Classical Reviews
Prom 71: Time for Three, BBC Concert Orchestra, LockhartWednesday, 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. Read more...
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Prom 69: Cleveland Orchestra, Welser-MöstTuesday, 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. Read more... |
Prom 66: St Matthew Passion, Berlin Philharmonic, RattleSunday, 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. Read more... |
A Season at the Juilliard School, Sky Arts 2Sunday, 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. Read more... |
DiDonato, Pappano, Wigmore HallSunday, 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. Read more... |
Prom 64: Berlin Philharmonic, RattleSaturday, 06 September 2014
After Monday’s Respighi extravaganza at the Proms, it was back on the rainbow express for more wonders of orchestral colour last night. In the young Stravinsky’s large-scale signing-in and poor depressed old Rachmaninov’s signing-off, you could trust Sir Simon Rattle’s Berlin army of generals to turn in any amount of subtle colours. Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Grieg, Mahler, Choir of Gonville & Caius CollegeSaturday, 06 September 2014
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Façade/Eight Songs for a Mad King, Grimeborn Opera, Arcola TheatreFriday, 05 September 2014
Walton’s Façade is not performed very often in London, but this weekend there is the opportunity to hear it four days in a row: on Monday at a chamber Prom, but before that in this enterprising staging, paired with Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King. Read more... |
Prom 63: McAllister, BBCSO, AlsopFriday, 05 September 2014
Conductor Marin Alsop was welcomed like Britannia herself at last night’s concert, an astute partnership of John Adams’ vivacious hybridism and Gustav Mahler’s colourful patchwork quilt of a symphony. Read more... |
Proms Chamber Music 7: Benjamin Grosvenor/Prom 60: Driver, RPO, DutoitTuesday, 02 September 2014
After the enervating excesses of Salome and Elektra at the weekend, the abundance of notes at the Proms continued in a piano recital and an orchestral showstopper, but this time with built-in air conditioning. After all, both 22-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor and septuagenarian Charles Dutoit are absolutely in control of the colours they make, very occasionally too much so. Read more... |
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