Classical music
David Nice
“You don’t love Schubert’s music?” Such, according to the greatest of living Schubert interpreters Elisabeth Leonskaja, was the response of her mentor Sviatoslav Richter to students who omitted the exposition repeats in the piano sonatas. Daniel Barenboim doesn’t observe them either, on the evidence of yesterday afternoon's concert, but four recitals and much in them ought to prove that he does love Schubert’s music, or rather has his own vision of how it ought to go. It’s not his fault if focus on the composer seems to have taken second place to the public's media-fed fascination with Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
To close its 2014-15 season the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose the choral masterpiece that Elgar preferred not to call an oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius. Performances in Scotland are rare, whether this is because of Presbyterian unease with Catholic sentiment, or the unfashionable nature of big-bottomed Anglican choral textures, it is difficult to say. North of the border we are more likely to turn to Brahms’ German Requiem for spiritual consolation. That said, the munificent Gerontius fits the Usher Hall like a glove; the hall was built 10 years after the premiere and with its Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Personality is essential for Schubert’s piano sonatas. Listen to two recordings of the same one and you could easily think they are different works, such is the performer's input. Daniel Barenboim would therefore seem ideal. He’s a huge personality – he even has his own name emblazoned in large gold letters on the lid of his piano: a personality verging on a cult. But it’s not quite right for this music.Barenboim always trades in big passions; Schubert does not – or only in late works, and even then not exclusively. To negotiate the more delicate music of the early B major Sonata, D575, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nielsen: Symphonies 2 and 6 Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo (BIS)Few composers' music can blow away the cobwebs quite like that of Carl Nielsen, and David Fanning's sleeve note to this BIS disc rightly describes him as “the greatest life-affirmer in the 20th-century symphonic tradition”. It's been a joy to watch Nielsen's stock rise in recent years, and John Storgårds' new cycle of the symphonies has just appeared in the wake of Alan Gilbert's blazing New York Philharmonic set. This disc of Symphonies 2 and 6 is the final instalment of Sakari Oramo's series, and I'm Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s not often that you arrive for a piano recital to see members of the audience on the stage, clustering around the instrument and taking photos of it. Those curious about the newly unveiled, straight-strung Barenboim-Maene concert grand (the name above the keyboard is simply BARENBOIM) were periodically ushered away from it; it was closed and reopened several times before it was time for the maestro himself to take control.The first event in Daniel Barenboim’s four recitals of Schubert sonatas involved several component parts that added up to a distinctly odd evening. Let’s dispatch one Read more ...
David Nice
Violinists either fathom the elusive heart and soul of Elgar’s music or miss the mark completely. Canadian James Ehnes, one of the most cultured soloists on the scene today, is the only one I’ve heard since Nigel Kennedy to make the Violin Concerto work in concert, in an equally rare total partnership with Elgarian supreme Andrew Davis and the Philharmonia. Last night he found the same emotional core in the Violin Sonata at the end of a colossal programme with a no less extraordinary but much less widely known companion, the American pianist Andrew Armstrong.In their smart suits and ties, Read more ...
theartsdesk
Hottest tickets for seats at the Proms have probably all gone already. Yet the beauty of it is that so long as you start queueing early enough you can always get to hear the greatest, or rather the most popular, artists, for £5 in the Arena which is of course easily the best place to be acoustically in the notoriously unpredictable Royal Albert Hall. And don’t say you’re too old to stand: a 91-year-old student of mine – her name, Grace Payne, needs celebrating – has been doing it, with a few breaks overseas, since 1947, and she’ll be there again this summer.First reactions to the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
With Kavakos, Faust, Shaham and Skride already been and gone, and Jansen, Ehnes, Bell and Ibragimova still to come, the LSO’s International Violin Festival has nothing left to prove. We’re not short of star power in London’s concert scene, but even by our spoilt metropolitan standards this is a pretty unarguable line-up. With excellence a given, then, it takes quite a lot to startle a crowd into delight – especially on a Sunday night. But that’s what Christian Tetzlaff did with the unassuming freshness and brilliance of his Beethoven.Ever thoughtful, Tetzlaff has taken the cadenzas that Read more ...
David Nice
No two symphonic swansongs could be more different than Sibelius’s heart-of-darkness Tapiola and Nielsen’s enigmatically joky Sixth Symphony. In its evasive yet organic jumpiness, the Danish composer’s anything but “Simple Symphony” – the Sixth’s subtitle – seemed last night to have most in common with another work from the mid-1920s, Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto.These are the connections and contrasts that the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor Sakari Oramo has been underlining in his six-concert journey around the Nielsen symphonies. Last night’s typically confounding finale Read more ...
Paul Gent
Dresden is slowly opening up to the world. All but destroyed by British bombing in the Second World War, locked away inside Communist East Germany for 40 years, it is now becoming a tourist honeypot. On a warm day in May, you can see the snap-happy groups of Japanese and Germans trailing behind their guides, marvelling at the imposing Baroque buildings in the Old Town. You see them queuing patiently for the extraordinary museums and poring over the the restaurant menus in the city’s huge squares. One of the local specialities is potato soup, but then nothing’s perfect.There are buskers on Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Florilegium, dir. Ashley Solomon (Channel Classics)This is a predictably satisfying pair of discs, another outstanding set of period-instrument Brandenburgs from a crack British group. It did prompt me to sample naughtily inauthentic performances from the likes of Karajan and Klemperer, both indecently enjoyable but sounding so anachronistic that it's hard to believe that we ever learned to love these pieces played in such a manner. The joy of Bach is that he's almost indestructible, as long as the spirit and intention are right – as they are on an entertaining new Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This penultimate night of the London (formally Lufthansa) Festival of Baroque Music brought beautiful, intelligent, superbly musical singing from two sopranos Julia Doyle and Grace Davidson, who sang early 18th century works by François Couperin: two exultatory motets, a Magnificat and the Leçons de Ténèbres.Their voices were ideally suited to these works, and particularly to the Leçons which filled the second half as an uninterrupted sequence. The three “Lessons” which have survived and were published – and only three out of what should be a complete sequence for Holy Week, of nine – Read more ...