Classical music
Gavin Dixon
Medieval to Modern – Jeremy Denk’s Wigmore Hall recital took us on a whistle-stop tour of Western music, beginning with Machaut in the mid-14th century and ending with Ligeti at the end of the 20th. The programme was made up of 25 short works, each by a different composer and arranged in broadly chronological order, resulting in a series of startling contrasts, but punctuated with equally surprising, and often very revealing, continuities.Nothing in the first half, which spanned Machaut to Bach, was actually written for the piano, but Denk was unapologetic, applying a broad, and thoroughly Read more ...
David Nice
"Total immersion", the term used for the BBC Symphony's one-composer days, takes on a whole new meaning in the Thames Tunnel Shaft now transformed – but fortunately not subject to makeover – under the mantle of Rotherhithe's Brunel Museum. All the more so with the pioneering Modulus Quartet, who presented the mostly consonant music of six collaborative composers with the main lights out, shifting colours on the performing space and films either to accompany three of the works or to let the creators speak in short, unpretentious introductions.The ambitious peripherals weren't perfect; Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michael Nyman and The Tempest – Prospero’s Books and Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs (MN Records)Think Michael Nyman and one inevitably thinks of the 1980s, and it’s quite possible that Nyman’s scores for Peter Greenaway will prove more enduring than the films themselves. This set, the two Tempest-inspired works remastered and reissued from Decca originals, includes the last Nyman/Greenaway collaboration, Prospero’s Books. A mixture of newly composed numbers and excerpts from an earlier theatrical score, it ended the pair’s working relationship. The reasons aren’t entirely clear from Nyman’s Read more ...
David Nice
They dreamed the impossible dream in 1970, turning aspects of Cervantes' Don Quixote into the musical Man of La Mancha. But Purcell, Eccles and the lively dramatist Thomas D'Urfey - anyone know his hit song "The Fart"? - got there first nearly 300 years earlier when the Knight of the Woeful Countenance trod the boards at Drury Lane's Theatre Royal in a seven-hour entertainment.Harry Bicket and The English Concert devised a clever programme of joyous early showbusiness homaging the 400th anniversary of Cervantes' death - in the same month as Shakespeare's, astonishingly - by interweaving the Read more ...
theartsdesk
The concert photographer Chris Christodoulou has been taking pictures at the BBC Proms for 35 years. Even more than the musicians under their baton, he spends his time watching conductors like a hawk, observing their every gesture and grimace. Every year the wackier images, which convey less dignity but more truth, don’t make it into the public eye.Or they didn’t until we at The Arts Desk entered into collaboration with Christodoulou. This year we publish our seventh gallery of his action portraits. Normally we publish only one snap per conductor. This time round, to help the Proms along with Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I had never been to the Last Night of the Proms until last night, nor really paid much attention to it in recent years. To the extent I did, I have been resentful of the fact that to many people it represents the Proms as a whole, with its flag waving and fancy dress, although in fact it is utterly atypical. But I went in the spirit of trying anything once and I’m glad I did, although once is probably enough.In a way, critiquing the Last Night of the Proms makes as much sense as critiquing a children’s birthday party, and is as likely to end in tears. The Last Night does not function like a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Tradition – a choral spectacular for the penultimate night of the Proms – but with a twist – a youth choir and period instruments. Marin Alsop this evening led a spectacular Verdi Requiem, not least for the sheer scale of the chorus, the BBC Proms Youth Choir some 200 strong. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment provided chacterful accompaniment, though sometimes struggled to compete, and the four soloists all delivered, particularly Tamara Wilson, here confirming her reputation as one of today’s leading Verdi sopranos.The BBC Proms Youth Choir brings together four youth choruses from Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar: Symphony No. 1, In the South Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano(ICA Classics)Antonio Pappano’s multi-national background might suggest that he’s the latest in a long line of foreign musicians to succeed with Elgar, though he’s actually British. He does a wonderful job with Elgar 1 in this live recording, though much of the credit rests with Rome’s Santa Cecilia orchestra – the strings’ heft and the weighty brass sonorities make most other performances sound distinctly anaemic. Not that Pappano goes crudely over the top; his unapologetically Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
You know what they say about men with big hands. Christian Thielemann has them, that’s for sure. Massive, meat-cleaving clappers, carving through the air. They give a pretty heavy upbeat too, and a generalissimo’s point and jab for a cue. If you’re a back-desk violinist in the Dresden Staatskapelle, you know when you’ve been Thielemanned.Those hands were also joined in a sweaty fanboy’s applause for Nikolaj Znaider at the end of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The violinist returned the love by dedicating his Bach encore to the conductor and orchestra. Such a concerto does not play itself, he Read more ...
David Nice
Soft power in the shape of cultural ambassadors can go a long way. With a little help from its big guns in banking and industry, Germany has given this year's Proms no less than four of its major orchestras – from Leipzig, two from Berlin, and now from Dresden: all the more reason to wave those EU flags on a typically international Last Night in three days' time.There's even been co-ordination this week in the shape of Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies three nights running, first from Barenboim and now from Christian Thielemann. A failsafe interpreter of the Austro-German Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Daniel Barenboim is as distinctive as he is unpredictable. His considerable strengths – dynamism, passion, keen intellectual engagement – are balanced by some notable weaknesses – clunky tempo changes, lack of detail – but all configure differently in each performance. This Prom was a success largely for the fresh perspectives he brought to Mozart and Bruckner, both composers prone to stiffness and formality from less adventurous performers.If the Mozart was the less successful, it was because Barenboim seemed to take his ideas too far, always working just outside the bounds of classical Read more ...
David Nice
Istanbul six weeks before the failed coup, the south-west coast of Turkey six weeks after: what's the difference? None that I could see; once past the Turkish Airlines flights, with literature and screen full of the "People's Victory", there was no sign of it at the D-Marin Classical Music Festival on the Bodrum peninsula, centred around the marina in Turgutreis, a 45-minute drive along a very built-up coastline from once-quiet Bodrum. One of the Turkish musicians studying abroad whom I heard at both the Istanbul and Bodrum festivals told me that, having postponed a home visit at the time of Read more ...