Classical music
David Nice
Tired after a hard day at the office? You might think you need a Classic FM-style warm bath, but the blast of Prokofiev’s Second Symphony, one of the noisiest in the repertoire, is the real ticket to recharging the batteries. Gianandrea Noseda, on the latest stage of his bracing journey through the composer’s symphonies and embracing the London Symphony Orchestra’s hugely popular Half Six Fix series, served it up with panache both in word and deed.The sweetener was the overture the 23-year-old Schubert furnished both for a “magic play with music”, Die Zauberharfe (no harp in the orchestra Read more ...
David Nice
When Vladimir Jurowski returns to what used to be “his” London Philharmonic Orchestra, you’d better jump. I would have done on Wednesday had I been able to get to his heady mix of Russian and Ukrainian rarities; luckily I could on Saturday night, because an outwardly standard programme of early 19th century works proved perfect, raising Schumann’s much-denigrated Violin Concerto to the level of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony.Vilde Frang (pictured below) was the ideal match for Jurowski and the LPO here. Her double-stopping entry, startlingly resonant, Read more ...
David Nice
Igor Levit is a master of the unorthodox marathon, one he was happy to share last night with 24-year-old Austrian Lukas Sternath, his student in Hanover. Not only did Sternath get the obvious stunner of two Prokofiev sonatas in the first half; he also had all the best tunes and phrases as the right-hand man, so to speak, in Shostakovich’s piano arrangement of his towering Tenth Symphony. The best, as in absolutely no holds barred, came at the very end.Had Prokofiev's Ninth Piano Sonata received a more straightforward interpretation, it should have followed the Seventh, not begun the concert: Read more ...
graham.rickson
Vox Feminae: music by Barbara Strozzi, Antonia Bemba, Hieryonymus Kapsberger... Les Kapsber’girls/Albane Imbs (Alpha)What a complete transformation from one album to the next. The last one, Vous-avez dit brunettes? – "did you say brunettes?" – (Alpha, 2021) opened tongue-in-cheek with the bleating and bells of a flock of sheep, then launching into occasionally over-theatrical songs about shepherds, love or drinking. Vox Feminae, a collection of works from Italian women composers, is in a different league altogether, and is surely going to end up winning some awards. Lutenist Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic took its Saturday night audience on a journey into French sonic luxuriance – in reverse order of historical formation, beginning with Duruflé, continuing with Chausson and ending with Saint-Saëns. It was conducted by Geoffrey Paterson and featured Dame Sarah Connolly as mezzo-soprano soloist, neither of them the artists originally announced, but 100 per cent good value as their substitutes. Finishing with the Third Symphony of Saint-Saëns – the “organ symphony”, which has a drawing power of its own for those who love to hear the noise that music can make – was the Read more ...
Biss, National Symphony Orchestra, Kuokman, NCH Dublin review - full house goes wild for vivid epics
David Nice
On paper, it was a standard programme with no stars to explain how this came to be a sellout concert. But packed it was, an audience of all ages which sat with concentrated awe through the spellbinding slow movement of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto and went wild at the end of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Both works were groundbreaking at the time, sounding absolutely fresh here with the passion and precision awesomely well balanced by conductor Lio Kuokman.It may be that the leonine Brahms is one step too far for a subtle pianist like Jonathan Biss (pictured below by Benjamin Ealovega): Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Forget, for a moment, the legend and the lustre. If you knew nothing about Riccardo Muti’s half-century of history with Verdi’s Messa da Requiem for the writer-patriot Alessandro Manzoni – he first gave it with the Philharmonia back in 1974 – and came fresh to this conductor with this work, would it shake the soul? On the evidence of the 83-year-old maestro’s performance with the same orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall last night, the answer would have to be a resonant affirmative. The Philharmonia Chorus built their mighty wall of sound and feeling above the players, while in front the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Mariam Batsashvili, the young virtuosa pianist from Georgia, is a star. No doubt about that. Trained at the Liszt Academy in Weimar and winner of the International Franz Liszt Competition for Young Pianists in that city in 2015, she should know something about how to play Liszt’s music.Her performance of his Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Hallé and Kahchun Wong – and her solo encore after it – proved that she does. It’s not just that she can play all the notes, all in the right order, and at times with phenomenal speed: it’s her portrayal of the music’s essential characteristics in its Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has had to put up with its fair share of artist cancellations over the last month, and the ensuing games of musical chairs led to the somewhat implausible scenario of this concert, where Richard Egarr, a conductor more closely associated with Bach and Handel, conducted the UK premiere of a work by Peter Eötvös, that darling of the avant-garde.In fairness to Egarr, he did nothing more than what he does with the Baroque music for which he is so renowned: he played it with the clarity, shape and the expression it needed to come alive. Shape, in fact, was critical Read more ...
graham.rickson
Donizetti: Songs Vols. 3 & 4 Michael Spyres (tenor), Carlo Rizzi (piano) – Vol. 3, Marie-Nicole Lemieux (mezzo-soprano), Giulio Zappa (piano) – Vol. 4. (Opera Rara)“The songs Donizetti poured forth during his composing career have [..] been unjustly neglected…. In their totality these compositions make a powerful case for Donizetti as a key figure in nineteenth-century domestic music-making,” writes Roger Parker, who acts as repertoire consultant to Opera Rara, and is in the process of establishing a new critical edition of them. Opera Rara is releasing a total of eight volumes, or Read more ...
David Nice
Imagine if Bach had set Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili’s allegory of Beauty breaking free from Pleasure with the guidance of Time and Enlightenment: he’d probably have hit the spiritual highs. The 21-year-old Handel, at least as this multifaceted performance so vigorously and poetically argued, plumps for hedonistic delights.Despite a radiant quiet curtain praising the truer, purer heavenly love, it was Pleasure in the shape of mezzo-in-a-thousand Helen Charlston who held us captive, along with the rainbow hues Peter Whelan drew from his phenomenally responsive Irish Baroque Orchestra in this Read more ...
David Nice
Few symphonies lasting over an hour hold the attention (Mahler’s can; even Messiaen’s Turangalîla feels two movements too long). Wynton Marsalis is a great man, but his Fourth, “The Jungle”, is no masterpiece, not even a symphony – a dance suite, maybe, with enough bold textures to recall wandering attentions. We needed less of this, and more of the Duke Ellington selections superbly played by the 15-strong Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in the first half.Right at the start, clarinettists Sherman Irby and Alexa Tarantino blew us away in "The Mooch". Trumpet solos flamed; the saxophones had Read more ...