbican

David Nice Friday, 23 October 2015

In practice as well as in prospect, the second in Riccardo Chailly’s Strauss/Mozart trilogy was a concert of two very different halves.

Pires, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Chailly, Barbican

David Nice Wednesday, 21 October 2015

Riccardo Chailly’s Strauss odyssey with his Leipzig orchestra peaked in Saxony last year, the 150^th anniversary of the composer’s birth. I was lucky to catch a razor-sharp Till Eulenspiegel and a saturated Death and Transfiguration in Dresden’s Semperoper close to the birthday. 14 months on, and the Barbican has nothing like the same necessary air to offer around a mini-residency of richly-scored symphonic poems.

Comment

SCO, Ticciati, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Christopher Lambton Friday, 16 October 2015

The justification for playing Brahms with a chamber orchestra is well rehearsed. In fact, I have on my desk a Telarc boxed set of the four symphonies “in the style of the original Meiningen performances”, recorded by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under the visionary Sir Charles Mackerras in 1997. Then, as now, the idea was to lighten the texture and give greater prominence to the woodwind.

Cordelia Williams, Kings Place

Peter Quantrill Wednesday, 14 October 2015

The music of Olivier Messiaen lends itself ideally to the kind of multimedia project created by Cordelia Williams. His titles tell stories of terror and redemption, Man, men, God and angels. His chords burst with colour, not only the green and gold of Christmas or the red and purple of Crucifixion but the pulsing of a slow journey, stripes of redemption, layers of wakefulness.

Bronfman, LSO, Gergiev, Barbican

Bernard Hughes Monday, 12 October 2015

Stravinsky and Bartók both escaped Europe at the start of the second world war to live in the USA. For Stravinsky it was the start of 30 years of mostly happy exile, while Bartók was to survive for only five years. Works from their time in America featured in Valery Gergiev’s penultimate concert as principal conductor of the LSO last night.

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Volkov, Barbican

Peter Quantrill Saturday, 10 October 2015

This Barbican concert began with a Mendelssohn overture and ended with a Haydn symphony. But on stage were the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. What did you expect in between, a Mozart piano concerto? Not likely. Instead they gave the first performance of No.48 (night studio) by Richard Ayres.