Classical music
Kimon Daltas
In the year of his 85th birthday, and his 60th season as a conductor, Bernard Haitink is hardly taking it easy, with concerts with various orchestras around Europe and the US including an appearance at the Proms. In this visit to London with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe he may not have been bounding up the steps to the stage, but his powers with the baton remain undimmed.His is a stately and commanding presence at the podium, almost still apart from the arms and the occasional emphatic step forwards. This proved plenty with which to wring out the tragic drama from the two works in the Read more ...
David Nice
A voluptuous dream in sequined silver, the nearly-27-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili sat down at the keyboard and instantly transcendentalised her mermaid look as Ravel’s Ondine. Even Brahms took to the life aquatic of her recital’s first half. For the second, though, there should have been a costume change into a clown suit with a tatty tutu pulled over it. Never have I witnessed a crazier trip through the distorting mirror – and if even Stravinsky’s mad puppet Petrushka couldn’t take the relentless onslaught, what about the poor old Chopin Second Scherzo and the Ravel La Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
"Finally,” said Sir Simon Rattle, “I get a chance to say thank you. We have had forty years working together without an argument." The Royal Philharmonic Society was awarding an Honorary Membership to Martin Campbell-White, Rattle's agent. Campbell-White, who has been a guiding influence on the conductor's career since the 1970's made a rare appearance on stage, as he became the first artist manager ever to win this award in the RPS's 201-year history. There was a sense of occasion about this concert, which was also Rattle's first appearance with the LSO since the Olympics opening Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: String Quintets and Sextets Alexander String Quartet, with Toby Appel (viola) and David Requiro (cello) (Foghorn Classics)Brahms's music is usually at its best, its most bucolic, when it's moseying along in a major key at a stately tempo. Each of these four large-scale chamber works has an opening movement marked Allegro ma non troppo, so you know that you're in safe hands musically. The two string sextets are early works, but they're technically assured and full of confidence. The Alexander Quartet never disappoint on disc, and they're spectacularly good here. Listening to them Read more ...
Mark Valencia
The rapid rise of Dutch baritone Henk Neven is easy to explain. He is blessed with instant charm and the voice, still attractively youthful in his late 30s, emerges full-toned from his slight frame with a faint, fast vibrato that lends it a distinctive tang. The Neven sound is sturdy rather than flexible, which may help explain why the first half of his Wigmore Hall recital was more satisfying than the second.We began in Spain, or at least in some foreign notions of that country. Two groups of Cervantes-inspired songs by French composers framed an absorbing septet of Canzone Scordate (“ Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was smart programming. The final night of London's Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music presented the forces of the Göttingen Ha(e)ndel Festival. Both festivals - the London one ended last night, the Göttingen one starts next week - have taken as their theme this year the tercentenary of the Hanoverian accession, and there is no town which wears its associations with the Hanoverian/British monarchs with quite so much pride as Göttingen; it owes its main souce of an identity, the existence of its university, to Georg-August, the King we know in Britain as George II (statue of William IV Read more ...
Mark Valencia
It’s safe to assume that mischievous Monsieur Poulenc would have been delighted by the juxtaposition of his joyous slice of Surrealism with Fauré’s serene masterpiece the Requiem. What his elder compatriot might have had to say is harder to imagine. Since Les Mamelles de Tirésias was conceived for the opera house and the Requiem for a place of worship they don’t even belong in the same building – and neither of them by rights in a concert hall – so to call them an odd match would be an understatement. The only obvious link between them is thematic rather than musical: the former Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten, Weinberg: Violin Concertos Linus Roth, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Mihkel Kütson (Challenge Classics)“I am a pupil of Shostakovich. Although I have never had lessons from him, I count myself as his pupil, as his flesh and blood.” Mieczysław Weinberg's close, complex relationship with his senior mentor continues to affect how we perceive his own music. Which is maddeningly inconsistent, and the jury's still out as to whether he's one of the great Soviet composers. But, when Weinberg is on form he can be terrific, and this 1959 Violin Concerto is a magnificent beast. It Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
No quibble about the result. Pianist Martin James Bartlett deservedly became BBC Young Musician of the Year 2014 at Usher Hall in Edinburgh last night. The 17-year-old, a student at the specialist Purcell School in Hertfordshire, and at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music took the title with a very strong performance of Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He was watchful, alert to every nuance, playing idiomatically, and with a very convincing sense of the shape of the piece right through to the final pay-off. He also established a lively partnership with the Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Antonio Pappano addressed the audience before the start of the concert to explain the thinking behind this rather unusual programme, first performed in the early nineties and now a perfect fit for the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia orchestra and chorus, where he has been music director since 2005.Having spent a period of time "exploring works themed around conflict", he had wanted to take on Luigi Dallapiccola’s one-act opera Il prigioniero ("The Prisoner") but needed companion pieces to make a concert’s worth. In figuring out how to create a programme that would function Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Part of the Birtwistle at 80 series at the Barbican, this not-quite-semi-staged Gawain ended up being held back a little by its shoestring production, where a straight concert performance might have transcended its limitations.The music, however, in all its dark, unremitting intensity, was extremely well served by an extended BBCSO, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and outstanding solists, including John Tomlinson returning magnificently to the role he first created over 20 years ago. Leigh Melrose (Gawain), Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts (King Arthur), Laura Aikin (Morgan Le Fay), and Jennifer Johnston Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tigran Mansurian: Quasi parlando Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Anja Lechner (cello), Amsterdam Sinfonietta/Candida Thompson (ECM)Wolfgang Sandner's sleeve notes rightly mention the “extreme frugality of expressive resources” in the music of the Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian. This sounds like a put down, but the clarity, the lack of superficiality only adds to the power of the works collected here. Mansurian's Concerto no 2 “Four Serious Songs” dates from 2006, and its Brahms-referencing title hints at the work's gravity. There's real beauty here. Patricia Kopatchinskaja's Read more ...