Classical music
Christopher Lambton
It was as a violin soloist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra that Joseph Swensen first appeared, in the mid-1980s, on the Scottish musical scene. He went on to become the orchestra’s principal conductor – a long and fruitful collaboration that lasted from 1996 to 2005. In this concert he returned to the orchestra where he now holds the title Conductor Emeritus, as both conductor and soloist, taking the podium for Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks and Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, and picking up his violin for Prokofiev’s Cinq Mélodies and Barber’s Violin Concerto.I have lost Read more ...
David Nice
Deep pain and sadness expressed through intense creative discipline aren’t qualities noted often enough in the music of Sergey Rachmaninov. Yet they’ve been consistently underlined, with rigour to match, in Vladimir Jurowski’s season-long “Inside Out” festival with his London Philharmonic Orchestra playing at a consistent white heat. Last night’s typically singular finale was crowned by a performance – Jurowski’s first – of the enigmatic Third Symphony as far removed as you could imagine from “tinsel”, a term with which it found itself bizarrely associated alongside lighter pieces in a Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Be a soloist: take responsibility for yourself. These are not maxims often encountered in musical ensembles where unity of purpose and execution is valued, but they lie behind the philosophy and sheer style of Ensemble InterContemporain, which Pierre Boulez founded in his own image to show confidence in the necessity and vitality of a Modernism always under threat when an easy life and easy listening are so easily bought.The Barbican’s celebration of Boulez in his ninetieth year began last week with the solemn obsequies of his Rituel and continued here in a vein of remembrance with Mémoriale Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It took just two bars of Debussy's La plus que lente for Stephen Hough to transport the entire Royal Festival Hall to Paris. The nearest thing the French composer ever wrote to a café waltz – inspired by a gypsy band in a local hotel – this bewitching, louche yet elusive little piece might in other hands make a more suitable encore than opener. But it set the tone for an evening in which Hough’s sleight-of-hand seemed to shrink the spaces of the venue: he is one of those rare pianists who, rather than “projecting to the back row”, produces a touch so seductively quiet that his listeners, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If the thought of the annual trek to Hay-on-Wye for the literary festival in May fills you with as much gloom as it does me (and I don’t have to go as far as most of our readers), you might do worse than sample the town’s chamber music festival this weekend as a healthy change or at least a soothing antidote.This is a new event crystallised out of an existing occasional series of concerts featuring the Fitzwilliam Quartet. And though it’s unlikely to spawn chamber music on every street corner of this small border town, in the way that bookshops once exploded out of Richard Booth’s original Read more ...
graham.rickson
Malcolm Arnold: Symphonies 1-9 London Symphony Orchestra/Richard Hickox, BBC Philharmonic/Rumon Gamba (Chandos)Malcolm Arnold's lasting reputation as a chameleonic comedian endures, though his more overtly serious cycle of nine symphonies shouldn't be overlooked. They span his compositional career – the bracing, bold No. 1 written in 1949, the alarming, sepulchral 9th completed in 1986. They exist in a very British parallel musical universe, miles from the European avant-garde. But Arnold wasn't an insular composer; these symphonies make overt reference to Berlioz, Sibelius, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Time was when a Boulez concert with the LSO would have been directed by the man himself, but that is no longer possible. In Peter Eötvös they have the next best thing, a conductor who has known the man and his music for decades, whose listening ear is scarcely less acute and whose most recent appearance wth the LSO, in Lachenmann and Brahms with Maurizio Pollini, made quite miraculous music from intensive rehearsal. It was evident that similar care had gone into the preparation of orchestral rites by Stravinsky and Boulez, preceded by the Livre pour cordes which the French composer fashioned Read more ...
David Nice
Poised vibrantly enough between the buried-alive monotony of Philip Glass and the dynamic flights of John Adams, Steve Reich’s Three Tales deserves a special place in music-theatre history ("opera" it is not). Ironically, since it deals with the two-edged sword of the 20th century’s major scientific developments, the video work with which the music interacts so brilliantly – by Reich’s former wife and long-term collaborator Beryl Korot – has been left looking a bit dated by rapid progress in that field since its 2002 premiere.Besides, after the pioneering speech-melodies of Different Trains Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Gasps of surprise were heard across the country last month, when Richard Morrison on BBC Radio 3's "Building a Library" announced Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin as his library choice for Elgar’s Second Symphony. That recommendation proved timely for the conductor and his orchestra, who yesterday completed their short London residency with the same symphony. The performance demonstrated a genuine intimacy with Elgar’s music. Enthusiasm as well, perhaps to excess, with many cherished details overpowered. An evening of passionate music-making, though, with real emotional Read more ...
David Nice
It looked like a potential misalliance between performers used to looking at the stars and a programme of earthly, ideally rather broadly humorous delights. In the event, Martha Argerich, who can turn her high, lucid playing to most ends, sought out a sharp-edged wit if not a relaxed warmth in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. The real magic came later in the first half. But in the second, Daniel Barenboim seemed to have a very strange concept indeed of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), a work which can seem oddly repellent without lashings of exuberant epic parody – there was Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You only have to look down the list of recent winners of the Handel Singing Competition – Andrew Kennedy, Elizabeth Atherton, Ruby Hughes, Sophie Junker – to see its pedigree, its knack for spotting serious talent. Yet you also only have to look down the list to realise that Handel gives sopranos an unfair advantage in a competition which gives them so much more repertoire to choose from than certain other voice types. Pity especially the tenors and baritones whose operatic choices all too rarely extend beyond walk-on roles. All of which makes this year’s winner – Spanish baritone Josep-Ramon Read more ...
graham.rickson
You’ve booked the iconic Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and their charismatic chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek to do a whistle-stop UK tour. Hoorah. But what do you get them to play? The mind boggles with programming possibilities. A symphony by Martinů? Janáček’s Taras Bulba? Suk’s Asrael? Naah – what you do, inevitably, is look at the Classic FM Hall of Fame and ask them to perform The Lark Ascending and the Bruch G minor Concerto.Not that there’s anything wrong with either piece, but I couldn’t help feeling musically short-changed by half of this concert, and wonder if the players felt the Read more ...