Classical music
stephen.walsh
The city of Brecon (county town of former Brecknockshire, now lost in the spurious and far-flung county of Powys) is a long way from Leipzig and on the face of it has little in common with the home of Bach and the native city of Wagner. But once a year for the past decade this rainy, hill-girt metropolis on the upper reaches of the River Usk has played host to a festival of Baroque music, and particularly Bach, that would match pretty well anything likely to be offered in the Thomaskirche.Its chief organiser, the violinist Rachel Podger, is both a local figure and a national treasure. Her Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Final thoughts: a fitting theme for the farewell concert of this year’s Gewandhaus Barbican residency. But the connections proved tenuous: Death and Transfiguration, the gloomy opener, was written when Strauss was only 25, and the Mozart Clarinet Concerto which followed, while it was one of his last works, shows little concern for mortality or summation. But the motivation was honourable – to find homes for Strauss’ tone poems, which rarely fit comfortably in any concert programme.This will probably be the last time that Riccardo Chailly conducts the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the UK (he’s about Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák, Suk, Janáček: Violin Concertos Josef Špaček (violin), Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Jiří Bělohlávek (Supraphon)Josef Suk's expansive single movement Fantasy in G minor is a big-boned, lovable work; it's a surprise to learn that Suk complained in later years that he'd had “enough of it to last a lifetime.” Suk's large-scale pieces can be a little overbearing. This 23-minute work isn’t. It opens brilliantly witha furious tutti passage full of quirky modulations and punchy accents. You expect that soloist Josef Špaček’s first entry will calm things down, but Suk’s music becomes Read more ...
David Nice
In practice as well as in prospect, the second in Riccardo Chailly’s Strauss/Mozart trilogy was a concert of two very different halves. The first offered small Bavarian and Austrian beer in the shape of Strauss’s fustian Macbeth, unbelievably close in time to the masterly Don Juan which blazed on Tuesday, and a pretty but just a little too anodyne Mozart violin concerto at the other end of Mozart’s prodigious composing life to the last work for piano and orchestra, which had amazed us in the first concert. Part Two was pure LSD: Also sprach Zarathustra, in which I’d hoped Chailly would invest Read more ...
David Nice
Riccardo Chailly’s Strauss odyssey with his Leipzig orchestra peaked in Saxony last year, the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. I was lucky to catch a razor-sharp Till Eulenspiegel and a saturated Death and Transfiguration in Dresden’s Semperoper close to the birthday. 14 months on, and the Barbican has nothing like the same necessary air to offer around a mini-residency of richly-scored symphonic poems. But Don Juan ought to be the perfect festive opener, and here it leapt into the void as only a truly alive, disciplined interpretation can.This was a great lover very much Read more ...
David Nice
“Whatever happened to Stephen Bishop?” is not a question likely to be asked by followers of legendary pianism. Born in San Pedro, Los Angeles on 17 October 1940, the young talent took his stepfather’s name as his career was launched at the age of 11. Later he honoured his own father’s Croatian "Kovacevich", by appending it to the “Bishop”. Now it’s plain Kovacevich carved in the pantheon of similar yet unique sensibilities like those of Arrau, Pollini, Richter and Zimerman, alongside masterly exponents of mostly different repertoire like Martha Argerich.On 2 November, in the hottest ticket on Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bartók: Complete Choral Works Choir of selected students of the Liszt Academy and the Eötvös Loránd University/László Dobszay, with Zoltan Kocsis (piano) (BMC Records)That Bartók's choral music is largely unknown outside Hungary is due to several factors. Most importantly, “The texts are for the most part untranslatable, and, in translation, are unsingable.” So writes Andras Wilheim in a fascinating essay in this two-disc set. Unfortunately, the text is almost unreadable, thanks to an eccentric choice of font – the one mis-step in a well designed, immaculately produced release. The music, Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The justification for playing Brahms with a chamber orchestra is well rehearsed. In fact, I have on my desk a Telarc boxed set of the four symphonies “in the style of the original Meiningen performances”, recorded by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under the visionary Sir Charles Mackerras in 1997. Then, as now, the idea was to lighten the texture and give greater prominence to the woodwind. By drawing back the dense curtain of string sound, the light could shine through and Brahms’ contrapuntal delicacy be revealed.That was 18 years ago: a long time in the history of an orchestra only just Read more ...
Michael Church
Never has the world of music been so open to exploration, nor so rich in paradox. Recording is abolishing history – the music of the past is being subsumed into a voracious and ever-expanding musical present. The shrinking of the globe to a digital village is abolishing geography: everyone can listen to everyone else’s music, wherever they happen to be. But in a piquant irony, just as the short-lived “world music” CD boom was whetting people’s appetite for new sounds, so those sounds were becoming homogenised out of existence, in response to the demands of the global pop market.The lament for Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The music of Olivier Messiaen lends itself ideally to the kind of multimedia project created by Cordelia Williams. His titles tell stories of terror and redemption, Man, men, God and angels. His chords burst with colour, not only the green and gold of Christmas or the red and purple of Crucifixion but the pulsing of a slow journey, stripes of redemption, layers of wakefulness. The only drawback is that the composer himself was very sure about what those stories and colours were, leaving little room for later interpreters to add their own perspectives.Nothing daunted, Williams commissioned Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Stravinsky and Bartók both escaped Europe at the start of the second world war to live in the USA. For Stravinsky it was the start of 30 years of mostly happy exile, while Bartók was to survive for only five years. Works from their time in America featured in Valery Gergiev’s penultimate concert as principal conductor of the LSO last night.Stravinsky’s neoclassical Symphony in C is not often heard in concert – it was the first time I had heard it live – and this performance was not a great advertisement for the piece. Written half in Europe, at a time when the composer’s wife, mother and Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
This Barbican concert began with a Mendelssohn overture and ended with a Haydn symphony. But on stage were the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. What did you expect in between, a Mozart piano concerto? Not likely. Instead they gave the first performance of No.48 (night studio) by Richard Ayres. English-born but resident in the Netherlands and working mostly on the Continent, Ayres has impeccable post-Minimalist credentials (studies with Louis Andriessen and Morton Feldman) which do no more than hint at how his music behaves – like a kid in a well-stocked acoustic sweet-shop. Or at a Read more ...