Classical Reviews
Sir Charles Mackerras Memorial Concert, Royal Festival HallFriday, 05 November 2010
In the last year of his life he was, as a colleague noted when we learned of Charles Mackerras’s death, the wise old gamekeeper in the spring forest of Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. No wonder Mackerras, we were told last night by his conductor nephew Alexander Briger, wanted that most ecstatic celebration of... Read more...
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Bostridge, Europa Galante, BarbicanSaturday, 30 October 2010
We have good days and we have bad days. Ian Bostridge, at last night’s concert at the Barbican, was not having one of his better ones. But time and CD releases wait for no man, and so he gamely ploughed through his programme of music written for three great Baroque tenors (no prizes for guessing what the title of the album is – do you think EMI would pass up an opportunity like that?), and by the end appeared a little more comfortable than at what was a rather tentative start. Read more... |
The English Concert, Alice Coote, Wigmore HallThursday, 28 October 2010
There is an excess about the Wigmore Hall’s Arts and Crafts cupola that lends itself to extravagant musical passions. The mural’s cloudy images may profess to picture music as an abstract creature, but the golden tangle of rays and warmly naked limbs make a rather more human case for its attractions. It was a case matched for persuasive enthusiasm (and significantly bettered for taste) last night by The English Concert and Alice Coote, in a programme of charged highlights from 16th and 17th-... Read more... |
Lachenmann Weekend, Southbank CentreMonday, 25 October 2010
Helmut Lachenmann is to instrumental technique what The Joy of Sex was to suburban nookie. A conduit to a whole new carnal world. Even those of us supposedly well versed in what a stringed instrument can do watched the Arditti Quartet perform the Lachenmann string quartets at the Queen Elizabeth Hall mouths agape. You...
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BBC Symphony Orchestra 80th Birthday Concert, BarbicanSaturday, 23 October 2010
Eighty years ago yesterday, the 41-year-old Adrian Boult launched the distinguished history of what was then a 114-strong BBC Symphony Orchestra with Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture in Portland Place. Three months later ice-and-fire Ernest Ansermet was over to conduct Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in a programme which included the composer at the piano. Both works were indispensible to last night's celebrations: crispbread and butter wrapped around an equally... Read more... |
Tetzlaff Quartet, Queen Elizabeth HallFriday, 22 October 2010
Their oaky, cultured and selectively scary-wild playing seemed to cast long autumn shadows over a sparse but intent audience. This is the kind of rare programme top violinist Christian Tetzlaff, his cellist sister Tanja and friends like to work on when they get time to play together.... Read more... |
100 Years of German Song, 1810-1910, Schade, Martineau, Wigmore HallWednesday, 20 October 2010
As we take in news of the cuts that the arts will have to absorb, and wait for the Cassandras to start hollering, it's important to remind ourselves of one arts venue that won't be wiping one bead of sweat off its brow as a result of today's announcements: the Wigmore Hall. This season, Britain's finest chamber music venue has a line-up of unsurpassed quality and variety. Yet it does so with less subsidy than any other equivalent music organisation in the country. Read more... |
Nicholas Daniel, Britten Sinfonia, MacMillan, Queen Elizabeth HallTuesday, 19 October 2010
If you were one of the world's top soloists but with a limited concerto stock - as woodwind players' tend to be - wouldn't you find it more rewarding to work as a principal in the orchestral ranks? That's the ideal, surely, but few carry it out in practice. Nicholas Daniel, the beefiest-sounding oboist to appear on the scene since the great Maurice Bourgue, is one who does. Last night he not only shone in the bright ensemble of Beethoven's Second Symphony; he also scored a triumph with a... Read more... |
Stephen Kovacevich 70th Birthday Concert, Wigmore HallMonday, 18 October 2010
Heartfelt birthday salutations to the great pianist first known as plain Stephen Bishop. For a recital in the early 1980s, when he first added the paternal Croatian "Kovacevich", introducing me to late Brahms piano music - Op 117, never more evanescent or troubling since - and the Beethoven Tempest Sonata, an incentive to tackle that work as best I could. Read more... |
Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Vásquez, Royal Festival HallFriday, 15 October 2010
It's now 21 years since I first heard the then-untrumpeted protégés of El Sistema, the Venezuelan phenomenon which has launched a thousand youth-and-music projects worldwide. Read more... |
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