Classical Reviews

Stephen Kovacevich 70th Birthday Concert, Wigmore Hall

David Nice Monday, 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.

Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Vásquez, Royal Festival Hall

David Nice Friday, 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.

Szymczewska, LPO, Vänskä, Royal Festival Hall

Edward Seckerson Thursday, 14 October 2010

The flurry of fanfares at the start of Magnus Lindberg’s Al largo (UK premiere) sounded almost Waltonian. Or maybe that was because the prospect of Osmo Vänskä in Walton’s First Symphony was such an enticing one that premonitions of its highly distinctive sound-world were already being suggested in the somewhat predictable pyrotechnics of the Lindberg. Lindberg is a great showman and an accomplished technician, but against Walton’s startling originality (circa 1935) he sounded, well...

Michael Jarrell, Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff

stephen Walsh Wednesday, 13 October 2010

Michael Jarrell: 'As thrilling and instantaneous as a tidal wave or an avalanche'

Music, Wagner famously pronounced, is the art of transition. For the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, by contrast, music is “the art of punctuation”. On the one hand, how to get from one thing to the next; on the other hand, how to separate one thing from the next. But in the end the problem is much the same: how do we make sense of large chunks of time that contain nothing but music?

Mutter, LSO, Sir Colin Davis, Barbican

David Nice Monday, 11 October 2010

Comment

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis, Barbican

David Nice Friday, 08 October 2010

Elgar and Delius are two geniuses who only ever composed themselves - the first drawing heavily on psychology and physiognomy, the second drenching his country visions in painful nostalgia. So it made good sense to have man and nature side by side in Sir Andrew Davis's latest enterprising concert. Oh, and there was a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society's Elgar Bursary too, though this was only "new" music by the old guard.

Comment

Electronica: BBC Concert Orchestra, Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, Hazlewood, QEH

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Thursday, 07 October 2010

I would call them burglars: musicians from the experimental rock, electronica and sound-art traditions who cross the genre divide, sneak into the world of classical music, pillage its more easily pillaged valuables, thieve its respectability, filch its original ideas, and sprint back breathlessly to their wide-eyed fans to show off this brilliantly clever "new" classical music (much of which is made up of techniques that George Benjamin would have grown out of by the age of six) in double...

Comment

Kissin, LPO, Neeme Järvi, Royal Festival Hall

David Nice Wednesday, 06 October 2010

Neeme Järvi: Easy mastery that lifts the familiar

"Well, Kissin's the star of the show," opined the fatuous gentleman who rolled in late to my row after the first piece on the programme. Possibly not, I wanted to snap back, in the light of that very fine pianist's current erratic form. But in any case this celebrity-hunter had just missed one of the great conductors working effortless miracles of charm on...

Comment

Mitsuko Uchida, Royal Festival Hall

Edward Seckerson Wednesday, 06 October 2010

Mitsuko Uchida’s playing is a glorious collusion of intellect and fantasy. Her recitals are meticulously planned but seemingly unexpected with chosen pieces impacting upon each other in ways one might not have imagined. Three keyboard giants – Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin – were the meat of this recital with not an incidental or superfluous note to be found anywhere.

Håkan Hardenberger, Wigmore Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Monday, 04 October 2010

The first phrase of the first piece by Georges Enescu - silken, expressive, rounded, breathed to perfection - established a very good case for Håkan Hardenberger being the greatest living trumpeter. The rest of his Wigmore Hall recital established a pretty equally watertight case against.