Classical music
Heidi Goldsmith
If the 15-word limit of a succinct listings blurb ever taught you a lesson let it be immediate suspicion of any performer or musician termed "jazzy". This wariness could extend to anything generically suffixed by "y" or "ish", simply because it suggests either pretence or a lack of original or strong identity. And yet if asked what a "jazzy" performance might be a few concrete elements come to mind; well-tuned glissandi, scored solos, precisely-timed appoggiaturas and that old crooner's classic "swing feel".From conductor Nicholas Collon's swift and jovial entrance onto the stage at LSO St Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was a rare outing by the World Orchestra for Peace, which has performed fewer than 20 concerts since the death of its founder Sir Georg Solti in 1997. UNESCO had designated this BBC Prom as "The 2014 Concert for Peace", the definite article implying a uniqueness which - according to rumour - is because concerts planned for Munich and Aix failed to get beyond the planning stage. It drew a respectable house to the Royal Albert Hall, which looked about three-quarters full.This has been a week in which world peace has seemed like a very distant ideal indeed, in which the news has been Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
No man is a prophet in his own land – except possibly the Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski. In the UK he shot to fame upon winning the London International Piano Competition in 2001 and at home he has become a national hero, his efforts rebooting the country’s classical music scene and inspiring the building of a new full-scale concert hall in Skopje – even though he is still a mere 35. He is also celebrated there as a popular songwriter. That, though, is a strand he left outside the Wigmore Hall, offering a programme that contained as much dark introspection as it did extroversion.Putting Read more ...
David Nice
Schubert played and sung through a long summer day by the water: what could be more enchanting? The prospect did not take into account the pain in that all too short-lived genius’s late work: when interpreted by a world-class trio, quartet and pianists at the 10th East Neuk Festival, it could be exhausting. So the hours in between were much needed balm on an afternoon and evening in the picture-postcard fishing village of Crail in the East Neuk (cf "nook") of Fife below St Andrews.Grey skies lifted by early afternoon, leaving the sun to bring out the honey colour of much of the local stone Read more ...
David Nice
“And suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.” To fill the Albert Hall – where a sizeable number of participants are standing, of course, in the best place – as handsomely as this, and as clearly, takes some work. Sir Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra know how to manipulate the space to best effect, and Elgar’s oratorios, of which The Kingdom is the third and last, are among the few works which mostly benefit from the warm halo it places around the sound.I only wish this one had been The Kingdom’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hartmann – Symphonies 1-8 Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, cond Markus Stenz, James Gaffigan, Michael Schønwandt, Christoph Poppen, Osmo Vänska, Ingo Metzmacher (Challenge Classics)The symphonies of Karl Amadeus Hartmann rarely get a hearing in the UK. He's rated by some as the greatest German symphonist of the 20th century, a figure who Hans Werner Henze summarised as a composer for whom “symphonic architecture was essential... as a suitable medium for reflecting the world as he experienced and understood it – as an agonizingly dramatic Read more ...
David Nice
I met one of the 20th century’s most impressive, if not always sympathetic, conductors twice, on both occasions to talk Puccini before La Scala recordings of La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) and Manon Lescaut.Maazel was then still in his grand mastery, and very excited about what he saw as a phenomenal score for the California-set opera. That lit him up. Puccini’s take on Abbé Prévost’s novel, it seems, did not, or maybe he was just in a bad mood. Certainly he wouldn’t be drawn – it was a simple work from the orchestral point of view, he declared, and that was more or less Read more ...
graham.rickson
Per Nørgård: Symphonies 1 and 8 Vienna Philharmonic/Sakari Oramo (Dacapo)Per Nørgård's Symphony No. 1 was completed in 1955. A few years earlier, the composer had written a fan letter to the elderly Sibelius – who was flattered to encounter a fellow musician with such a thorough understanding of his own style. There are plenty of nods to the elder composer in this astonishing symphony, including a brief snatch of Tapiola near the opening. Most Sibelian is Nørgård's temporal control; different layers of music seemingly operating at different speeds, often linked by repetitive string Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Temple Music's enterprising song series, directed by pianist Julius Drake, brought a welcome rarity to Middle Temple Hall last night. Schumann's Myrthen, the garland of twenty-six songs dedicated to his intended bride Clara Wieck, are seldom heard in a complete performance. Even with an interval in the middle, they serve as a reminder of the power and sheer emotional range of Schumann's music. These songs were almost certainly the catalyst which set in motion the composer's miraculous 'Liederjahr' of 1840, in which he wrote virtually 140 solo songs and duets with piano.At the heart of Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The latest in a series of "Pinnock’s Passions" concerts at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse saw the doyen of period instrument performance lead a delightful exploration of Handel the musical borrower, entitled "Handel’s Garden". As Trevor Pinnock writes in the programme notes, "throughout his life as a composer he had the habit of taking cuttings, transplanting and grafting from works old and new".In parts this involved playing the original pieces, for instance arias by Reinhard Keiser and Agostino Steffani, followed by Handel’s magpie reworking of them (in Semele and Theodora). Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ned Rorem: Piano Album 1, Six Friends Carolyn Enger (piano) (Naxos)The prolific Ned Rorem will be 91 this autumn. He's still an active composer, and the 33 short piano pieces collected on this engaging, low-key CD are all tributes to friendship. Few of these works exceed two minutes, and there's not a dud among them. Many contain material that was developed into larger-scale pieces, though they feel more like elegant line drawings than crude sketches. Rorem's sophisticated, unashamedly tonal style never palls, and the lack of superficial flashiness is a virtue. This music isn't Read more ...
David Nice
José Mourinho is Setúbal’s most famous son. Non-Portuguese readers are not expected to know the two other celebrities most feted by this extraordinary port city on the estuary of the River Sado, with miles of sandy beaches opposite where a school of dolphins resides and the lush national park of the Arrábida mountain range just to the west. Luísa Todi, the Portuguese mezzo who graced the court of Catherine the Great, gives her name to the lovely garden avenue which is the city’s most relaxed hub; poet Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage’s statue looks over the central square in his honour (“hardly Read more ...