Classical music
theartsdesk
Southbank Centre’s current season has included weekends devoted to three contemporary giants: Pierre Boulez, Conlon Nancarrow and George Benjamin. But it closes with a festival devoted to not to one contemporary composer but 20. The New Music 20x12 weekend, initiated by the PRS for Music Foundation, is a Olympic celebration of the range and diversity of new British composition. Indeed, the only thing all 20 pieces will have in common is that – you’ve guessed it - they will last 12 minutes.Performances will take place all over the Southbank Centre, and 14 of them will be freeSome of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Oh boy. More Schubert. Deep breath. I had flashbacks of last month's wall-to-wall Franzi on BBC Radio Three. Nothing's come closer to ending my lifelong love affair with the tubby Austrian than the endless stream of half-finished three-part drinking songs that seemed to become the mainstay of that week-long celebration. Thankfully, last night at the Royal Festival Hall, we weren't getting any old Schubert. We were getting the great final trio of piano sonatas. And it wasn't just any old pianist performing them. It was Mitsuko Uchida. Who better to rekindle my feelings for the composer than Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Adams: Harmonielehre, Short Ride in a Fast Machine San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)John Adams’s expansive, hyperactive three-movement work emerges more powerfully than ever before in this live recording from San Francisco. The bass lines in this Harmonielehre have staggering presence – listen too loudly through headphones and your brain begins to liquify. Those low notes are all-important, occasionally giving us a fleeting sense of harmonic stability in music which really soars. Adams’s control of tempo is remarkable; at times it’s virtually impossible to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The 2012 BBC Proms open on 13 July and end on 8 September. This is the full list of the 76 concerts. Book tickets here. Prom 1: First Night of the PromsFri 13 July 2012, 7.30pm, Royal Albert HallMark-Anthony Turnage - Canon Fever (3 mins)Elgar - Overture 'Cockaigne (In London Town)' (15 mins)Delius - Sea Drift (25 mins)Tippett - Suite for the Birthday of Prince Charles (16 mins)Elgar - Coronation Ode (33 mins)Prom 2: Lerner & Loewe – My Fair LadySat 14 July 2012, 7.00pm, Royal Albert HallLoewe - My Fair Lady (170 mins)Prom 3: Debussy – Pelléas et MélisandeSun 15 July 2012, 7.00pm, Read more ...
geoff brown
A mischievous part of me firmly believes that from the mountain of dubious art works produced in the world since the 1980s, the most dubious of all have been the percussion concertos. I know I’m being somewhat harsh, for I’ve thrilled along with most audiences to James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni, Emmanuel – far and away the best piece ever premiered by Evelyn Glennie, instigator of this percussion avalanche. But these ears have also been witness to enough trivial and meretricious concoctions to feel at least some trepidation before the launch of another percussion world premiere.Having Colin Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Donatella Flick, one of Britain's most important arts patrons, is furious. "Madness!" she cries in her lush Italian voice. "This is a country that was fantastic, and now there's a demolition going on, bit by bit!" We're sitting in Sir Winston Churchill's old drawing room - now her drawing room - near Kensington Gardens, and I would give a lot to see David Cameron flinching on her huge black sofa as he got a withering dressing-down. Yesterday Cameron's government agreed to delay for further consideration their big new wheeze for getting the rich to pay more tax by cutting the advantages of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Lightness. Tenderness. Grace. These are not words you normally associate with Barenboim's pianism - not these days. But they were exactly the thoughts running through my head while listening to his performance of Mozart's C minor piano concerto last night at the Royal Festival Hall. Subtly marshalling his Staatskapelle Berlin from the keyboard, Barenboim was a wholly transformed figure from the ingratiating, lollipop-distributing showman I'd seen at the Tate Modern last year. It wasn't immediately certain that we weren't going to get Barenboim the splashy ringmaster again. The first Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I don't have many feelings about the Titanic (any more than I do about any tragedies of the distant past). I know few of the facts, I can remember nothing of the film and I have been left almost completely untouched by the centenary. Yet I am enormously grateful to have caught a Barbican performance of The Sinking of the Titanic, Gavin Bryars' beautiful musical meditation on the event. The reason why this hour-long rumination works so well is that it does not rely on the emotional power of the catastrophe to generate its own emotional power. The debris of sounds that Read more ...
geoff brown
Looking at John Wilson conduct, it’s possible to think that you’re watching an incarnation of that Proms favourite of decades past, Sir Malcolm Sargent. The immaculate tailcoat, shining white cuffs, the florid gestures with a baton as long as a magic wand: the only missing visual ingredient is Sargent’s self-regarding air. On Sunday afternoon at the Festival Hall, Wilson, Britain’s golden maestro of light music, garnished the impression by venturing into some of Sargent’s own territory with The Yeomen of the Guard: the only quasi-serious piece among Gilbert and Sullivan’s corpus, and the only Read more ...