Classical music
edward.seckerson
Sir Simon Rattle’s Sibelian journey has been long and fruitful and has taken him all the way from Birmingham to Berlin, and more particularly the revered Philharmonic where the spaces between the notes now resonate in extraordinary ways and the bass lines are sunk deeper than with any other orchestra on the planet. Beginning their London residency with the first two of Sibelius’s symphonies (the rest to follow over the next few days) gave us a chance to feel how organically Sibelius became Sibelius and how the music effectively seemed to come up through the bass lines. The wonder of the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Andris Nelsons is flavour of the month in London. He is in town to conduct The Flying Dutchman at Covent Garden, but between performances he is moonlighting at the Festival Hall, giving two concerts with the Philharmonia. This, the first, opened with a serviceable Mozart Piano Concerto No. 25 from Paul Lewis, and concluded with a Bruckner Third Symphony that was in a different league entirely.The orchestra was reduced for the Mozart, though still large for the repertoire. Nelsons and Lewis have a curious working relationship, the conductor pushing for more expression and phrase shaping than Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic has something of a track record when it comes to finding conductors destined for great heights. After all, Sir Simon Rattle was a player in Merseyside Youth Orchestra and started his conducting career in Liverpool. The latest RLPO concert, following that great tradition, included a new face. And what an impact she made. The audience evidently loved her – a partial standing ovation, which is something of a rarity on Hope Street – and plenty of whoops and whistles (in the best possible taste) surely mean that she’ll soon be beating a return path to the Liverpool Read more ...
geoff brown
The concert season’s title may be Rachmaninoff Inside Out. But the work that dominated and got people talking in yesterday’s instalment of Vladimir Jurowski’s London Philharmonic series was by another composer entirely. “Weird, isn’t it?” said the man in the row behind. And that was only after the first movement of George Enescu’s massive Symphony No. 3, one of the most remarkable effusions by the composer and crack violinist chiefly known for his pair of Romanian Rhapsodies, popular picture postcards.Jurowski likes programming these early 20th-century epics, the sonic equivalent of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dohnányi: Variations on a Nursery Song, Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto no 1, Strauss: Burleske Valerie Tryon (piano), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Jac van Steen (Somm)This entertaining, well-filled disc collects three works which, if they were programmed more frequently, should fill concert halls. The pick of them is Dohnányi's inventive, unpretentious Variations on a Nursery Song – a piece which throws up fresh surprises with each listen. The best joke comes near the beginning, as a brooding, doom-filled opening slyly introduces the theme, Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman. Fourteen variations Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
When you’re visiting someone for the first time, it’s probably just as well that you make a good impression – or else you may not be asked back. If that’s what the Carducci String Quartet was trying to do on their début visit to Liverpool, then they did all the right things. They mesmerised the audience with their performance of the second of Beethoven’s "Razumovsky" quartets, so much so that they were forced to sit down and perform an encore, which turned out to be a little irreverent Shostakovich, in the shape of the Rondo Polka.If anything, this concert – part of the Royal Liverpool Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
If what you wanted to do was go out to the middle of the Mexican desert, invert the Cross and dip it in blood, screaming obscenities all the while, surrounded by a sunburnt band of fellow travellers all off their heads on mescalin, Tutuguri is definitely the music you’d want to do it to. Which is OK, because those are pretty much the images conjured up by Antonin Artaud’s poem-radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God, which prompted Wolfgang Rihm to make a two-hour instrumental setting of this "Rite of the Black Sun" for large orchestra, taped chorus, howling vocalist (Leigh Melrose) Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jürg Frey: pianist, alone R. Andrew Lee (piano) (Irritable Hedgehog Music)The Irritable Hedgehog label's signature release is a recording of Dennis Johnson's epic piano work November, an early minimalist work from the late 1950s. Lovingly reconstructed from a muffled C120 cassette tape by composer Kyle Gann, it's astonishing; five hours of cool, static wonder, compelling in spite of the glacial pace and lack of conventional musical narrative. November is performed by Denver-based pianist R. Andrew Lee, who's also the soloist in the label's double disc set of Swiss composer Jürg Frey's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Ernst Krenek is probably best remembered nowadays as the composer of Jonny Spielt Auf – the quintessential Zeitoper of Weimar Germany and later the archetype of all that was designated “degenerate” in art by the Nazi regime. And perhaps also as – briefly – the husband of Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav. But Krenek was far more than that. He was a magpie collector of styles and influences whose large corpus of work reflects almost every major 20th-century trend. From Romanticism to jazz, serialism, neo-Renaissance modality and even electronic works, Krenek’s history is the history of music Read more ...
geoff brown
Barbara Hannigan, we all know, is game for anything. This Canadian soprano with the pearliest tones and the dramatic instincts of a Sarah Bernhardt can find beauty and meaning in almost every contemporary composer’s barbed wire. Recently she’s been cavorting on stage as Alban Berg’s Lulu; earlier this month, for a sliver of Ligeti, she paraded herself on the Barbican platform as a gum-chewing schoolgirl in a naughty micro-skirt.There was nothing like that at Vladimir Jurowski’s London Philharmonic concert at the Festival Hall. Her dress code was conventional: a stylish but demure white dress Read more ...
graham.rickson
Henry Mancini: The Classic Soundtrack Collection (Sony)You get a good sense of any composer's strengths and limitations when you consume their music in box set-sized quantities. With the Juilliard-trained Henry Mancini, you marvel at the catchiness of the melodic material and the transparent orchestration. Sony Music's new box set collects 18 Mancini film scores, and a casual perusal will also highlight the great man's weak spots. He wasn't a master at developing his ideas, relying instead on canny use of ostinati and a clever overlaying of his catchy motifs. Which, if you're writing Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
James Dillon calls this major work, premered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival last November, a “Cubist Stabat Mater”. He sets the hymn, but adds in more recent words, texts on related themes by Picasso, Kristeva and Rilke, among others. The music, too, acknowledges the passage of historical time, with subtle references to musical styles from down the centuries. If this all sounds like a recipe for Postmodern intellectualism and detachment, the results are surprisingly direct – a heartfelt and emphatic response to the image of the grieving mother. Dillon is too much the Read more ...