Classical Reviews

Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher, London Symphony Orchestra, Alsop, Barbican Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Saturday, 05 November 2011

Honegger's gaudy 1935 meditation on the life of Joan of Arc - which we witnessed in concert last night at the Barbican - is an untidy flea market of meretricious musical ideas. The work's only value lies in it being able to make one understand why the likes of Pierre Boulez felt forced to make their postwar musical revolutions so sweeping and so violent.

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Duke Bluebeard's Castle, Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen, Royal Festival Hall

Edward Seckerson Friday, 04 November 2011

Sometimes the most disturbing images exist only in our imaginations - and so the questions posed in the preface to Bartók’s operatic masterpiece Duke Bluebeard’s Castle become especially pertinent: “Where did this happen - outside or within? Where is the stage - outside or within?” The answers, surely, lie “within”, making the prospect of a “semi-staged” climax to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia Bartók series, Infernal Dance, a potentially troubling one.

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Classical CDs Weekly: Dvořák, De Falla, Music Makes a City (DVD)

graham Rickson Saturday, 29 October 2011

Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Czech Suite, Two Slavonic Dances Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics)

Komsi, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Oramo, Barbican Hall

David Nice Saturday, 29 October 2011

With Riccardo Chailly's Leipzig Beethoven series well into its capacious stride, another cycle of symphonies keeping unusual company begins. This one featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra will take longer and features six conductors, four of them known masters of their subject, chimerical Sibelius.

WNO Orchestra, Koenigs, St David's Hall, Cardiff

stephen Walsh Saturday, 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.

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Holland Panorama, Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff

stephen Walsh Thursday, 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).

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Beethoven Cycle, Concert 2: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Chailly, Barbican Hall

David Nice Wednesday, 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.

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Beethoven Cycle, Concert 1: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Chailly, Barbican Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Tuesday, 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.

Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Ivari Ilja, Barbican Hall

David Nice Saturday, 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.