Classical Reviews
WNO Orchestra, Koenigs, St David's Hall, CardiffSaturday, 29 October 2011
“Blessed are the dead”, sings Brahms in the final movement of his German Requiem. And as far as the rest of this concert was concerned it was perhaps just as well. In Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the children are all dead; and in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw everyone else has passed on except, of course, the survivor. The audience was not so much dead as largely absent, frightened off, I suppose, by the dreaded Arnold. Read more...
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Holland Panorama, Hoddinott Hall, CardiffThursday, 27 October 2011
Isn’t it strange how national talent goes by subject? Put on a blockbuster exhibition of Dutch painting and the queue will stretch to the Embankment. But can you imagine a festival of Dutch music? Sweelinck (d 1652) and Andriessen (b 1939) more or less sums it up. The BBC brought together three living Dutch composers for this Portrait concert, and one of them wasn’t after all Dutch (“I’ve kept my Swedish passport,” he insisted rather unchivalrously in the pre-concert interview). Read more... |
Beethoven Cycle, Concert 2: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Chailly, Barbican HallWednesday, 26 October 2011
Of all the Beethoven symphonies the Seventh is the one that can seem to whizz along under its own steam. At any rate, the impression Riccardo Chailly gave last night was of having fine-tuned his sleek Leipzig machine, turning on the engine and letting it fly. Only the extra stops I like to think a great conductor would usually have pulled out remained untouched. Read more... |
Beethoven Cycle, Concert 1: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Chailly, Barbican HallTuesday, 25 October 2011
There are many ways of breathing new life into Beethoven. Carlos Kleiber used to do it through imagery. He once famously asked his Viennese double basses to play like monkeys during a rehearsal of Beethoven's Seventh. Riccardo Chailly's tactic for his Barbican Beethoven cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra appears to have been to become, if not monkeyish, then at least a bit of a mischievous teenager. Read more... |
Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Ivari Ilja, Barbican HallSaturday, 22 October 2011
Tchaikovsky songs, the most obvious missing link in Olga Borodina's all-Russian programme a couple of Fridays back, formed a spare but unforgettable apex to this second recital in the Barbican's Great Performers series. That in itself, and unusual repertoire - Sviridov the other week, Tchaikovsky's rigorous protégé Taneyev last night - gave the sense of a mini-festival in two concerts. Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Schumann, Stravinsky, XenakisSaturday, 22 October 2011
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Classical CDs Weekly: Bach, Schwertsik, ShostakovichSaturday, 15 October 2011
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Schiff, Baker, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, ManchesterFriday, 14 October 2011
The objective: Beethoven’s symphonies. All of them. In numerical order, one after the other. Not only that, but a “powerful” work written in the last century to go with each one. That is Sir Mark Elder’s self-imposed mission for his 12th season with the Hallé. He has described it as the orchestra’s “first Beethoven cycle of the 21st century”. Is that a veiled promise of others to come? Perhaps in another 50 years, which is when the Hallé last tackled the cycle. Read more... |
Les Arts Florissants, Union ChapelFriday, 14 October 2011
“They should have trance nights here,” I heard a young man say to his girlfriend as we entered the domed, craggy splendour of Islington’s Union Chapel. Still a working church, this Victorian Gothic monster is an architectural Escher fantasy of arches and angles, its octagonal layout concealing as much as it reveals on first glance. Read more... |
Pacifica Quartet, Wigmore HallThursday, 13 October 2011
How good it feels, after several decades of Shostakovich quartet series, to be able to say not just “what a tragic life” but also “what ingenious treatment of great ideas, what a range of universal human emotions”. And even, walking on air away from the second concert in the Pacifica Quartet’s Wigmore Shostakovich cycle, “how accepting, how at one with the world”. Read more... |
Schumann: Geistervariationen András Schiff (ECM)
Bach: Five Keyboard Concertos Ramin Bahrami, Gewandhausorchester, Riccardo Chailly (Decca)Pages
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