Classical music
Peter Culshaw
The workers at the smart Borusan Holdings head office are expected to be tidy, especially on a Friday. That’s because their office doubles up as an art gallery, the Borusan Contemporary, at weekends. There are some paintings, like the attractive wall paintings of Jenny Zenuik, although the main thrust of the collection is up-to-the-minute electronic art. Some seem a little gimmicky, like superior executive toys, such as one where you place your finger in a hole and the frame turns into images of your fingerprint, but it’s an excellent way to pass an hour or two.There’s a separate space for an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Norman Lebrecht, the seasoned and ever-alert musical commentator, thinks he and his readers may have uncovered someone making a very good stab at being Mozart. Three pieces have been discovered on the internet DIY-video channel being played by a pianist whose face can't be seen, all purporting to be new or obscure works by Mozart, Haydn and Mendelssohn.In a time when lost items are turning up quite regularly now - Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven pieces have recently been found in far-flung files and libraries - Lebrecht decided to take the "Ask the Audience" option, by putting the Mozart piece Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 7, In Nature’s Realm, Scherzo capriccioso Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics) Each of Dvořák’s last three symphonies is a wonder, and the Seventh is possibly the best of the lot. It’s a work which can get under your skin. The dark D minor tonality is so right for this music; there’s a brooding darkness to the orchestral sound coupled with swaggering rhythmic drive. And the melodies are consistently gorgeous. The symphony is often described as Brahmsian, though José Serebrier rightly suggests that Dvořák was a better orchestrator, having Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Musicians can go one of two ways after a period of prolonged professional absence. The hiatus can either set them free (Horowitz) or screw them up (Pogorelich). In the case of Maxim Vengerov, we already knew that the latter hadn't happened. A successful early reappearance with the St Petersburg Philharmonic at the Royal Festival Hall a few weeks back - where he stepped in for an AWOL Martha Argerich - proved that. But the real test was always going to be his recital comeback at the Wigmore Hall last night. How has the Russian violinist evolved since we last heard him in London in 2007?A lot Read more ...
geoff brown
After conducting two performances of Parsifal since Saturday and one of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, most human beings would be spending a day curled up at home. But Valery Gergiev doesn’t know what carpet slippers look like. Besides, he’s currently on tour in Britain with his Mariinsky Opera forces, and he’s conducting nothing but blockbusters. Last night, Verdi’s Requiem in London. On Good Friday, it’s the epic Parsifal again, in Birmingham. The tour finished, he’ll be back in St Petersburg by Sunday, launching the Mariinsky’s third International Piano Festival. Brisk rhythms melted into Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Edinburgh International Festival runs this year from 9 August to 2 September, with an energetically global look. Forty-seven nations - around a third of the world's countries - are represented in a conscious reflection of the focus of the London Olympics.A new unorthodox theatrical space has been added with the conversion of the Royal Highland Centre’s Lowland Hall for three unconventional stagings: Grzegorz Jarzyna’s Macbeth, Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir (Aurores) and Christoph Marthaler's comic adaptation of My Fair Lady, Meine faire Dame – ein Sprachlabor.Other Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Gergiev’s second Cardiff concert was thematically linked to his first. Mahler’s Eighth Symphony shares with Parsifal a certain kind of solipsistic religiosity that talks about God in the way some people talk about their ancestors. We don’t really need them any more, but they make us feel important. One approaches both works with mixed feelings (some, with actual distaste). But in the end one usually has to admit: art conquers, and God is not (altogether) mocked.Mahler, it can’t be denied, isn’t quite Wagner. The spiritual and intellectual complexity of Parsifal bypasses the fake religion (or Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can’t walk down the street in central Abu Dhabi. Not because of any danger or prohibition, but simply because there just aren’t any pavements yet. Look out of any one of the high-rise buildings that dominate the city, and you’ll see a landscape modestly veiled in the dust of construction. Roads, schools, hospitals and inevitably hotels are all emerging from the desert at a rate that renders the city map unrecognisable every six months. But while the developments of infrastructure and architecture are proclaimed in the fog and clamour of drills, there’s an altogether quieter project at Read more ...
ash.smyth
Attention! Required viewing: Jon Shenk’s Maldivian climate-change documentary, The Island President, starring one Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed in the title role.What might be called a natural sequel - or codicil, anyway - to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, The Island President tells the story of Nasheed’s long struggle against the dictatorship of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, his imprisonment, his exile, and his eventual jubilant ascension to the presidency in 2008 - only to discover that his country was sinking into the sea.To lose one island may be considered a misfortune; to lose 2,000… So it’s the run Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The organisation that channels public money to generate today's new classical music has been resoundingly condemned this week by all of Britain's most important composers. In an open letter, signed by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Colin Matthews, Nicola LeFanu, Julian Anderson and 250 more, the British contemporary music-making establishment accuses Sound and Music - set up by the Arts Council three years ago - of having alienated virtually all the composers it was set up to work with.The letter, published on Tuesday, accuses Sound and Music (SAM) in the frankest terms of Read more ...
geoff brown
If Dr Frankenstein wanted to manufacture the perfect violinist, he’d require a long list of ingredients. Perfect, unfussy technique, of course; but also seriousness of purpose, a sense of humour, a clear head, a passionate heart, a generous tone, plus access to a Stradivarius. On the other hand, the good doctor could simply go out and find Julia Fischer, the 28-year-old German violinist who ticks almost all of the above boxes, except perhaps “sense of humour”. There’s not a flashy or egotistical bone in her body, nor an itchy one: even six years ago she’d vaulted way past the promising stage Read more ...