Classical music
Gavin Dixon
Charles Dutoit gets the best from the Royal Philharmonic. He conducts with broad, sweeping gestures, and the orchestra responds with dramatic immediacy and vivid colours. This concert’s programme was well chosen to play to their shared strengths, and the results were impressive: colourful Respighi, muscular Dvořák and taut, compelling Stravinsky.Respighi’s Fountains of Rome opens and closes with evocations of dawn and dusk. Dutoit has little interest in miniature, fragile textures, and never ventures into the quietest dynamics. But he and the orchestra compensate with luminous colours and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Vincenzo Galilei: The Well-tempered Lute Žak Osmo (lute) (Hyperion)Bach's Well-tempered Clavier wasn't the first major musical work designed to demonstrate the advantages of an equitable, scientific approach to intonation. Vincenzo Galilei's Libro d'intavolature di liuto was published in 1584, a hefty collection of pieces composed for lute, some of which demonstrate the instrument's capability to transpose pieces to any pitch of the well-tempered scale. Galilei was a polymath who approached the study of music with scientific zeal, and his best-known son was the astronomer Galileo. The Read more ...
David Nice
Art can inspire music, and vice versa. When concert (as opposed to theatre or film) scores are accompanied by images, however, the effect dilutes the impact of both; above all, the imagination stops working on the visual dimension created in the mind's eye. That had to be the case last night, though given Olivier Messiaen's tendency to outstay his welcome by at least three movements in his orchestral epics, Deborah O'Grady's nature photography carried on with its capacity to surprise and stun long after the music, in this second event of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
An auspicious debut with the Royal Philharmonic for Vasily Petrenko. Just watching him conduct, it is clear that he is a natural communicator, always giving a clear, generous beat and never missing a cue. No surprise, then, that the orchestra was on his wavelength from the start last night in Mahler's Second ("Resurrection") Symphony, reflecting back all his dynamism and focus. That immediacy was balanced by careful planning on Petrenko’s part, with tempo choices finely calibrated for dramatic power and structural coherence.Symphonic order was Petrenko’s guiding principle in the first Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The annual Bach Choir St Matthew Passion is a satisfying mix of new and old. The tradition dates back to 1930, and, as was the fashion then, the choir employed is huge. Applause is kept to a minimum, another nod to tradition, as is the translation of the text into English.But the choir has not been deaf to more recent developments, or to the rise of period performance practice. They now sing with period instrument ensemble Florilegium, and the choir’s musical director, David Hill, led an account that draws on recent trends, not least in the fleet tempos and elegantly shaped phrases, Read more ...
David Nice
Cherrypicking from 17 concerts to come up with the one by last year's Leeds International Piano Competition winner may seem a bit unfair to the French Institute's ever more ambitious annual It's All About Piano! Festival. It was hard, for instance, to miss out on the youth element, the Satie bookending the weekend's events, or for that matter the absolute star of the festival two years ago, David Kadouch, who then gave one of the best, and most intriguingly programmed, recitals I've ever heard and teamed up for a Saturday night duo recital with Adam Laloum. Let's just say that the alternative Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Some of us have waited years for this. The opportunity to see Schumann’s largest, most ambitious work was not to be missed. For this most literary of composers, setting the Alpha and Omega of German poetry was a labour of love, which he undertook in reverse, but with progressively less reliable inspiration. From the grandiose bluster of the overture, composed last, you would be hard pressed to anticipate the sublime heights of the third part, composed by Schumann in a wake of elation shortly after completing The Paradise and the Peri.Hardly more than a year ago the London Symphony Orchestra Read more ...
graham.rickson
Copland: Orchestral Works 1 BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson (Chandos)There are sensational things in the first volume of John Wilson’s projected Copland series, but his disc suffers from being released too soon after Andrew Litton’s thrilling Colorado Symphony anthology. Litton scores by allowing us to hear Billy the Kid and Rodeo in their uncut original versions, and his orchestra play with a muscular grace that’s matched by BIS’s widescreen sound. Wilson’s hard-working BBC Philharmonic are more than capable, but many of Copland’s brasher moments are too restrained. El Salón México is a case in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night’s concert at the Barbican focused on the theme of dreams and night-time, centred around the UK premiere of Dream of the Song by George Benjamin. But the one piece on the programme that did not fit with the theme stole the show. Stravinsky’s American-period masterpiece Symphony in Three Movements supplied the energy and rhythmic impetus lacking elsewhere.George Benjamin’s Dream of the Song combined arrestingly beautiful poems translated from medieval Spanish with fragments of Lorca, scored for solo countertenor (Iestyn Davies) accompanied by a small orchestra and women’s chorus (the Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
I expect that there will be a sense of mild disappointment within the ranks of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra that its great Brahms season did not come to quite the conclusion intended. As readers will know from last week’s review of the Fourth Symphony, a herniated disc meant that Principal Conductor Robin Ticciati had to pull out of both that concert and also last night’s performance of the Deutsches Requiem (he has also withdrawn from Glyndebourne performances of Wagner's Die Meistersinger).Principal Guest Conductor Emmanuel Krivine agreed to stand in for both concerts but in the event he Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
With the death of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies from leukaemia at the age of 81, the UK has lost the most prolific composer of his generation, as well as one of the most passionate advocates for art music.Maxwell Davies, known universally as Max, wrote for every classical genre under the sun. Stevie’s Ferry to Hoy is played today by children and piano students the world over. With a simple melody of unaffected charm and satisfying rhythmic games playing just beneath the surface, the piece is as characteristically Max as the unrelenting orchestral churn of Worldes Blis, the gay and sentimental Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
How can an orchestra perform the music of the future? This was the question posed by Francois-Xavier Roth, congenial maestro and charming educator, as the standard concerto for platform arrangers played out behind him on the floor of LSO St Luke’s. Roth had just offered one confident answer to the question, with the first performance of Dr Glaser’s Experiment by Darren Bloom.Californian-born in 1982 but long resident in the UK, Bloom made use of both the performing space and the virtuosity of the LSO. Radiating out from a core of bass and percussion were pairs of solo and duo winds and Read more ...