Classical music
David Nice
First, the good news: you can see Wagner’s entire Ring at the Royal Albert Hall, with absolutely the world’s finest Wagner singers and conductor in concert, for a grand total of £20. The bad news is that unless you have a season ticket – in which case it works out even cheaper – you’ll probably have to queue for most of the day to guarantee a place in the Arena or Gallery, and then you’ll still need the energy to stand for up to five hours an evening.None of that will deter devoted Prommers, whose numbers swell and grow younger every season. Little wonder, with the price of £5 a ticket held Read more ...
theartsdesk
Still the tributes come thick and fast, celebrating the greatest performances of the public figure who is remembered with the most universal affection and admiration this week (and on this day). We asked some of the top musicians to focus on an event, a meeting or a recording which made a special impact on them. Ian Bostridge, Imogen Cooper, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Daniel Harding, Stephen Hough, Steven Isserlis, Dame Gwyneth Jones, Vladimir Jurowski and the Royal Opera’s David Syrus give warm and wonderful insights on what made Sir Colin not just a supreme conductor but also a rich and Read more ...
Humphrey Burton
Colin was an enormous influence in my youth and I’d like to share some memories of those days. It was over 60 years ago, on a Sunday afternoon in May 1952, that I attended a concert performance of The Marriage of Figaro given by Chelsea Opera Group in a school hall in Hills Road, Cambridge. The singers were all young, gifted and sparky. The orchestra purred. The narration (written by David Cairns) was genuinely funny, indeed it seemed bliss to be alive that afternoon and to be young (I was 21) seventh heaven. On the podium was Colin Davis, a slim, shock-headed dynamo who lived and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In its ebbs, flows and final grand flourishing, the career of Sir Colin Davis was reminiscent of some of the great musical masterpieces with which he became closely identified. From Mozart to Tippett, Berlioz to Beethoven and Sibelius, Davis proved himself one of the major international conductors of the post-war era. If in his earlier years he acquired a reputation for being fractious and confrontational with his musicians, the Davis of the last three decades was wise and unruffled, finding in music an almost transcendental refuge. "It amounts to an alternative reality," he told Tom Service Read more ...
graham.rickson
Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 1-4, Paganini Rhapsody Valentina Lisitsa, London Symphony Orchestra/Michael Francis (Decca)Read the press notes before listening to this double CD and you’d be forgiven for feeling some trepidation; Valentina Lisitsa is a Ukrainian pianist who was catapulted to megastardom via the medium of, er, YouTube. Then you find out that time constraints prevented Lisitsa from meeting conductor Michael Francis before the sessions. He had to make do with emailled video clips. So it’s a delight to report that much, though not all, of the music making captured here is Read more ...
David Nice
"You know that I am as sincere in my faith, without any messianic screamings, as I am in my Parisian sexuality," declared Francis Poulenc, who died 50 years ago this January at one with his God and his cheerful, not exclusively but mainly gay, promiscuity. Alas, the Revd Richard Coles and Anne Atkins, nearly scuppering all the joy of the CLS's mini-festival finale in a “discussion” before the concert proper had even begun, didn't seem to know at all .Having proposed some sort of imaginary tussle between God and sex for the soul of our lovable Frenchman, the two went off at a waffly, self- Read more ...
David Nice
We had, as presenter James Naughtie so wryly remarked, set aside our mourning weeds for the low-key glamour of celebrating a far from moribund classical recording industry. Movers, shakers and humble BBC Music Magazine contributors all shifted from the airy dining space at the ever-accommodating Kings Place yesterday - I won't forget the mint marshmallow - and descended to woody Hall One for the magazine's 2013 awards.Editor Oliver Condy had a hard act to precede in the shape of quick-quipping Naughtie, but he made us laugh with news of an anniversary less vaunted than Wagner’s, Verdi’s or Read more ...
edward.seckerson
When Schoenberg made his steroidal orchestration of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet he saw and heard what many don’t - that Brahms was more of a radical than the music world was ready to acknowledge, that he was not the conservative in the shadow of Wagner that commentators at the time felt the need to brand him. And yet at the heart of that orchestration, at the root of its motivation, was Schoenberg’s deep-felt reverence for the past, and who better to reveal that than an orchestra - the Vienna Philharmonic - so steeped in tradition that voices of approval from the likes of Brahms, and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If ever there was such a thing as a safe pair of pianistic hands then they would belong to Norway’s Leif Ove Andsnes. There’s a cool, patrician control to everything he does that speaks to thorough preparation, careful interpretative choices and immaculate technique. Thrill-seekers and risk-takers may want to look elsewhere, but for everyone else Andsnes offers the chance to hear cleanly through to the skeleton of a work. No histrionics or affectations muddy the silhouettes on show, and if occasionally one longs for a moment of abandon then it’s a desire easily satisfied by 10 minutes in the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“A book,” says the Boy-Illuminator in George Benjamin’s latest opera Written on Skin, “needs long days of light.” He speaks for Benjamin himself, a composer who, for all his fabulous musical mind and ear, has never found composition easy and has often struggled to produce work of any kind that satisfies his own meticulous standards.His one previous opera, Into the Little Hill, might be thought to exemplify this struggle, with its astonishing refinement of detail and almost studious denial of the facile or melodramatic. Written on skin it could well have been. It was intriguing to renew its Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The evolution of the solo percussionist has advanced dramatically over the last couple of decades and among the superstars of the hardware that can be struck and pounded or caressed and stroked is the flying Scotsman Colin Currie, whose profile has steadily grown since becoming the first percussionist ever to reach the finals of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 1994.In 2005 he received a coveted Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award enabling him to both to extend his commissioning activities and to raise awareness of the percussive revolution in which he plays such a major role. Currie talks here Read more ...
graham.rickson
Goossens: Orchestral works vol.2 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos)British conductor and composer Sir Eugene Goossens achieved major fame leading the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s. Previously he'd given the first British concert performance of Stravinky’s Rite in 1921 and had moved to the US shortly afterwards to take up a sequence of conducting posts. His Sydney tenure ended abruptly in bizarre circumstances, and he returned, disappointed to London, dying in 1962. Goossens’s expertise as an interpreter of contemporary music undoubtedly influenced his own Read more ...