Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
With Kavakos, Faust, Shaham and Skride already been and gone, and Jansen, Ehnes, Bell and Ibragimova still to come, the LSO’s International Violin Festival has nothing left to prove. We’re not short of star power in London’s concert scene, but even by our spoilt metropolitan standards this is a pretty unarguable line-up. With excellence a given, then, it takes quite a lot to startle a crowd into delight – especially on a Sunday night. But that’s what Christian Tetzlaff did with the unassuming freshness and brilliance of his Beethoven.Ever thoughtful, Tetzlaff has taken the cadenzas that Read more ...
David Nice
No two symphonic swansongs could be more different than Sibelius’s heart-of-darkness Tapiola and Nielsen’s enigmatically joky Sixth Symphony. In its evasive yet organic jumpiness, the Danish composer’s anything but “Simple Symphony” – the Sixth’s subtitle – seemed last night to have most in common with another work from the mid-1920s, Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto.These are the connections and contrasts that the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor Sakari Oramo has been underlining in his six-concert journey around the Nielsen symphonies. Last night’s typically confounding finale Read more ...
Paul Gent
Dresden is slowly opening up to the world. All but destroyed by British bombing in the Second World War, locked away inside Communist East Germany for 40 years, it is now becoming a tourist honeypot. On a warm day in May, you can see the snap-happy groups of Japanese and Germans trailing behind their guides, marvelling at the imposing Baroque buildings in the Old Town. You see them queuing patiently for the extraordinary museums and poring over the the restaurant menus in the city’s huge squares. One of the local specialities is potato soup, but then nothing’s perfect.There are buskers on Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Florilegium, dir. Ashley Solomon (Channel Classics)This is a predictably satisfying pair of discs, another outstanding set of period-instrument Brandenburgs from a crack British group. It did prompt me to sample naughtily inauthentic performances from the likes of Karajan and Klemperer, both indecently enjoyable but sounding so anachronistic that it's hard to believe that we ever learned to love these pieces played in such a manner. The joy of Bach is that he's almost indestructible, as long as the spirit and intention are right – as they are on an entertaining new Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This penultimate night of the London (formally Lufthansa) Festival of Baroque Music brought beautiful, intelligent, superbly musical singing from two sopranos Julia Doyle and Grace Davidson, who sang early 18th century works by François Couperin: two exultatory motets, a Magnificat and the Leçons de Ténèbres.Their voices were ideally suited to these works, and particularly to the Leçons which filled the second half as an uninterrupted sequence. The three “Lessons” which have survived and were published – and only three out of what should be a complete sequence for Holy Week, of nine – Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the Scottish Chamber Orchestra the transition from its home in the Queen’s Hall to the much larger spaces of Usher Hall is not always a happy one. Earlier this season an experimental performance of Mahler’s fourth symphony lacked heft in the larger Edinburgh venue, for this listener at least, but would have swamped the smaller. Many disagreed.But no such worries with this joyful performance of Haydn’s The Creation. Although the orchestra of about 50 looked quite spare on the large stage, and the chorus a compact bunch in the middle of the choir stalls, the sound filled the space Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
From the strings’ first entry, sweet and mysterious, conveying at once the erotic charge between Berlioz's Dido and Aeneas, its long-suppressed unfolding and also its transience, the BBC Symphony Orchestra played like a dream for their conductor laureate Sir Andrew Davis. He has done the Royal Hunt and Storm from Les Troyens many times before, with them and others, if never yet the work entire, but this was a performance fit for the opera house, full of sussurating passion, “grotesque dances” and “dishevelled hair” as the composer demanded, built carefully towards its orgiastic but abortive Read more ...
graham.rickson
Messiaen: Des canyons aux étoiles London Philharmonic Orchestra/Christoph Eschenbach (LPO)Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie is almost a repertoire work, but performances of Des canyons aux étoiles are rarer. Any new recording is a cause for celebration, and this live one is a wowzer. Messiaen had been asked to write a large-scale work for the United States bicentenary, a commission which gave him the chance to visit the spectacular Bryce Canyon in Utah. Its geology and birdsong fill the piece, a vast 12-movement work which sounds like a summation of Messiaen's career. Newcomers should Read more ...
David Nice
Fusion between Christian Venice and the Ottoman east started up at least as early as the 15th century, accompanied by a superb portrait of Sultan Mehmet II attributed to Gentile Bellini (pictured below). So what Egyptian-born oud (read oriental lute) player Joseph Tawadros and that febrile Australian Richard Tognetti with members of the Academy of Ancient Music in cheerful tow were trying to do last night had honourable precedents. Their vibrant mix turned out to be exactly the sort of high level east-west happening not on the programme of this year’s Proms.Tognetti’s Vivaldi sometimes bent Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not often in classical music that you find yourself queuing under a railway bridge in Shoreditch at 9pm (and still less often that the artistic experience inside merits the endeavour). But get past the door staff and the effortful East London cool of it all, and I Fagiolini’s Betrayal (subtitled “A Polyphonic Crime Drama”) offers some pretty persuasive reasons to slough off the comforts of the concert hall and get gritty.The show is the follow-up to I Fagiolini and director John La Bouchardière’s previous collaboration The Full Monteverdi, and follows a similar pattern – threading a Read more ...
David Nice
Mahler once wrote that his symphonies were edifices built from the same stones, gathered in childhood. In each of the four recitals I’ve heard from Yevgeny Sudbin, he’s moved several of his repertoire cornerstones around to different effect in the piano-programme equivalents of a very large symphony orchestra playing a Mahler symphony: massive sonorities, total structural grasp, huge intelligence.Take the placing of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre as filtered through the virtuosic imaginations of Liszt, Horowitz and Sudbin himself. It looked last night as if it was going to be an official encore Read more ...
David Nice
Whatever the recording industry may try to tell you, there is rarely any such thing as a single “best” among today’s pianists. We’ve had Benjamin Grosvenor and Leif Ove Andsnes, excellent artists both, touted as a cut above the rest. But hearing pianists in all corners of the world, you realize how much phenomenal and ungradable talent there is out there. It’s especially apparent in the relatively new wave of Russian-born pianists: Boris Giltburg, Denis Kozhukhin, Alexander Melnikov, Daniil Trifonov, Nikolai Lugansky, even the inexplicably less feted Rustem Hayroudinoff and Polina Leschenko Read more ...