Classical music
David Kettle
“An affectionate look at different nationalities through their horses.” That was the memorably bizarre description by harpsichordist/conductor Richard Egarr of Telemann’s Les nations suite, with which he opened his second Queen’s Hall concert directing the Academy of Ancient Music at the Edinburgh International Festival.And indeed, there was a certain clippety-clop rhythm to much of Telemann’s writing, certainly brought out in Egarr’s wonderfully vivid, theatrical account, which made a convincing case for the piece referring to our equine friends.In fact, Egarr’s humorous introduction served Read more ...
David Nice
For the first time ever Paavo Järvi has been showing other nations why the Estonian Festival Orchestra is among the world's best – travelling to other Nordic countries after their annual gathering in Estonia’s summer capital of Pärnu, with the big bastions of Vienna and Berlin to come early next year. I caught their first ever trip abroad, a fleeting visit to Jūrmala just outside the Latvian capital Riga, two hours south of Pärnu passing nothing but forests, rivers, lakes and the occasional small settlement. And then it was back to base in the loveliest of seaside towns, and what remained of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Six weeks in and we’ve got to that sweet spot in the Proms season where thematic threads start to knit together, sequences begin to fill out, cycles to finish – when you hear not just the concert in front of you but the echoes of those already past. It’s this cumulative impact, this sense of narrative that gives the festival its particular character, lending weight to even the most workaday midweek concerts.“Cycle” may be too grand a term for Elgar’s two-and-a-bit completed symphonies, but the triptych is still an interesting one, especially when crowned with Anthony Payne’s thoughtful Read more ...
David Nice
Everything you may have read about Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla's wonder-working with her City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is true. Confined to a Turkish hospital bed when their first Prom together took place last August, I wondered from the radio broadcast if the extremes in Tchaikovsky weren't too much. In the live experience last night, the miracle of the detail and the justification for even the most startling decisions proved totally convincing. And what a stunner of a programme, too, with plenty of wit in Stravinsky and Gerald Barry (of course) and a lightness you don't often get in Read more ...
David Nice
Reformation Day, Luther 500 - in Proms terms it can only mean Bach, the alpha and omega of music, flourishing roughly two centuries after the Wittenberg Nightingale nailed his 95 theses to the church door. Those of us who headed home on Saturday night reeling from the C major sunburst at the end of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder were happy to hear an even greater blaze at Sunday lunchtime, albeit from only one regal instrument, the Albert Hall organ in the master's E flat major Prelude which the sometime neoBaroque Schoenberg revered and even arranged. But there were many other voices during the Read more ...
David Nice
From sunset to sunrise, across aeons of time, usually flashes by in Schoenberg's polystylistic epic. Not last night at the Proms: Simon Rattle is too much in love with the sounds he can get from the London Symphony Orchestra - here verging on a Berlin beauty - to think of moving forward the doomed love of Danish King Waldemar and the beautiful Tovelille. Still, occasional stickings in the gold-studded mud apart, the variety and vividness of the work, the Albert Hall coming into its own as it often does for big chorus-and-orchestra events and the steady addition of more ideal soloists than the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Krenek: Complete Piano Concertos, Volume 2 Mikhail Korzhev, Eric Huebner (pianos), Nurit Pacht (violin), Adrian Partington (organ), English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Toccata Classics)A cycle of piano concertos by Ernst Krenek won't be on many people's shopping lists, but Volume 1 in this series was unexpectedly absorbing. All hail its successor, which contains just one piano concerto in the conventional sense. That's the Concerto No 4, composed in 1950 and another example of Krenek’s gift for writing exuberant, approachable atonal music. The first movement's waltz rhythms are Read more ...
David Kettle
It was an intriguing, contrast-filled programme that Swiss-born pianist Andreas Haefliger brought to Edinburgh for his Queen’s Hall recital at the International Festival. Two masterpieces of musical picture painting – Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and the smaller but equally evocative St Francis of Assisi’s Sermon to the Birds by Liszt – alongside two far more abstract works: Berg’s compact but punchy Sonata Op. 1 and Beethoven’s Op. 101 Sonata.You might have expected two entirely different musical approaches, then – one all hot-headed, vivid musical storytelling, the other cool and Read more ...
David Nice
So it was Rachmaninov night at the Proms, but with a difference: a trinity of works sacred and profane, the first two introduced by the Latvian choir due to perform the third singing harmonised Russian Orthodox chants of the kind on which the composer based so many of his supposedly late-romantic inspirations. That was bound to enliven a bog-standard programme of the Third Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony. But there was plenty of fresh food in soloist Alexander Gavrylyuk’s singular take on "the Rach Three", and Thomas Dausgaard, principal conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dreams & Fancies – English music for solo guitar Sean Shibe (guitar) (Delphian)This is the best solo guitar disc I've heard. That it comes from a soloist in his twenties makes it all the more astounding. There's a funny quote in Lucy Walker’s sleeve note from the influential Spanish guitarist Francisco Tárrega, who remarked that “the guitar in the hands of an Englishman is almost blasphemy.” Not any more; the British guitarist Julian Bream emerged from nowhere to become one of the 20th century's most important players, and one who inspired a huge range of contemporary composers to write Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Goodness the BBC Philharmonic plays well for John Storgårds. The orchestra’s chief guest conductor has a lovely easy manner on the podium – all curved gestures and loose arms, and the result is a partnership that brings the absolute best out of the BBC’s Manchester-based orchestra. Here, in a programme dominated by the Nordic music in which he excels, they carved glossy, oaken shapes out of Grieg and Sibelius, bringing some sophisticated rusticity to the gilded Royal Albert Hall.It was the solo viola that set the tone, thrusting its way through the orchestra at the start of their sequence of Read more ...
David Nice
The road to hell is paved with brilliant ideas in Berlioz's idiosyncratic take on the Faust legend. John Eliot Gardiner proved better than anyone in last night's Prom that this splendidly lopsided "dramatic legend" can only be weakened by its many stagings; all the drama is in the music, and especially in the orchestra, from rollicking country dances and fanfaring Hungarians through to the shrieking night birds on the ride to the abyss and the six harps dappling the plains of heaven in what for modern tastes is a quite unnecessary "Epilogue in Heaven" for redeemed Marguerite.Gardiner is a Read more ...