Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
Despite the best attempts of Stephen Johnson’s programme notes to create synthesis from last night’s London Philharmonic Orchestra concert, there was something rather smash and grab about the programming. It was as though Jurowski, suddenly inspired to play classical Supermarket Sweep, had emerged with a disparate trolley-load of Zemlinsky, Mozart and Szymanowski – oh, and the Brahms Violin Concerto. With a full crowd lured by big-name soloist Joshua Bell, the question was not only what the LPO would make of this disparate collections of curiosities, but also the audience.The Brahms concerto Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Classical music and sport: should they spend more time together? The idea was posited more than 20 years ago that football and opera made for ideal bedfellows, so long as the football was being played in Italy and the operatic aria was Nessun Dorma, sung by Pavarotti. Since then no major tournament or Olympiad passes by without the BBC making the effort to hoik improving classical sounds into the broadcasting mix.The idea that the emotionalism of sport finds its perfect expression in certain types of music will be put to the test on Friday when the BBC Philharmonic performs a series of tunes Read more ...
geoff brown
It’s over 30 years since André Previn left his post as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. But once you’re part of the LSO’s treasured ‘family of artists’, the orchestra never lets go, year upon year inviting you back for Christmas, New Year, weddings, bar mitzvahs, any occasion going. The same with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter – briefly in the last decade Previn’s fifth wife, though they share the same platform with just as much ease now that they’re divorced.Sunday’s unusually diverting concert formed part of the LSO’s "Artist Portrait" of Mutter: a portrait hardly Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's one of the fundamental rules of concert-going that in any given season there will be one piece that trips you up. And that piece will always be by Berlioz. No matter what new alchemical concoctions Boulez, Lachenmann, Ferneyhough or Rihm will throw at you, someone will programme something by the 19th-century French composer - usually something with a perfectly benign-sounding title like King Lear Overture or Roméo et Juliette - that will in fact sound more modern, more outlandish, more baffling than anything written before or since. So it was again last night.The first riddle was Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Trauer-Music: Music to Mourn Prince Leopold Taverner Consort and Players/Parrott (Avie)Prince Leopold was Bach’s patron in the small town of Cöthen, where the young composer arrived to take up the post of Capellmeister in 1717. Leopold was a cultured and genial employer, who, according to Bach, “both knew and loved music”. And though the composer only stayed until 1723, his Cöthen years were creatively productive. Much of Bach’s music from this period has been sadly lost, including the sequence of pieces written in 1728 to mourn Leopold’s sudden death at the age of 34. A libretto Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The problem with being the closest major European capital to the United States is that touring American orchestras always visit us first or last. When they hit London, they're exhausted. This was very noticeable the first time the New York Philharmonic dropped by with their new chief conductor Alan Gilbert a few years back. They were a pale and baggy-eyed lot compared to the alert team I'd seen and heard just a few months before in New York. This time exhaustion wasn't the problem. They hadn't performed Mahler Nine since early January when the fourth movement was interrupted by the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You couldn't imagine a less likely acrobat than avuncular American Richard Goode. But when it comes to the piano, there's no mistaking it. A nippy little tumbler he undoubtedly is. Today we saw his fingers bounce about the keyboard like a troupe of prepubescent Romanian gymnasts. The sleepy Sunday concert that many had clearly hoped for was not going to be the narrative of this kinetic performance.The first work on the programme might have lulled some into a false sense of security. Schumann's Kinderszenen called mostly on Goode's avuncularism. He responded with some tender pianistic sketches Read more ...
graham.rickson
Havergal Brian: Symphony No 1 The Gothic BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Concert Orchestra etc/Martyn Brabbins (Hyperion)The performers involved are too numerous to list above; Hyperion do include the names of every instrumentalist, soloist and choir member in the booklet, more than 800 of them. This is a recording of the 2011 Proms performance, recorded with spectacular definition by the BBC on 17 July last year. Where to begin? This is a hugely impressive record of a great performance, but I’m not convinced that this is great music. But you can’t help feeling thankful Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Poor old Stephen Hough. The Liszt double. Again! Was he not at all Liszted out after last year's epic bicentenary? Were we not Liszted out by last year's epic bicentenary? Hough has been living, breathing and eating these two pieces for the past year and a half. The familiarity might have bred contempt. Amazingly it hasn't. In fact, all the prep work of last year appeared to make this performance of the first two piano concertos one of the most satisfying I've heard.The works are well known to us today. The rhetorical gestures, the reveries, the roulades are pure Liszt, the epitome of Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow.” And how! The BBC Phil’s composer/conductor H K “Nali” Gruber could not have timed the UK premiere of his Northwind Pictures better. We were ready targets for his shattering evocation of the wind with every device at the percussionists’ disposal and a large hand-cranked wind machine. The boys in the back row had a great night out.A one-movement piece, it is derived from his comic fairy-tale opera Der Herr Wind (Mr North Wind), successfully premiered by Zurich Opera in 2005. You don’t need to know the story to get something out of the music, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Louis Andriessen: Anaïs Nin, De Staat London Sinfonietta and soloists/Atherton (Signum)A friend of mine studied with the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen in the 1980s. He sent me a cassette (remember those?) of De Staat, and I can remember being bowled over by the music’s stark majesty and rhythmic punchiness, Andriessen’s repetitive vocal lines soaring over minimalist riffs, more redolent of Stravinsky than Glass. Written in the mid-1970s, Andriessen wrote of one early performance that he “had to sing every note for them (the musicians), because they articulated the piece like Bruckner Read more ...
geoff brown
At last, a bag of sweets! In earlier concerts from Vladimir Jurowski’s LPO series Prokofiev: Man of the People? much time was spent consuming the composer’s flat soufflés, experimental rock cakes, or the fancy dish that was really haddock. Interesting for the brain, maybe, but the diet on occasion has been hard on the stomach. Not that any of this impinged on audience numbers: the season has definitely proved Jurowski’s happy lock on the London Philharmonic’s audiences. They will follow their artistic guru and Principal Conductor almost anywhere.But for this last concert of all, the Read more ...