Classical music
Christopher Lambton
Is there an ideal way to programme Metamorphosen? Richard Strauss’s elegiac masterpiece requires 23 solo strings. That’s more than most chamber orchestras can muster, but with a full size symphony orchestra the piece leaves most of the players with nothing to do. In this Usher Hall concert the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose to let Metamorphosen stand in glorious isolation before the interval. Those players that could opted to stand – not an option for the lower strings – in a tight semicircle round principal guest conductor Thomas Søndergård, with the rest of the orchestra’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Partitas 1-6 Igor Levit (piano) (Sony)Martin Geck's sleeve essay accompanying this pair of discs is a good read, hinting at the subtleties and complexities lying just below the surface of what may, superficially, look like six simple suites of dance movements. Bach's title page for the first Partita describes it as music "for keyboard practice... composed for music lovers, to refresh their spirits". Geck quotes from a letter about Bach written by Schumann in 1840: “I confess my sins to this lofty figure every day, while seeking to purify and strengthen myself through him... I'm Read more ...
David Nice
Musical theatre needn’t be dominated by the human voice. Instrumental dramas with an element of acting can be a good way into the wonderful world of chamber music for younger audiences, and the Wigmore Hall’s new gambit of special student tickets for contemporary music paid off with the very different crowd there last night. It was rewarded with playing of the highest imaginative order from soloists in their own right: violinists Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Pekka Kuusisto, viola-player Lilli Maijala and cellist Pieter Wispelway. Yet though they got the musical dramas of early Beethoven and a Read more ...
David Nice
When I entered the light and spacious chief conductor’s room in Bamberg’s Konzerthalle, Jonathan Nott was poised with a coloured pencil over one of the toughest of 20th century scores, Varèse’s Arcana. He thought he might have bitten off rather a lot to chew the day after that night’s Bamberg programme of Jörg Widmann’s Violin Concerto, Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie and a new commission as part of the orchestra’s new Encore! project, David Philip Hefti’s con moto.An Amsterdam Concertgebouw special beckoned, a large-scale throwback to Nott’s days at the head of the Asko Ensemble and the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony no 9 Danish National Symphony Orchestra/Michael Schønwandt (Challenge Classics)The halting, juddering opening of Mahler 9 is nicely characterised in this live reading. Low harp notes ring out like bells, the stuttering rhythm on cellos and horn sharply pointed. Michael Schønwandt conducted this performance at short notice owing to a colleague's illness, and there's an unusual flexibility and spontaneity on display. The build up to the first climax, three minutes in, is well handled. Schønwandt lets us hear all – the orchestral playing fiery and radiant, the tempi Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Pianist Mitsuko Uchida's concentration, calm and grace under pressure are an inspiration. Towards the end of the first piece on her programme, played to a packed Royal Festival Hall last night, the quiet but insistent high-pitched screech of a fire alarm kept going off. Low voices on walkie-talkies at the entrances to the hall were also audible. Whatever the confusion they were sharing with each other, they were failing to lift it. While the noises persisted, Uchida continued the delicate hand-crossing dialogues of Schubert's F Minor Impromptu from the D935 set. She would quizzically hover a Read more ...
David Nice
What Anne-Sophie Mutter is to the violin, Alison Balsom to the trumpet and Sabine Meyer to the clarinet, so is Sioned Williams to the harp. Though Meyer had the glass-ceiling distinction of being the first woman in the Berlin Philharmonic, Williams’s service to the BBC Symphony Orchestra has been longer (nearly 25 years so far as principal harp). And while all four artists have had major new works composed for them, the harpist’s commission of six pieces to celebrate her 60th birthday would seem to be a record. And who else would have part-remortgaged her home to pay for the enrichment, an Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
When Alan Gilbert’s Nielsen Project with the New York Phil and Danish label Dacapo is completed next year, it will total four CDs including the six symphonies, three concertos (flute, violin, clarinet) and two bonus overtures. The latest instalment (Symphonies 1 and 4) has just been released, while earlier this month the orchestra performed the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and Maskarade Overture in three concerts which were recorded for release in January 2015. On the morning after the first of those concerts, Alan Gilbert talked about his love for Nielsen, why he’s jumping at the opportunity Read more ...
David Nice
Should you not have caught one of the 20th century’s handful of greatest Wagnerian singers live - I did, just once, in a Prom of uneven excerpts - chances are that you first heard Birgit Nilsson in Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung on Sir Georg Solti’s Vienna Philharmonic Ring recording. The distinguished President of the Birgit Nilsson Prize who lives in the orchestra's wonderful city, physicist, economist and Nilsson’s biggest if always most respectful fan Professor Doktor Rutbert Reisch, insists that the connection was never a criterion behind the bi- or triennial prize of Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Staying close to his Scandinavian roots, John Storgårds, principal guest conductor of the BBC Phil and chief conductor of the Helsinki Phil, is gearing up for the celebration of Carl Nielsen’s 150th birthday next year. Being the seventh child of 12, Nielsen battled his way from poor beginnings to musical eminence, serving his time on the way as a military bandsman and, for 16 years, as a violinist in the Royal Danish Orchestra. He, too, always stayed close to his roots, even writing Danish popular songs to the end.Storgårds will be conducting all six Nielsen symphonies, written between the Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Adams: City Noir, Saxophone Concerto St. Louis Symphony/David Robertson, with Timothy McAllister (saxophone) (Nonesuch)There's a lot going on in John Adams's City Noir. Ideas come thick and fast, and for every few that are skilfully developed, another gets cast aside. The composer's description of this three movement symphony as “the soundtrack to an imagined noir film” fits nicely – though it's busier and more elaborately scored than most soundtracks. Best to think of noir in terms of subject matter rather than colour. Much of City Noir gleams and dazzles. We get blinding sunlight Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
“Mahler, with a chamber orchestra?” In his introduction to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s winter season brochure, principal conductor Robin Ticciati anticipates the reaction of an audience brought up to believe that a chamber orchestra leaves its comfort zone somewhere in the early 19th Century. But the truth is that in the 40-odd years of its existence this innovative orchestra has persistently pushed at the boundaries of its core classical repertoire, where justified historically or musically – in the case of Brahms symphonies, for example, it is now widely acknowledged that early Read more ...