Classical music
David Nice
Drawing an audience of five and a half thousand in to listen intently is harder than pushing out into the vasts of the Albert Hall. Yet it’s what seems to work best in this unpredictable space, and last night masterful veterans Elisabeth Leonskaja and Charles Dutoit knew exactly what to do. The results were romantic introspection in Mozart - an unfashionable but valid alternative to authentic sprightliness - and a Shostakovich Fifteenth Symphony that was more skull than skin, but a compellingly decorated skull for all that.The quietly commanding tone of the evening, in marked contrast to the Read more ...
David Kettle
It was the first major casualty of the 2015 Edinburgh International Festival. Global superstar pianist Lang Lang was stuck overseas, forbidden from flying by his doctor because of an ear infection, and therefore unable to perform Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra as planned (it had been an enticing prospect). But fear not, Lang Lang lovers – word is that he’ll be recovered in time for his solo recital of Bach, Chopin and Tchaikovsky on Friday 21 August.It was sad to see a few noticeable gaps among the Usher Hall’s seating, especially when there was an equally Read more ...
David Benedict
Nearly 10 years ago to the day, an almost unknown 24-year-old Venezuelan conductor came a cropper when valiantly stepping in at short notice to conduct Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony at the Proms. (His name was Gustavo Dudamel. Whatever happened to him?) To pull off successful performances of Sibelius’s seven symphonies you need not just the ability to fire up players but the intellectual grasp to grip their elusive, fluid structures.So after handing the first four symphonies in this year’s anniversary cycle to relatively young guns Thomas Dausgaard and Ilan Volkov, the BBC was taking no chances Read more ...
David Nice
A second night of Sibelius symphonies at the Proms, packed to the rafters just like its predecessor. Exit Thomas Dausgaard, the tuba needed for the first two symphonies but not for the Third or – surprising given its pervasive darkness – the Fourth, and the air that had billowed around supremely supple performances. Enter Ilan Volkov to bring too much dark earth and inorganic point-making at first, though the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, its strings sounding tougher if less inward from a different point in the hall, was still on world-class form.The programme was identical to the second Read more ...
David Nice
From Sakari Oramo’s riveting Nielsen symphonies at the Barbican to Thomas Dausgaard kicking off the Proms’ Sibelius cycle, the two Nordic immortals are well served in their 150th birthday year. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, whose reins Dausgaard takes over from the great Donald Runnicles in 2016, may not have the sheer heft of the Berlin Philharmonic strings we heard earlier this year in Rattle’s Sibelius. But the Glasgow-based players get much deeper under the skin, and prove so much lighter on their feet when the Danish conductor takes flight. Sibelius’s hard-to-handle treasury of Read more ...
David Kettle
On paper it looked like it would be very much a concert of two halves. James MacMillan’s energetic, glittering Second Percussion Concerto was unveiled last year and received its first UK performance in London last December, and it was getting its premiere in the composer’s homeland at this Edinburgh International Festival concert from its dedicatee, percussionist Colin Currie, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. And in the second half, something entirely different: Sibelius’s rarely performed, hugely expansive choral symphony Kullervo.What brought the two contrasting works together – Read more ...
graham.rickson
Schoenberg: Gurre-Lieder Gürzenich-Orchester Köln/Markus Stenz (Hyperion)Schoenberg's vast Gurre-Lieder began life in 1900 as a modest song cycle for soprano, tenor and piano, its texts drawn from Danish poetry. He suspended work on the piece in 1903, returning to it in 1910 – by which time his musical style had radically changed. As had the scale of the piece, which ideally needs between 300 and 400 performers, six vocal soloists and over 100 minutes. Not forgetting the ratchet and some iron chains. The extravagant forces are used with admirable restraint, and performances remain an Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Pairing Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony with John Foulds’ Three Mantras was a smart piece of programming: established modern classic and obscure novelty sharing an inspiration from Indian music and philosophy, and both perfectly designed for showing off a very fine orchestra to its best advantage.Before this concert I knew little of John Foulds (1880-1939) other than as a composer of light music in a blandly appealing style. The Three Mantras proved him to be a far more interesting and arresting composer. Originally preludes to the acts of a Sanskrit opera Avatara, which the composer later Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The pulling power of the BBC Proms was in action last night, as a virtually full Royal Albert Hall settled down at 6.30pm, and braced itself for 22 testing minutes of restless, angular, unforgiving 1960s Boulez.The audience had been lured in by the gentler fare that was to come in the second half, but Boulez's Figures - Doubles - Prismes, under the taut control of its pulse by François-Xavier Roth, definitely left its mark.This work, receiving its Proms premiere, and constituting the entire first half of the concert, had been the composer's measured and controlled response to Stockhausen's Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Sir John Eliot Gardiner has made great play for years with the idea that Beethoven’s Fifth is a revolutionary symphony in not only musical but political terms. Accordingly the first bars were a call to arms, taking no heed of a restless Proms audience, or the Albert Hall’s generous acoustic, ploughing into and then through the argument with the joyful fury of a class war demo breaking police lines.Niceties of intonation and ensemble counted for less in such a febrile atmosphere, but a week on from the Aurora Orchestra’s Beethoven "Pastoral", I wonder if there’s a trend re-emerging for playing Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The England cricket team recently went through seven Test matches alternating winning and losing, the longest such sequence in the history of the game. Eric Whitacre managed a similar, and similarly frustrating, series of hits and misses in his Sunday matinee Prom of American music with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.Whitacre featured as both composer (of four of the pieces) and conductor, the programming showing the strengths but also the limitations of both of these aspects of his work. As a presenter, though, he is excellent, speaking to the audience between items with assurance and Read more ...
David Nice
Yet another full Proms house sat down, and of course stood, for a rather strange six course meal which turned out not quite what the menu had led us to anticipate. While it was obvious that the rare and expensive bird dishes were going to be quickly over, the hors d’oeuvres in the shape of Mozart ballet music proved piquant but too many, and the real meat which we might have expected in Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements appeared instead in a work too often mislabelled a soufflé, Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto, through the alchemy of masterchef soloist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who also Read more ...