Classical music
David Nice
Under its master music director, the once-torpid Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has given us some of the most brilliant concerts of the 2023-4 season. Their Prom together changed course from the Elgar/Rachmaninov theme and dared even more, placing together four works in three parts each – two with atmospheric outer sections flanking vivid ceremonials (Ives, Debussy), two placing the lyricism at the dead centre (Ravel, Tchaikovsky).To label it a vintage Prom in form, a new work would have been necessary. But Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England still sounds like one, and its big symphonic Read more ...
David Nice
It seems like only yesterday – the date in fact was 22 December 2016 – that 17-year-old Sheku Kanneh-Mason, fresh from his win as BBC Young Musician of the Year, played the Haydn C major Cello Concerto in a Pimlico church with a group of young players known collectively as the Fantasia Orchestra and conducted by Tom Fetherstonhaugh (Sibelius’s Second Symphony followed).In the orchestra was the cellist's 18-year-old violinist brother Braimah. The constitution of the players wasn’t something I knew at the time. Braimah (pictured below by Ron Milsom in a Fantasia concert at the Guiting Festival Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Cherish the moments. They go ever so quickly.” Sheila Hancock, beloved actor, writer – and award-winning singer, notably of Stephen Sondheim in Sweeney Todd – gave us that carpe diem nudge in the course of an afternoon discussion of her favourite music. Beside her, a bunch of playing partners (the Carducci Quartet, pianist Christopher Glynn, soprano Caroline Blair) performed extracts from her choices. Such events can often err on the side of cosy blandness. But here amid the early-Georgian splendour of Duncombe Park outside Helmsley in North Yorkshire, Dame Sheila – utterly undimmed at Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What is Englishness? Over the last century the answer has changed substantially. Yet last night’s Prom, which – according to the programme – set itself the task of celebrating “all things English” had a very particular answer.This was an England of Eric Ravilious paintings, Earl Grey tea, the vibrant greens of a hedgerow, the gentle plop of croquet mallets against croquet balls. The compositions spanned more than a century, and their reference points more than half a millennium, yet they all had an elegance and subtlety that evoked a very homegrown pastoral tradition.From the outset, Read more ...
David Nice
Returning after ten months to the unique vasts of Albert’s colosseum, especially for a Verdi Requiem as powerful as this and a packed hall, felt like a rebirth. There was immediate purging in the focused whispers of the first “Requiem aeternam”s, BBC National Orchestra of Wales Principal Conductor Ryan Bancroft instilling a confidence you knew would last the evening, and instant thrills in the clarion “Kyrie”s of all four world-class soloists.Were there imperfections? Fleetingly. Bass Soloman Howard sometimes ran ahead of the orchestra in “Confutatis maledictis” – Bancroft seems like a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This looked like a classic Prom in the grand old BBC tradition: two big but lesser-known pieces by pivotal figures (Schoenberg and Zemlinsky) played by a major non-metropolitan ensemble, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. And so it proved, with powerful, refined and meatily satisfying versions of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s The Mermaid conducted by the NOW’s chief, Ryan Bancroft.Here, surely, where entertainment meets enlightenment, the Proms heartland used to lie. But, on a perfect July evening, the house was much sparser than it should have been Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The first night of the BBC’s 2024 Proms season was illuminated by the blazing brilliance of Isata Kanneh-Mason’s performance of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto and the world premiere of Ben Nobuto’s witty video-game-inspired Hallelujah Sim. Hong Kong born conductor Elim Chan presided over a vibrant, joyful evening in which apparent crowd-pleasers like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were balanced by pieces that ranged from the sublime to the mischievously meticulous.The BBC Symphony Orchestra kicked off with Handel’s 1749 Music for the Royal Fireworks as an amuse bouche, which was rearranged in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Diabelli Variations, Debussy: Préludes George Lepauw (piano) (Orchid Classics)Beethoven and Debussy don’t often share column space, but listening to these albums in succession proved to be an enjoyable experience. George Lepauw’s 2017 set of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier has long been one of my favourites, so I was keen to hear how he tackled Beethoven’s vast, multi-faceted Diabelli Variations. These aren’t variations in the Goldbergian sense: Beethoven’s German title for the work translates more accurately as ‘transformations’, and we frequently lose sight of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
So maybe there’s a bigger quota of popular Proms, leading Stephen Walsh to lambast what he sees as "junk" to avoid. It surely doesn’t matter. Among the 89 concerts, some of them beyond the Royal Albert Hall, the mix of old and new, middle-of-the-road and deeply serious, is as strong as ever. There’s no dumbing-down.A recent online article for a paper which should know better posits well-known classics as “lowbrow”. When it comes to Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini or Holst’s The Planets, there’s no such thing: these masterpieces are popular for a reason. Many Prommers will be Read more ...
David Nice
"The world meets in Pärnu", slogan for the 14th festival in Estonia's summer seaside capital, has held good ever since Paavo Järvi gathered native musicians and key players from the international teams he inspires to form what's now the Estonian Festival Orchestra. Buzz about the youngsters formerly serving just the conductors’ course is new; 2024's Järvi Academy Youth Symphony Orchestra embraces 30 countries.So it was that the youngest member, 11-year-old Armenian cellist Aren Toplaghaltsian, got to play his first Beethoven symphony under 87-year old Neeme Järvi, a living legend (young Aren Read more ...
graham.rickson
Fauré: Complete Music for Solo Piano Lucas Debargue (Sony)In lots of ways I was ready to like this boxset of the complete Fauré music for solo piano, having long seen it as an extraordinary strand of the piano’s literature. But also perhaps I am also more likely to be critical, as “I know what I like” – such as Marc-André Hamelin’s brilliant Hyperion disc from 2023. Lucas Debargue’s detailed sleeve note also carries an air of ambivalence. He had rejected Fauré from his repertoire early on, finding the music “sleek, mechanical and occasionally opaque.” But during lockdown he reassessed, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
NMC Recordings has spent 35 years promoting contemporary music by British composers, and this commitment to both emerging and established voices was represented at this birthday concert in London last night, part of the Spitalfields Festival. From their emergence in 1989 in a different musical and technological world (“NMC” standing for “New Music Cassettes”) my early days of CD buying were guided by NMC’s developing catalogue and they are still a go-to for finding interesting new things. The audience at the Dutch Church in the City of London was garlanded with composer royalty of all Read more ...