Classical music
David Nice
In many ways the most well-tempered of conductors, Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013) brought a peerless orchestral transparency and beauty of line to the great German classics. Even the most overloaded Richard Strauss scores under his watchful eye and ear could sound, as the composer once said his opera Elektra should, “like fairy music by Mendelssohn”. A modest and affable old-school gent, Sawallisch prided himself on these qualities and on the longevity of his devotion to one company especially: he was music director of the Bavarian State Opera for over 21 years, from 1971 to 1992.Courtesy of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
While Liza Minnelli belted out hits from the 1972 film Cabaret next door at the Festival Hall, we in the Queen Elizabeth Hall were meant to be getting the real deal - echt 1920s Berliner Kabarett performed by Germans in German. German actors had been flown in. As had members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Awaiting us was an enticing line-up of Weill, Eisler, Hollaender, Heymann, Hindemith and Schoenberg. The raw, rambunctious Berliner night life beckoned. It was not to be.For some curious reason, the Southbank Centre thought that stuffing a programme full of dull monologues Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Cello Symphony, Cello Sonata and Cello Suites Alban Gerhardt, Steven Osborne, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Manze (Hyperion)This is a brilliant anthology, wonderfully performed and beautifully recorded. Britten’s cello music was written for Mstislav Rostropovich, whom the composer had met in 1960 at the UK premiere of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto no 1. The Sonata was completed shortly afterwards. The reading by Alban Gerhardt and Steven Osborne is refreshingly extrovert, and Britten’s tricksy piano writing has enormous impact. Gerhardt’s boldness makes the work feel Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Yesterday Kenneth Branagh was thanking Manchester – saying that he felt he had “come of age” the previous time he had performed Shakespeare in the city 25 years ago, the audience being so “generous, quick-witted and lively". He also thanked the city for having the determination and audacity, in the face of gloom and cuts, at the launch of its adventurous festival, to back to the hilt a biennial world-class arts extravaganza, which, among many notable headline acts has Branagh as lead in Macbeth (directed by Branagh and Emmy and Tony award-winning Rob Ashcroft). Tickets will be gold dust, but Read more ...
graham.rickson
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d never listened to The Dark Side of the Moon until a few weeks ago. I’ve heard loads of other esoteric vintage pop, most of it terminally unfashionable and deeply obscure. Growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, I was vaguely aware that Pink Floyd had hit an uncool patch and the album passed me by. I’ve now made up for lost time. Through vintage speakers and scratchy second hand vinyl. Via weedy iPod headphones. In the car, en route to Sainsburys.Classical music critics haven’t had an illustrious track record when writing about pop. Back in the Sixties Read more ...
David Nice
You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the OAE’s publicity didn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, by advertising this concert with Alfred’s tag at its head, the intention was surely to highlight the shock of the new in all three works played and/or conducted by András Schiff.As it happened, Schiff made it all sound unshockingly natural on one level within the charmed circle of equally Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hans Gál & Hans Krása: Complete String Trios Ensemble Epomeo (Avie)Avie have already successfully exhumed the four symphonies by the Austrian émigré Hans Gál, who pitched up in Edinburgh in the 1940s and enjoyed a long academic career. His early Serenade in D for string trio epitomises his early style – breezy, neoclassical and full of busy counterpoint which never sounds too studied or pedantic. This is supremely approachable, engaging music, and sweetly played here – every chromatic kink handled with deft skill. Best is the closing Alla Marcia, dazzling in terms of its technical Read more ...
David Nice
Orchestral volcanoes were erupting all over Europe around the year 1915. It was courageous enough to make a mountain chain out of three of them in a single concert. I was less prepared for the white-heat focus applied by that stalwart Dane Thomas Dausgaard, and completely flummoxed when he and Jian Wang, a cellist with the biggest yet most streamlined sound I’ve ever heard, made total sense of the only overblown monster on the programme, Bloch’s "Hebraic Rhapsody" Schelomo.Andrew Huth’s programme note made special claim for its “gorgeous orchestral colours”. But it’s bound to sound as thick Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise Festival has reached the American leg of its year-long tour through 20th century music, and with it safe musical ground. In the second of three concerts with the LPO, American conductor Marin Alsop showcased the two equally appealing sides of America’s musical history: its cleanly-scrubbed, western classical face in Copland and Ives, and the grubbier, jazz-infused gestures of Joplin and Gershwin.Alsop (pictured below) is the real deal - a no-nonsense musician with a flair for texture and a real affinity for this generous, rhythmic repertoire. Her Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Death comes in many guises but in this ingeniously devised Philharmonia concert he most definitely did not have the last laugh. That was for Shostakovich and a curiously ticking time bomb of percussion which first surfaced in his Fourth Symphony when Stalin branded him a renegade but which later became a kind of defiant titter trailing to eternity in his fifteenth and last symphony. That piece, oblique and puzzling but extraordinarily lucid too, might be regarded as the apotheosis of his most powerful weapon in life and death: irony. It begins in the nursery like a second childhood Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Maxim Vengerov’s four-year absence from the London stage is recent enough that any performance by him has the added value of having been clawed back from a jealous god. That a violinist of such explosive talent could have been permanently silenced by something as mundane as an injury sustained in the gym is barely thinkable, though the possibility seemed very real in the hinter years between 2008 and 2012.But back he is, and entirely on form too. That said – look away now if you deplore journalistic cliché – this was very much a concert of two halves: a solid but buttoned-up take on two early Read more ...
David Nice
You don’t have to live under a totalitarian regime to write music of profound anguish. I was driven to argue the point at a Shostakovich symposium when an audience quizzer took issue with my assertion that Britten could go just as deep as the Russian. Much as the works of the two composers in this programme, Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto and Britten’s Spring Symphony, revealed their lighter sides to varying degrees, it was our anniversary composer who scored highest with his darker undercurrents. Conductor Edward Gardner’s further touch of class was to avoid giving one of what will Read more ...