Classical Reviews

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.

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Wolfgang Holzmair, Andreas Haefliger, Wigmore Hall

Ismene Brown Sunday, 29 November 2009

Baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and pianist Andreas Haefliger: two to admire for musicianship and integrity

There’s something beyond detailed and attentive musicianship that’s needed in Schubert’s last, most desolate song-cycle, Winterreise (“Winter’s journey”). It’s a dramatic arc that unites these 24 songs into a journey, the number of breaths in time and miles in distance that elapse from the first poem to the 24th, and bring you a sense of contact with the person undergoing this terrible suffering. Someone who is not Schubert, the composer, or Müller, the poet, but a third person.

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Leonidas Kavakos, Camerata Salzburg, QEH

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Saturday, 28 November 2009

There are many ways of being orchestral. About as many ways, in fact, as there are of organising the body politic. At one extreme there are the fascist orchestral states with their Kim Il-sung-emulating conductor-tyrants (Fritz Reiner's Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for example). At the other you have the right-on, conductorless cooperatives of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

Schnittke Festival finale, Jurowski, RFH

David Nice Saturday, 28 November 2009

Eliot's "time future contained in time past" has been conductor Vladimir Jurowski's unofficial motto throughout a festival which has had to take itself very seriously, and managed miraculously to carry a surprisingly large, loyal audience of all ages and persuasions along with it. Such stringent conditions could hardly be otherwise given the focal point of an uncompromising genius.

Messiah, ENO

Jonathan Wikeley Friday, 27 November 2009

Communion and community: Warner's Messiah mixes the sacred and the everyday

There are so many ways a dramatic production of Messiah can go wrong it is almost unbearable to think about it. Certainly, there was a palpable buzz of nervousness in the Coliseum about last night’s audience as they took their seats. Did English National Opera really think it could pull it off? Could it avoid the pitfalls into triteness that surely lurk at every corner? How would the chorus manage it? And please God, let it be better than Glyndebourne’s 2007 St Matthew Passion.

Comment

William Christie, Les Arts Florissants, Barbican

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Friday, 27 November 2009

Thank God for Les Arts Florissants. Without the assiduous efforts of this pretty, chic French ensemble and its expat American conductor William Christie, one of the great periods in musical history, that of the French high baroque, would still be shrouded in darkness.

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

Edward Seckerson Thursday, 26 November 2009

J S Bach was very much at the spiritual centre of this cunningly devised programme for the South Bank’s current Alfred Schnittke fest: Between Two Worlds. But by the time we emerged shaken but, in my case, not stirred by Schnittke’s preposterous 3rd Symphony the entire Austro-German symphonic legacy had flashed before our ears. Well, not flashed exactly, rather ground to a halt from a slow rewind of ever diminishing returns.