Classical music
graham.rickson
Ives: Symphonies nos 1 and 2 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos)Mervyn Cooke’s sleeve note for this disc, the first in Sir Andrew Davis’s Charles Ives cycle, sensibly punctures the main myth surrounding this most fascinating of composers. That he was insurance man by day, avant-garde pioneer by night isn’t quite the truth. Spend some time listening to Ives’s sprawling, ear-stretching 4th Symphony and you’ll begin to wonder whether he knew what he was doing. He did, of course, and a few enjoyable hours spent in the company of these two symphonies demonstrate that Ives Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
There is no mistaking the music of Unsuk Chin. Born in Korea and based in Berlin, Chin brings a range of cultural perspectives to her work. She often describes her music in terms of light and colour, and evokes dreamscapes when recalling her inspirations. Yet her music also has a strong gestural quality, her musical ideas are clear and definite, often subtle but never ambiguous.It is an approach that has won her many admirers and advocates, among them some of classical music’s biggest names, including Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel. And she has received numerous awards, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The St Luke Passion I heard last night was my second sung Passion of the day. The first was in a parish church as a central part of the liturgy of the day on Good Friday: nothing too fancy, as befits an amateur choir, the words of St John as set by Victoria amid shining plainsong. We stood for the 30-odd minutes it took to sing, dropping briefly to our knees at the moment of the Lord's death. The St Luke Passion was on a different scale: in the majestic space of King's College Chapel, performed by full orchestra and three choirs, and packed out with the massed Great and Good of Cambridge, who Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten & Barber: Piano Concertos Elizabeth Joy Roe (piano), London Symphony Orchestra/Emil Tabakov (Decca)For years, the only available recording of Britten's Piano Concerto was the one with Sviatoslav Richter accompanied by the composer. Richter is still a contender, his expansive first movement tempo allowing the details to register without underplaying the music's vivacity. Speedier recent accounts by Howard Shelley and Steven Osborne can sound a little breathless. Elizabeth Joy Roe's timings suggest that she's going to follow the Richter approach, but she's as swift as any Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Ronald Stevenson, who died on Saturday at the age of 87, was a composer and pianist who will be much missed both in the small Borders village where he lived and by the much larger musical community in Scotland and beyond. As a composer he was unashamedly rooted in the late 19th Century tradition of intellectual pianism – in his music you can trace a line of descent from Bach to Liszt through his great hero Busoni. He believed passionately in the “primacy of melody”; he loathed The Rite of Spring and in his polemical book on Western music (Kahn and Averill, 1971) he reflects that the “impact Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
After a Messiah last Christmas by one of London’s finest professional chamber choirs that was straight off the factory production line – mindlessly and maddeningly correct, just, I suspect, as it had been the five other times they performed it that week – I vowed to do things a little differently this Easter. Bach’s Passions certainly need skill and musicianship, but what they need above all is sincerity and heart. With that theory in mind, I went looking for a performance by a good amateur ensemble; when I found one by the Anton Bruckner Choir that also numbered Jacques Imbrailo and Ed Lyon Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Opening It’s All About Piano!, a short but packed festival shared between Kings Place and the Institut français in Kensington, Mikhail Rudy made a rare appearance in the UK. The premise was unusual if hardly revolutionary, a meeting of music and film in which it was not obvious which was the accompanying medium. Was Rudy the silent-film pianist, or were the movies illustrative of latent narratives in Janáček and Musorgsky? Neither. And therein lay the recital’s success.It was back in 2012 that the Cité de la Musique in Paris commissioned from the Quay Brothers a film adaptation of Kafka’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony no 9, American Suite Bamberger Symphoniker/Robin Ticciati (Tudor)A quick check at one online CD retailer brings up 22 pages of New World Symphonies, and a full iTunes perusal involves a lot of downward scrolling. Do we need another one? If it's good, yes, and Robin Ticciati's new version of Dvořák 9 has lots going for it. He's got a brilliant ear for detail which rarely derails the music's forward momentum. The often inaudible viola line accompanying the cellos' lament is present at the start, and the Bamberg winds ooze character. Dvořak's moody introduction broods, Read more ...
David Nice
Over the past two Saturdays, Vladimir Jurowski and a London Philharmonic on top form have given us a mini-festival of great scores for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The hallucinogenic vision of ancient Greece in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé last week was succeeded yesterday evening by the fresh-as-poster-paint colours of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and excerpts from Prokofiev’s Chout (The Buffoon), a longer score in the Petrushka mould which has suffered disproportionate neglect (though not from the LPO – both Alexander Lazarev and Jurowski have conducted the complete ballet). Both works, especially in Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Pierre Boulez sits in the back of a car as it drives across Westminster Bridge. He is talking about the audience appeal of his music, and he is characteristically direct. If the performance is good, and the situation is right, he insists, then audiences will come. That was back in 1968. The interview was featured in one of the documentaries that began today’s event, and it proved prescient. Boulez at 90, the day-long festival of music by the BBC Symphony Orchestra's former chief conductor, was well planned (by the BBCSO) and well performed. And the audiences came: every event was well Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ruperto Chapí: String Quartets 1 and 2 Cuarteto Latinoamericano (Sono Luminus)Think string quartet and you tend to think Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart. Maybe Bartók and Shostakovich. But generally something respectable, well-behaved and Northern European. Not Spanish, unless it's the one by Ravel. So you need to make the acquaintance of Ruperto Chapí. He came to prominence in the late 19th century as a zarzuela composer. Born near Alicante in 1851, he trained in Rome and Paris, returning to Spain in 1880. In the years immediately before his death in 1909 he composed four string quartets, a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Who knew that the wisdom of crowds could be quite so fickle or so fallible? This superb recital by the American violinist Leila Josefowicz and pianist John Novacek was played in front of a Wigmore Hall only about a quarter-full. Josefowicz, returning to the Wigmore after five years, wasn't ruffled in the slightest. After all, a bigger date awaits her in just one week's time: next Thursday she is to give the world premiere of a new work by John Adams with the New York Philharmonic, for which Avery Fisher Hall is already close to sell-out.The duo carried off this London recital with huge Read more ...