Classical music
geoff brown
Judging from the photos used to publicise Anna Prohaska’s new album – one of them is dancing merrily above this review – this gorgeously gifted soprano should have been singing this spin-off recital wearing an army great coat. She compromised with a severe black tunic and trousers with military references and a slight science-fiction cut: she could almost have been a futuristic soldier from the old Korda film Things to Come. In her case the things that came were the complete tracks of her Deutsche Grammophon CD Behind the Lines: songs from around Europe and America about war and the pity Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: West Side Story Alexandra Silber, Cheyenne Jackson, San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)Bernstein's West Side Story has been patchily served on disc. The original cast version has the freshest vocals but is heavily cut. The film soundtrack reordered the songs, with Sondheim's lyrics softened. Michael Tilson Thomas's new, live San Francisco version offers the best of all worlds. This two-disc set presents the show virtually complete. It's well sung and the playing is magnificent. Sid Ramin and Irv Kostal orchestrated the show from Bernstein's piano score, Read more ...
geoff brown
Of all the epithets you could pin on that roast beef of Old England, William Boyce, “gamechanger” is one of the more unlikely. Like any good 18th-century Englishman, this composer followed the widespread Italianate model of the late Baroque, infused it with Handel, and a swig or two of Purcell, and just got to work. Latterly he spent far too much time setting toadying odes for Britain’s Hanoverian kings; no chance for revolution there. But “Gifted Conservatives”, unlike “Gamechangers”, wouldn’t today be an enticing name for a concert season’s thematic link. So there he was, Boyce the Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss was born in Munich 150 years ago today. Christian Thielemann is celebrating the fact by conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden in the juiciest of all-Strauss operatic potpourris, a festive concert to be held in the city’s glorious Semperoper. What wouldn’t I give to hear Anja Harteros, alongside Anne Schwanewilms the loveliest of Strauss sopranos, and chaste nymph Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel in a peerless operatic epilogue? In fact the Dresden Music Festival, my host, ended yesterday and seems to function as a separate entity with its own period-instrument orchestra. I Read more ...
graham.rickson
Khachaturian: Violin Concerto, Shostakovich: String Quartets 7 and 8 James Ehnes (violin), Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Mark Wigglesworth, Ehnes Quartet (Onyx)Moving from Khachaturian's breezy circus music to two of Shostakovich's darker quartets is quite a journey; you're best programming a generous pause halfway through this CD. The Khachaturian, composed for David Oistrakh in 1940, is a blast, its raucous optimism totally out of step with its time. James Ehnes's total lack of inhibition is just what the work deserves, and this full-blooded performance is glorious. Ehnes can change Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
In the year of his 85th birthday, and his 60th season as a conductor, Bernard Haitink is hardly taking it easy, with concerts with various orchestras around Europe and the US including an appearance at the Proms. In this visit to London with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe he may not have been bounding up the steps to the stage, but his powers with the baton remain undimmed.His is a stately and commanding presence at the podium, almost still apart from the arms and the occasional emphatic step forwards. This proved plenty with which to wring out the tragic drama from the two works in the Read more ...
David Nice
A voluptuous dream in sequined silver, the nearly-27-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili sat down at the keyboard and instantly transcendentalised her mermaid look as Ravel’s Ondine. Even Brahms took to the life aquatic of her recital’s first half. For the second, though, there should have been a costume change into a clown suit with a tatty tutu pulled over it. Never have I witnessed a crazier trip through the distorting mirror – and if even Stravinsky’s mad puppet Petrushka couldn’t take the relentless onslaught, what about the poor old Chopin Second Scherzo and the Ravel La Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Finally,” said Sir Simon Rattle, “I get a chance to say thank you. We have had forty years working together without an argument." The Royal Philharmonic Society was awarding an Honorary Membership to Martin Campbell-White, Rattle's agent. Campbell-White, who has been a guiding influence on the conductor's career since the 1970's made a rare appearance on stage, as he became the first artist manager ever to win this award in the RPS's 201-year history. There was a sense of occasion about this concert, which was also Rattle's first appearance with the LSO since the Olympics opening Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: String Quintets and Sextets Alexander String Quartet, with Toby Appel (viola) and David Requiro (cello) (Foghorn Classics)Brahms's music is usually at its best, its most bucolic, when it's moseying along in a major key at a stately tempo. Each of these four large-scale chamber works has an opening movement marked Allegro ma non troppo, so you know that you're in safe hands musically. The two string sextets are early works, but they're technically assured and full of confidence. The Alexander Quartet never disappoint on disc, and they're spectacularly good here. Listening to them Read more ...
Mark Valencia
The rapid rise of Dutch baritone Henk Neven is easy to explain. He is blessed with instant charm and the voice, still attractively youthful in his late 30s, emerges full-toned from his slight frame with a faint, fast vibrato that lends it a distinctive tang. The Neven sound is sturdy rather than flexible, which may help explain why the first half of his Wigmore Hall recital was more satisfying than the second.We began in Spain, or at least in some foreign notions of that country. Two groups of Cervantes-inspired songs by French composers framed an absorbing septet of Canzone Scordate (“ Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was smart programming. The final night of London's Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music presented the forces of the Göttingen Ha(e)ndel Festival. Both festivals - the London one ended last night, the Göttingen one starts next week - have taken as their theme this year the tercentenary of the Hanoverian accession, and there is no town which wears its associations with the Hanoverian/British monarchs with quite so much pride as Göttingen; it owes its main souce of an identity, the existence of its university, to Georg-August, the King we know in Britain as George II (statue of William IV Read more ...
Mark Valencia
It’s safe to assume that mischievous Monsieur Poulenc would have been delighted by the juxtaposition of his joyous slice of Surrealism with Fauré’s serene masterpiece the Requiem. What his elder compatriot might have had to say is harder to imagine. Since Les Mamelles de Tirésias was conceived for the opera house and the Requiem for a place of worship they don’t even belong in the same building – and neither of them by rights in a concert hall – so to call them an odd match would be an understatement. The only obvious link between them is thematic rather than musical: the former Read more ...