Classical music
Glyn Môn Hughes
While there is, of course, safety in numbers, but five premieres on four continents is, perhaps, a little novel. Tan Dun’s new Concerto for Double-Bass, subtitled Wolf Totem, is a co-commission by five orchestras: the Royal Concertgebouw, St Louis Symphony, the Taiwan Philharmonic, the Tasmanian Symphony and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.The principal bass player in each orchestra is to be soloist and the piece received its world première last month in Amsterdam.So to Liverpool for its second outing, where the soloist was Marcel Becker. The composer, who has been commissioned by many of Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The Seventh Symphony was by some way the most scrappy and inaccurate of the performances in the Sibelius cycle given at the Barbican by, it must be said again, the world’s best orchestra. The oboes crunched a chord that fairly made you wince. A few bars later, the famous strings were all over the place. During that scherzo section, Sir Simon Rattle was willing the Berlin Philharmonic to move like The World’s Strongest Man with the bit between his teeth for a ten-ton truck.They did shift themselves, eventually, into an heroic drive towards the still-debated closure – or is it cliff-edge Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A memorial concert to a busy man. Alexander Ivashkin, who died last January, was a cellist, a scholar, a teacher, an authority on Russian music, and much else besides. This evening’s concert faced up to the daunting challenge of commemorating the many diverse aspects of Ivashkin’s career. The results were predictably wide-ranging, yet always coherent, and an impressive focus was brought to this mixed but never eclectic programme.Credit, then, to Danny Driver. The concert was organised by the University of Goldsmiths, where Ivashkin was Professor of Music, and where Driver has succeeded him as Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
While the Berlin Philharmonic's progress through London with Simon Rattle has grabbed the column inches away from the rest of the capital's classical music offerings this week, a delightful mostly Ravel programme from the Philharmonia should not be passed over. It presented the G Major Piano Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida as exemplary soloist, and an imaginative semi-staging of the “lyrical fantasy” L'Enfant et Les Sortilèges, a work too rarely performed, and which is hard to beat for sheer magic.Both of these compositions are the result of long creative processes. They are lovingly crafted Read more ...
David Nice
Bass lines were Edward Seckerson’s starting point yesterday in welcoming the Berlin Philharmonic Sibelius cycle to London, and none strikes more terror from the depths than the subterranean growl that launches the most selectively-scored symphony of the 20th Century, the Fourth. Awe-inspiring is how it sounds on Sir Simon Rattle’s 1986 City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra recording, with a little help perhaps from the engineer, and those eight Berlin Philharmonic double-basses last night were not going to stint on its force either.Yet the beginning of the concert reminded us that cellos and Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Sir Simon Rattle’s Sibelian journey has been long and fruitful and has taken him all the way from Birmingham to Berlin, and more particularly the revered Philharmonic where the spaces between the notes now resonate in extraordinary ways and the bass lines are sunk deeper than with any other orchestra on the planet. Beginning their London residency with the first two of Sibelius’s symphonies (the rest to follow over the next few days) gave us a chance to feel how organically Sibelius became Sibelius and how the music effectively seemed to come up through the bass lines. The wonder of the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Andris Nelsons is flavour of the month in London. He is in town to conduct The Flying Dutchman at Covent Garden, but between performances he is moonlighting at the Festival Hall, giving two concerts with the Philharmonia. This, the first, opened with a serviceable Mozart Piano Concerto No. 25 from Paul Lewis, and concluded with a Bruckner Third Symphony that was in a different league entirely.The orchestra was reduced for the Mozart, though still large for the repertoire. Nelsons and Lewis have a curious working relationship, the conductor pushing for more expression and phrase shaping than Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic has something of a track record when it comes to finding conductors destined for great heights. After all, Sir Simon Rattle was a player in Merseyside Youth Orchestra and started his conducting career in Liverpool. The latest RLPO concert, following that great tradition, included a new face. And what an impact she made. The audience evidently loved her – a partial standing ovation, which is something of a rarity on Hope Street – and plenty of whoops and whistles (in the best possible taste) surely mean that she’ll soon be beating a return path to the Liverpool Read more ...
geoff brown
The concert season’s title may be Rachmaninoff Inside Out. But the work that dominated and got people talking in yesterday’s instalment of Vladimir Jurowski’s London Philharmonic series was by another composer entirely. “Weird, isn’t it?” said the man in the row behind. And that was only after the first movement of George Enescu’s massive Symphony No. 3, one of the most remarkable effusions by the composer and crack violinist chiefly known for his pair of Romanian Rhapsodies, popular picture postcards.Jurowski likes programming these early 20th-century epics, the sonic equivalent of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dohnányi: Variations on a Nursery Song, Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto no 1, Strauss: Burleske Valerie Tryon (piano), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Jac van Steen (Somm)This entertaining, well-filled disc collects three works which, if they were programmed more frequently, should fill concert halls. The pick of them is Dohnányi's inventive, unpretentious Variations on a Nursery Song – a piece which throws up fresh surprises with each listen. The best joke comes near the beginning, as a brooding, doom-filled opening slyly introduces the theme, Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman. Fourteen variations Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
When you’re visiting someone for the first time, it’s probably just as well that you make a good impression – or else you may not be asked back. If that’s what the Carducci String Quartet was trying to do on their début visit to Liverpool, then they did all the right things. They mesmerised the audience with their performance of the second of Beethoven’s "Razumovsky" quartets, so much so that they were forced to sit down and perform an encore, which turned out to be a little irreverent Shostakovich, in the shape of the Rondo Polka.If anything, this concert – part of the Royal Liverpool Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
If what you wanted to do was go out to the middle of the Mexican desert, invert the Cross and dip it in blood, screaming obscenities all the while, surrounded by a sunburnt band of fellow travellers all off their heads on mescalin, Tutuguri is definitely the music you’d want to do it to. Which is OK, because those are pretty much the images conjured up by Antonin Artaud’s poem-radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God, which prompted Wolfgang Rihm to make a two-hour instrumental setting of this "Rite of the Black Sun" for large orchestra, taped chorus, howling vocalist (Leigh Melrose) Read more ...