Classical music
David Nice
Highly finished literary tales of doomed nixies, like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, seem to have prompted reams of bad art but plenty of mellifluous music. Not even all of that is on the same level. Viennese late-Romantic Zemlinsky's loose-limbed three-part Andersen homage has long floated in a limbo somewhere below the more curvaceous forms of Dvořák's Rusalka and Sibelius's The Oceanides, and not just because of unfavourable historical circumstances (the composer withdrew the work after its 1905 premiere, and it did not resurface until 1984). Still, it was good to hear it in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Fauré: Requiem Chœur de l’Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre de Paris, Paavo Järvi, with Philippe Jaroussky (counter tenor), Matthias Goerne (baritone) (Virgin Classics)Fauré’s understated Requiem is another iconic work which has suffered by dint of its popularity; too many dodgy amateur performances convinced me that I never wanted to hear it again. And then a fresh-sounding recording turns up, and makes you realise that there is something special going on here. It’s Fauré’s restraint which surprises: there’s little shock and bombast in this Requiem but a great deal of warm, fuzzy consolation. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Honegger's gaudy 1935 meditation on the life of Joan of Arc - which we witnessed in concert last night at the Barbican - is an untidy flea market of meretricious musical ideas. The work's only value lies in it being able to make one understand why the likes of Pierre Boulez felt forced to make their postwar musical revolutions so sweeping and so violent. The sort of musical slime that the interwar French Neo-Classicists like Honegger left behind - one of the worst examples of which is his Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake) - required an industrial-strength Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Sometimes the most disturbing images exist only in our imaginations - and so the questions posed in the preface to Bartók’s operatic masterpiece Duke Bluebeard’s Castle become especially pertinent: “Where did this happen - outside or within? Where is the stage - outside or within?” The answers, surely, lie “within”, making the prospect of a “semi-staged” climax to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia Bartók series, Infernal Dance, a potentially troubling one.There was a “set” - a grey-walled shell and a pendulous shard-like mobile whose mere presence had one fearing the worst. And so the first Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Czech Suite, Two Slavonic Dances Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics)It’s easy to become a little obsessed with obscure, underrated music. You bang on and on about works which you’re convinced are masterpieces which no one ever seems to play. Which means that it’s also easy to dismiss pieces of classical music which are genuinely popular. You think you know them so well as to never need to hear them again. Grieg’s Piano Concerto and Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony are perhaps the easiest of all to undervalue; they’re deservedly loved because Read more ...
David Nice
With Riccardo Chailly's Leipzig Beethoven series well into its capacious stride, another cycle of symphonies keeping unusual company begins. This one featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra will take longer and features six conductors, four of them known masters of their subject, chimerical Sibelius. The only problem last night was that Sakari Oramo, in tandem with his charismatic soprano wife Anu Komsi, took us to such strange and wonderful places in the first concert that I want them both back for the next five.The format was a BBC Symphony speciality, a four-work programme, which hasn't Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Blessed are the dead”, sings Brahms in the final movement of his German Requiem. And as far as the rest of this concert was concerned it was perhaps just as well. In Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the children are all dead; and in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw everyone else has passed on except, of course, the survivor. The audience was not so much dead as largely absent, frightened off, I suppose, by the dreaded Arnold. Or maybe they were just at home painting pumpkins.They missed a brave programme, but a brilliant one. Schoenberg’s brusque, utterly unsentimental masterpiece is Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Isn’t it strange how national talent goes by subject? Put on a blockbuster exhibition of Dutch painting and the queue will stretch to the Embankment. But can you imagine a festival of Dutch music? Sweelinck (d 1652) and Andriessen (b 1939) more or less sums it up. The BBC brought together three living Dutch composers for this Portrait concert, and one of them wasn’t after all Dutch (“I’ve kept my Swedish passport,” he insisted rather unchivalrously in the pre-concert interview). And I’m sorry to report – as a lifelong fan of Speculaas biscuits and Dutch gin – that the Swedish work was the Read more ...
David Nice
Of all the Beethoven symphonies the Seventh is the one that can seem to whizz along under its own steam. At any rate, the impression Riccardo Chailly gave last night was of having fine-tuned his sleek Leipzig machine, turning on the engine and letting it fly. Only the extra stops I like to think a great conductor would usually have pulled out remained untouched.All of that was still enough for a packed and refreshingly diverse audience to stand and roar at the end, duly overwhelmed enough by the mighty engine that is the Seventh Symphony - straining at the leash 200 years on from its first Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways of breathing new life into Beethoven. Carlos Kleiber used to do it through imagery. He once famously asked his Viennese double basses to play like monkeys during a rehearsal of Beethoven's Seventh. Riccardo Chailly's tactic for his Barbican Beethoven cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra appears to have been to become, if not monkeyish, then at least a bit of a mischievous teenager. Consequently, his first concert saw him throw out the Classical niceties and fill the hall with impish dash and boyish extremes.Beethoven's Second Symphony gained in stature. With a beefy Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On Thursday the London Symphony Orchestra plays a night of epic movie music by the man who gave America’s cowboy heroes their most stirring tunes. Dimitri Tiomkin was one of Hollywood’s film-score giants, John Wayne’s choice as composer for The Alamo, Wayne’s magnum opus, and Tiomkin's was the music that urged Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood to ride out in iconic glory in landmark adventures such as High Noon or Rawhide.He was also a composer of suspense, of the knife-edge when a young wife is framed by her husband for murder, of the fateful convergence that brings two strangers together on a Read more ...
David Nice
Tchaikovsky songs, the most obvious missing link in Olga Borodina's all-Russian programme a couple of Fridays back, formed a spare but unforgettable apex to this second recital in the Barbican's Great Performers series. That in itself, and unusual repertoire - Sviridov the other week, Tchaikovsky's rigorous protégé Taneyev last night - gave the sense of a mini-festival in two concerts. Not forgetting the fact that after Borodina, Amati viola among mezzos, came Hvorostovsky, Guarnerius cello of baritones.Which was almost as far as it went for three-quarters of this much less inflected and Read more ...