Classical music
David Nice
It was the C major Prelude and Fugue from this second book of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, not its more familiar counterpart in Book One, which found itself tracked on a gold-plated disc inside Voyager I to reach whatever intelligent life there may be outside our solar system. Surely more interesting, though, is the universe within the minds of certain exceptional individuals – in this case not just that of the composer, which remains unfathomable. How can an artist like András Schiff not only have all 48 Preludes and Fugues in his head, but communicate them to a huge public with such Read more ...
David Nice
Like the Proms, but over a more concentrated time-span, in a much better concert hall and with a swankier audience paying a good deal more, the Lucerne Festival offers a summer parade of the world's greatest orchestras and conductors night after night. Hardly anywhere else, though, offers a home-assembled band of top players quite like the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, even if it will never be the same without Claudio Abbado. And this year, following his extraordinary Easter Festival conducting masterclasses just after his 89th birthday, Bernard Haitink resumed his very special rapport with the Read more ...
David Benedict
“What drivel! What nonsense! What escapist Techicolor twaddle!” No, not a description of Wallis Giunta’s scintillating BBC Proms at Cadogan Hall recital, it’s a lyric from “What A Movie”, Leonard Bernstein’s outstanding stand-alone number from his one-act opera Trouble In Tahiti. Narrating the story of a ridiculously torrid movie the heroine has sat through, Giunta joyously inhabited its every moment and delivered it with complete theatrical assurance. That’s only to be expected; theartsdesk reviewed her stunning performance in the role for Opera North last year. What really impressed here Read more ...
David Kettle
The Edinburgh International Festival scored quite a coup in securing the services of Bernstein protégée Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on the very day of the great composer/conductor’s centenary – and for the festival’s penultimate concert of 2018. And with local legend Nicola Benedetti as violin soloist, there was an understandably expectant, almost carnival atmosphere in the packed Usher Hall. What we got, however, was a concert that was far more restrained – at times puzzlingly so – but more thoughtful, too.The most fun of the evening came in the form of four miniature Read more ...
David Nice
1944 was one hell of a year for Bernstein the composer, with a perfect ballet and a near-perfect musical sharing a general theme of three sailors loose in New York, but nothing else, in their boisterous originality. Perhaps their only equal among Bernstein's works - more contestably – is MASS of 1971, surely his biggest and most resonant score, but hardly a candidate for comparable classicism. What John Wilson applied last night to make On the Town work as unremittingly well as the much shorter ballet, Fancy Free, was precisely that classical focus, high on energy and cutting no slack. Never Read more ...
David Kettle
There were two immediate casualties at Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s high-energy account of Messiaen’s monumental Des canyons aux étoiles… with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Edinburgh International Festival.First was one of the strings in the Usher Hall’s Steinway grand, which finally gave way during the piece’s eighth movement. Well, it had been given really quite a pounding by Aimard, and went on to emit a prepared piano-like buzzing rattle until the end of the piece. Second – less crucially – was the handle of the percussion section’s wind machine, cranked so furiously to conjure Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sir Richard Rodney Bennett: Orchestral Works, Volume 2 BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/John Wilson, with Howard McGill (saxophone) (Chandos)Asked by an American journalist whether his music was ‘great’, Richard Rodney Bennett replied that “some of it is beautiful, and a lot of it is useful, and that's the most I’ll say.” The music on this second volume of John Wilson's Bennett series is frequently extremely beautiful, and it repeats the first instalment’s trick of demonstrating Bennett's extraordinary versatility. His single movement Symphony No 2 was premiered by Bernstein and the New Read more ...
Prom 55, Lisztes, Lendvai, Lendvay, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer review - unity and strength
Jessica Duchen
There seems no limit to the sheer creativity that fizzes from Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. For their second night at the Proms, packed out this time, the theme was the meeting of classical and Gypsy musical traditions. And though Fischer, talking to the audience from the podium, kindly explained that the Gypsy tradition is distinct from both Hungarian folk music and classical conservatoires, what emerged was a sense that they have far more in common than might be admitted.Nothing asserts “Hungarian Gypsy music” quite strongly as a cimbalom centre stage. In case you haven’ Read more ...
Prom 54, Richter, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer review - independent-minded Hungarians return
David Nice
Two heartening facts first. Iván Fischer's much-loved crew remains one of the few world-class orchestras with an individual voice, centred on lean, athletic strings adaptable to Fischer's febrile focus (perfect for Enescu and Bartók, not quite so much for Mahler). And though the Budapest players remain Hungary's greatest musical ambassadors, the anti-Orbán stance of their eloquent chief conductor means that they will never be propaganda tools of the new nationalism; we can welcome them back to the Proms unreservedly.Fischer is not only something of a hero for saying what's right; he's also a Read more ...
James Bingham
Forty thousand choirs in the UK! Choral directors of the UK rejoice. Voices Now have finally published the Big Choral Census. They’ve put hard data to something we knew was true: there are loads of choirs and loads of people who love singing in them. Finally we can present government with solid evidence that meaningful investment into the art form will be money well spent. Surely a cause for celebration? Yes... but not entirely.I’ve lost count of the numbers of choirs I’ve come across that barely survive on their current membership. For non-auditioned choirs, dwindling numbers mean choirs can Read more ...
David Nice
Those of us schooled in the English choral tradition know and love Hubert Parry's "My soul, there is a country", but few have sung or heard it live as the first of a mighty cycle. Parry completed the six Songs of Farewell not long before his death 100 years ago. In the sensitivity of their word-setting and the harmonies used to underline the text, they are as much of a collective masterpiece in their way as Strauss's Four Last Songs of 44 years later – featured, with astute Proms planning, in the evening Prom – and they need a fine conductor to marshal their speech-melodic flow. It must have Read more ...
David Nice
Brits are the folk you expect to encounter the most in the rural-England-on-steroids of the beautiful Dordogne. In my experience they outnumber the French, at least in high summer, not just as visitors and retired homeowners but also as artisans selling their wares in Riberac's big Friday market. The Dutch are here, too, in force, and one of the long-term settlers, big Baroque name Ton Koopman, makes his own major contribution in August along with music-loving local Robert-Nicolas Huet. Their base is the atmospheric tiny settlement of Cercles, a place that feels as much end-of-the-road in a Read more ...