Classical Reviews

BBC National Orchestra of Wales, St David's Hall, Cardiff

stephen Walsh Friday, 12 November 2010

Piero di Cosimo: 'The Fight Between the Lapiths and the Centaurs'

How much do you know about centaurs? Probably you know they are horses below the withers, human above. But did you know they were heavy drinkers who once got out of hand at the wedding of the King of the Lapiths, tried to rape the bride and got beaten up for their pains?

Kafka Fragments, Barbican Hall

alexandra Coghlan Friday, 12 November 2010

Dog eat dog: 'David Michalek's images dominate the projected backdrop'

A 70-minute song cycle for soprano and violin, the Kafka Fragments is the magnum opus (the irony of its miniature forms seems entirely deliberate) of György Kurtág, a composer known for the inscrutability of his music. His lines arrive at the ears fully armed, unwilling to surrender their meaning. A performance of the Fragments at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2008 famously drove a musically literate audience from the room, so can Peter Sellars's staged...

Sir Charles Mackerras Memorial Concert, Royal Festival Hall

David Nice Friday, 05 November 2010

Sir Charles Mackerras during rehearsals for his final Philharmonia concert last December

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...

Comment

Bostridge, Europa Galante, Barbican

Jonathan Wikeley Saturday, 30 October 2010

Three for the price of one: Bostridge looks to the famous tenors of the Baroque

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.

Comment

The English Concert, Alice Coote, Wigmore Hall

alexandra Coghlan Thursday, 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-...

Lachenmann Weekend, Southbank Centre

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Monday, 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...

BBC Symphony Orchestra 80th Birthday Concert, Barbican

David Nice Saturday, 23 October 2010

Kari Kriikku as Kaija Saariaho's unicorn, with David Robertson conducting the BBCSO

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...

Tetzlaff Quartet, Queen Elizabeth Hall

David Nice Friday, 22 October 2010

Strange meeting: Viola-player Hanna Weinmeister, violinists Elisabeth Kufferath and Christian Tetzlaff, and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff

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....

100 Years of German Song, 1810-1910, Schade, Martineau, Wigmore Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Wednesday, 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.

Comment

Nicholas Daniel, Britten Sinfonia, MacMillan, Queen Elizabeth Hall

David Nice Tuesday, 19 October 2010

Nicholas Daniel: Tackling MacMillan's tough and brilliant new Oboe Concerto before slipping back into the ranks of the Britten Sinfonia

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...