Classical music
David Nice
Arise, Sir Edward – Gardner, not Elgar, whose First Symphony the former conducted last night. Well, maybe a knighthood’s too premature; although the daft honours system has rewarded others in the operatic world for less, and Gardner has already served two brilliant terms at Glyndebourne Touring Opera and ENO, there was just one aspect of the symphony that he didn’t seem quite to get last night.It was the visionary gleam, its flipside the pain of the composer’s tortured introspection, which he missed by a centimetre and which knights of greater experience like Sirs John Barbirolli, Adrian Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems that the gradual leakage of avant-garde-post-classical-call-it-what-you-will music from the rarefied environment of concert halls and into the spaces traditionally inhabited by alternative and club music is now inexorable. And violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is one of the instrumental (pun intended) figures in this move from trickle to flood. As one quarter of the organising team for the London Contemporary Music Festival (along with erstwhile classical editor for theartsdesk, Igor Toronyi-Lalic), she has helped bring Parmegianni, Schwitters, Radigue and other 20th/21st century composers Read more ...
David Nice
Where did all the terrific programming energy of last year’s The Rest is Noise festival go? One answer – surprising given the orchestra’s former Friday night lite status – is into a two-concert adventure by the BBCCO. World to Come, World Once Known has been devised by Principal Conductor Keith Lockhart to reflect the Janus-headed phenomenon of music just before, during and after the First World War.While the first concert, to be broadcast this afternoon on BBC Radio 3, registered the shock of the new following the cataclysm, last night’s poignant sextet of works examined grief – for lost Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Tchaikovsky de nos jours, is Theodore Gumbril’s dismissal of Skryabin in Aldous Huxley’s Twenties novel Antic Hay. For some reason, Alexander Skryabin has suffered more than most from snap judgements of this kind. He has been the woolly theosophist, the vacuous, over-inflated mystifier, the effete, self-indulgent decorative – everything except the refined, disciplined creative genius. It’s high time these images were consigned to the rubbish dump of history, along with the dull-witted Bach, the mad Beethoven, and for that matter the slushy Tchaikovsky. Skryabin was a superior artist whose Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Piano Concertos 2 and 4 Mahler Chamber Orchestra/Leif Ove Andsnes (piano and director) (Sony)You know that this will be good after just a few seconds; Beethoven's comically strait-laced opening gesture promptly answered by a smartly shaped orchestral tutti. Well-tuned winds and horns are perky, and string articulation is perfect. All so good that you're caught off guard when Leif Ove Andsnes makes his sly entrance and you remember that this is a piano concerto. The lightness of touch is intoxicating, Andsnes scaling down his sound so that he's a perfect match for a well- Read more ...
David Nice
Depth, height, breadth, a sense of the new and strange in three brilliantly-programmed works spanning just over a century: all these and a clarity in impassioned execution told us why the BBC Symphony Orchestra was inspired in choosing Finn Sakari Oramo as its principal conductor. Their anniversary journey through Nielsen’s symphonies next Barbican season – itself a heady mix announced amid the palms of the singular conservatory before a vintage assembly of performances around the Centre – is more fascinating in prospect, for me at any rate, than the promised visits of the New York and Berlin Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The core pulse of Tudor polyphony is often deliciously slow. It gets down to a mesmeric pace of about 30 beats per minute. The listener just has to succumb to it, and the experience, even in the virtually unheated Cambridge College chapel where The Sixteen began its 2014 Choral Pilgrimage last night, was pure pleasure.The names of the three composers whose work form the Sixteen's programme for the concerts of this year's Pilgrimage will be unfamiliar, but Davy, Sheppard and Mundy are all important precursors of Byrd and Tallis, and the sequence of works has been meticulously prepared to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Turning every concert into a party, baroque ensemble L’Arpeggiata are performers in the truest sense. Too often early musicians get away with being shy or downright awkward, visibly uncomfortable when forced to introduce an encore. Not so with these European virtuosi, whose signature improvisations give each member (yes, even the percussionist) the chance to step into a starring role. And don’t get me started on the baroque rap that concluded the group’s most recent London concert…For the second of their three-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall, Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata moved away Read more ...
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Piano Concertos 1-5 Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, BBC Philharmonic/Gianandrea Noseda (Chandos)Two of Prokofiev's five piano concertos are so well-embedded in the repertoire that they tend to dwarf the other three. So it's great to have the whole lot squeezed comfortably onto a pair of discs. I've long enjoyed Ashkenazy's 1970s accounts, accompanied by a beefy LSO under André Previn. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's playing is rather different; he realises that there's more to Prokofiev than pure brawn. Not that these performances are lightweight in any sense – the remorseless cadenza in the Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The newly restored Royal Festival Hall organ was inaugurated in a celebratory atmosphere with this gala launch concert, which also marks the beginning of the Pull Out All the Stops organ festival.The varied programme included works for solo organ, as well as combined with brass and choir, and included two world premieres composed specially for the concert, one by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and one by the late John Tavener. Four organists took turns (John Scott, Jane Parker-Smith, Isabelle Demers and David Goode), two conductors (Jessica Cottis and Sam Laughton), plus Alison Balsom, the combined Read more ...
David Nice
A voyage around Beethoven by Ives and John Adams, and then beyond him by Berlioz, added up to a vintage San Francisco Symphony programme from its music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Forty years on from his first concert with SFS, he’s still youthful in demeanour, still flapping with seagull (or albatross) like flamboyancy. But is there a chill behind the showmanship? I ended up feeling that way despite what should have been the ultimate cataclysm of the Frenchman’s concluding infernal orgy.The sound of the orchestra is still sleek and bright. That paid dividends in a Bruckner concert I Read more ...
graham.rickson
William Alwyn: Piano Music Mark Bebbington (Somm)William Alwyn was a Suffolk-based composer who died in 1985. He dabbled in painting and writing, and held the post of Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music for nearly 30 years. His output included a cycle of symphonies and the music to several well-known British films. Curiously, he was related to the actor Gary Cooper, even providing the score to Cooper's final screen appearance. Alwyn's piano output, as represented here, more than deserves an occasional hearing. Mark Bebbington gives us graceful readings of Alwyn's 11 Read more ...