Classical Reviews

Britten Sinfonia, Wigmore Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Wednesday, 16 December 2009

Multiply by a hundred and you get a good picture of this afternoon's Wigmore Hall concert

A truly terrifying sight this afternoon. The Wigmore Hall: full of children. A group of 50 10- to 13-year-olds were filing in to hear their first classical concert. On this one event a lifetime’s attitude to an entire art form would be based. It was make or break time. The concert would have to have been very carefully chosen. Hm. What had these wise teachers picked for these impressionable young rookies to ease their ears into the tough world of classical music? A lunchtime chamber...

Royal Concertgebouw, Jansons, Barbican

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Monday, 14 December 2009

There’s simply no orchestral sound quite like it. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra had barely done a bar of Bedřich Smetana’s overture to The Bartered Bride before I found myself grinning like a fool. It was as if I had stepped off a plane and walked into a bath of fresh foreign sun. The biting cold of winter had temporarily lifted for those who had made it to the Barbican this weekend. Spring had come early.

Philharmonia, Mackerras, RFH

David Nice Sunday, 13 December 2009

Sir Charles Mackerras: hitting the right emotional spots with effortless mastery

Creative old age brings with it not just the expected serene glow but also a singular urgency, a fresh intensity, or so that magisterial pianist Claudio Arrau once wrote. Arrau was a living testament to his claim; so, now, is the 84-year-old Sir Charles Mackerras. Everything he's chosen to bring to life this season has a valedictory quality, or perhaps he simply selects the best. His Philharmonia diptych of concerts led us from the Wagnerian end of the world on Thursday to a Sunday afternoon of...

Imogen Cooper, QEH

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Wednesday, 09 December 2009

Franz Schubert: sweet but probably not sane

Even Schubert’s very earliest compositions terrify. His first songs, written when he was only 13, are unforgettably vivid, gory, messy, mangled, full of darkness and horror, like dead little birds. He never shakes off this Gothic sensibility; it’s never ironed out of him. A part of him remains untutored, untamed, right to the end, and over time his dark preoccupations gather a more and more frightening shape. Pitch blackness is reached in his Piano Sonata in A minor, D784, one of strangest...

Comment

Christine Brewer, Roger Vignoles, Wigmore Hall

Edward Seckerson Wednesday, 09 December 2009

American great: 'Christine Brewer in Richard Strauss is about as right as it gets'

Wigmore Hall does not always take kindly to big voices; it’s an easy hall to over-sing. But when the singer is the American soprano Christine Brewer and the sound so open, so rich and effulgent, hall and voice become one resonance. It’s almost as if Wigmore is selective in its response. It warms to the right voice in the right music. Brewer in Strauss is about as right as it gets. And besides, regardless of the venue, Brewer has never sung to be heard; she sings to be understood.

Nikolai Demidenko, Wigmore Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Monday, 07 December 2009

Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's Wigmore Hall recital plunge and soar, catch you by the feet and dangle you by the ankles.

Otello, LSO, Sir Colin Davis, Barbican

David Nice Sunday, 06 December 2009

Sir Colin Davis rehearsing the LSO last week: Starbursts and moonshine, but less of the broader sweep

Let's suppose that off-centre genius among opera directors Richard Jones had been asked to bring his imagination to bear on Sir Colin Davis's latest Verdi-in-concert. I imagine he might have weighed up leading men, chorus and the conductor's unexpected blend of manicure with flash alongside swathes of masterful beauty, and decided to follow up his 1940s Windsor Falstaff at Glyndebourne with a 1970s Otello set in Surbiton.

Total Immersion: George Crumb, Barbican

David Nice Saturday, 05 December 2009

To summon spirits from the vasty deep is the ambition of too many overloaded contemporary scores. George Crumb is better than most at getting those spirits to come when he calls, yet even he touches the transcendental more surely the fewer instruments he engages.

Pictures Reframed: Leif Ove Andsnes & Robin Rhode, QEH

Ismene Brown Friday, 04 December 2009

We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical music to a general audience today - he calls the status quo into question, and he may be right.

Comment

Philippe Jaroussky, Concerto Cologne, Barbican

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Thursday, 03 December 2009

Nesting gay men and posh female totty by the bucketload in the audience last night. Fill any programme with Baroque opera and that’s what you get. Why? Because the Baroque is aspirational pop. It's grounded in the same musical tricks that drive on the chart-topping hits of Kylie or Madonna: pumping ostinati, unshake-offable tunes and harmonic Häagen-Dazs - obvious harmonic loops that you can't get enough of. Though last night the hook was even simpler: a beddable boy.