Classical music
graham.rickson
Chopin: Mazurkas Ivana Gavric (Edition Classics)Ivana Gavric suggests that Chopin’s Mazurkas are “short, poignant, diary entries”, and her performances remind us how the greatest composers are never constrained when writing miniatures. As with Bartók’s vast Mikrokosmos, where the simplest, sparest studies sound fully realised. Gavric sticks to mazurkas composed before 1838, preferring their unmannered rusticity. It's a shock to read a critic in 1833 describing Chopin's Op. 7 set as containing “ear-splitting discords, harsh modulations, ugly distortions of melody and rhythm”. Gavric Read more ...
David Nice
Not your usual blockbuster for Holy Week, this. In other words, neither of the Bach Passions but a Requiem, and not – these days, at any rate – one of the more often-performed ones (it's not among the 79 works listed in The BBC Proms Guide to Great Choral Works). Dvořák's laments and optimisms may not soar as consistently as Verdi's, but the (late) style is invariably the man here, and the pay-off for a broken back in the early stages is a bigger healing later on and a final cathartic lament. Certainly no conductor could be more devoted to Dvořák's steady wonders than the great Jiří Read more ...
Nigel Short
Having just celebrated a birthday the wrong side of 50 years of age I confess to regularly pinching myself when I dare to look back and see the higgledy-piggledy route my life has taken to bring me to the present day, as we celebrate 15 years of Tenebrae. Not just the odd lucky break here and there but seemingly a lifelong sequence of odd twists and turns, of chance meetings and associations, every one of which has resulted in me landing at the current co-ordinates of life.And what a place it is! Fate, destiny, luck? Call it what you will, but I know only too well that none of these things Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
For the first performances of his Eighth Symphony in Munich, Mahler conducted 11 rehearsals. He arranged for the bells of the city’s trams to be silenced during the concerts. He left nothing to chance. On Saturday night, for once, one felt that all concerned had done likewise.In Munich the piece was billed as the Symphony of a Thousand. Symphony of 250, often as not, is what we get, including instrumentalists, unless you turn up to one of those get-your-uncle-in-to-sing affairs at the Royal Albert Hall. So the sight of 350 choristers filling up the choir and side stalls of the Royal Festival Read more ...
graham.rickson
Haydn: Sonatas and Variations Leon McCawley (piano) (Somm)Haydn's keyboard music needs this sort of persuasive advocacy. Four sonatas and a set of variations is a lot to pack in to a single disc, but the composer’s inability to waffle on is his greatest asset. There's such elegance and economy at play in this music; every note counts and there's nowhere to hide. Leon McCawley’s unflappability is winning, the deceptive technical challenges surmounted with no sense of strain. I'm thinking of moments like the rapid semiquavers in the last movement of Sonata No 53, beautifully handled. He Read more ...
David Nice
Who needs hallucinogenic drugs when we have Debussy's two books of Préludes? In the hands, that is, of a pianist magician who holds the key to this wild parade, demi-real wonderland, call it what you will. I've only heard two wizards equal to the whole sequence: on disc, Krystian Zimerman, graced by a wide recorded range the old masters could never command, and now, in the concert hall, Alexander Melnikov. Between them, they prove that Debussy can be not only ravishingly remote, but violent, too, and scary as hell.Debussy's curiosity spans thousands of years, from ancient Egyptian funerary Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Brighton Festival, which takes place every May, is renowned for its plethora of free events. The 2017 Festival is curated by Guest Director Kate Tempest, the poet, writer and performer, alongside Festival CEO Andrew Comben who’s been the event's overall manager since 2008 (also overseeing the Brighton Dome venues all year round). This year the Festival’s theme is “Everyday Epic”.“Kate has this sense of the arts being important through the everyday of our lives,” Comben explains, “at the same time as acknowledging that, for everyone, things can take on epic proportions, whether that’s Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams, greatest communicator among living front-rank composers, zoomed into the follow-spot for the second and third concerts of the New York Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency. Harmonielehre, his first epic symphony in all but name, and The Chairman Dances, preliminary study for the nostalgic-cum-violent foxtrot of the Maos in Act Three of Nixon in China, are already repertoire staples, while Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra is about to become one; this was its third performance in London since 2013. Even so, the spotlighting was bold for a high-profile tour, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Alan Gilbert chose a surprisingly low-key programme to open the New York Philharmonic’s three-day Barbican residency, Bartók’s genre-defying Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and Mahler’s modest Fourth Symphony. But it proved an engaging combination, and showed off many of the orchestra’s great strengths. Gilbert himself led with a steady hand, although his tempos were often propulsive, and even if some of the Mahler felt superficial, there were many moments of magic, especially in the last two movements, welcome reminders of the orchestra’s considerable form with this music.Bartók’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Serenades 1 & 2 Gävle Symphony Orchestra/Jaime Martín (Ondine)You know within seconds that this release is going to be good: droning string fifths introducing the catchiest of horn solos, the tune echoed in some style by a winningly perky clarinet. This is Premier League playing, and discovering that it's from an orchestra you've never heard of adds to the pleasure. Brahms's two Serenades are terrific pieces and don't get heard anything like as often as they deserve. Happily, both are on this disc, wonderfully performed by Sweden’s Gåvle Symphony Orchestra under Spanish flautist- Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In musical performance, if you get the start right and the end right, you can get away with a lot in between. In last night’s LSO concert under François-Xavier Roth there was a mixed bag of more and less successful beginnings and endings, but lots of fine playing sandwiched in the middle.Mahler was only 24 when he began work on his first symphony, but it is a work of astonishing ambition and mastery for such a young composer. It originally had a detailed programme note narrating the story behind the music, and a descriptive name: “Titan”. By the time of the revised version Mahler had thought Read more ...
David Nice
A wife dies to save her husband; a hero goes to hell and back to retrieve her from the underworld. Nothing of this dark myth, other than a rollicking row across the Styx from a bass singing Charon, ferryman of the dead, remains in Handel's incidental music to Alceste, a play on the subject by Tobias Smollett (of Roderick Random fame) which never reached a putatively extravagant Covent Garden staging and which has vanished from sight. Instead we have a masque-like score in which the principle characters don't sing. In the company of an inventive little serenade by Boyce and a great Concerto Read more ...