Classical Reviews

Last Night of the Proms, Jansen, Williams, BBCSO, Oramo

Sebastian Scotney Sunday, 14 September 2014

If only the Last Night of the Proms could just be about the music. If it were, then the story which I would want to tell would be about Janine Jansen. A crowd which mainly turns up to wave its vast array of flags, to bounce its beach-balls and generally to step free from the shackles of adulthood, was mesmerised into a concentrated hush by the magnetism of the Dutch violinist. She drew the huge audience right in to her playing.

Prom 75: Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Gilbert

alexandra Coghlan Saturday, 13 September 2014

The silliness of the Last Night is really just a postscript to the penultimate night of the Proms, traditionally given over to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was a tradition restored yesterday evening when Alan Gilbert and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra returned for their second concert of the season. For anyone whose stomach is liable to turn at extrovert jingoism and excess, this was the perfect antidote.

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Classical CDs Weekly: Elgar, Fuzzy, James Rhodes

graham Rickson Saturday, 13 September 2014

Elgar: Symphony no 1, Cockaigne Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo (BIS)

Prom 74: Wainwright, Voigt, Britten Sinfonia, Debus

David Nice Friday, 12 September 2014

Swathes of this year’s final Late Night Prom were so invertebrate, amateurish even, that I was tempted to go home and throw out my Want One and Want Two CDs. I won’t, of course: Canadian American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has written some fabulous songs, and developed a unique vocal style to deliver them.

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Prom 72: Berthaud, BBCSO, Litton

alexandra Coghlan Thursday, 11 September 2014

A Prom billed as “English Music” sounds like a restful sort of affair – probably pastoral, definitely tuneful and potentially restorative after a day in the office. In practice however this concert from Andrew Litton and the BBC Symphony Orchestra was – thankfully – altogether more bracing, pairing Vaughan Williams at his most combative with vintage Birtwistle.

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Prom 71: Time for Three, BBC Concert Orchestra, Lockhart

Matthew Wright Wednesday, 10 September 2014

Aaron Copland was an unlikely musical portraitist of the American plains and prairies. Son of Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn and student of modernism with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he nonetheless created the quintessential American orchestral sound with a series of popular (“vernacular” was his phrase) works in 1930s and 1940s. Last night three of his most popular pieces were paired with two new pieces inspired by jazz, that other great American twentieth-century music.

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Prom 69: Cleveland Orchestra, Welser-Möst

Geoff Brown Tuesday, 09 September 2014

Is there something about the start of a new cultural season, or indeed the Proms, that make classical music’s conductors rush to jump ship? Consider this. Last Friday, two days before his pair of Prom concerts with his American outfit, the Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, so diffident on the outside, resigned from his important European post as the Vienna State Opera’s music director with immediate effect. Irreconcilable artistic differences were cited.

Prom 66: St Matthew Passion, Berlin Philharmonic, Rattle

alexandra Coghlan Sunday, 07 September 2014

Peter Sellars’ work used to be about making a statement. He would dislocate texts from contexts, subvert musical suggestion and ignore written statement for the sheer joy of the artistic friction it would generate. The beauty of his St Matthew Passion staging however, first seen in 2010, is that it does nothing of the sort.

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A Season at the Juilliard School, Sky Arts 2

David Nice Sunday, 07 September 2014

“You feel like you’re walking into Fame, the movie,“ says one of three third-year drama students towards the beginning of this six-part documentary. That’s what we might have hoped of what, at least in the first episode, turns out to be a mere infomercial for New York’s prestigious academy of performing arts.

DiDonato, Pappano, Wigmore Hall

Sebastian Scotney Sunday, 07 September 2014

For the first night of its 114th season, the dear old Wiggy welcomed back its regulars after the summer break. A starry occasion like this recital by Joyce DiDonato and Sir Antonio Pappano gets booked out virtually exclusively by those patrons and members, so it was an evening with a lot of air-kissing and greeting across the familiar rows of red seats.