Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
“They should have trance nights here,” I heard a young man say to his girlfriend as we entered the domed, craggy splendour of Islington’s Union Chapel. Still a working church, this Victorian Gothic monster is an architectural Escher fantasy of arches and angles, its octagonal layout concealing as much as it reveals on first glance. Add a central stage where you might expect the altar, glowing red under the lights, to a programme of some of Monteverdi’s most erotic madrigals, and it didn’t take a degree in semiotics to realise what was going on. With sacred and secular rubbing up against one Read more ...
David Nice
How good it feels, after several decades of Shostakovich quartet series, to be able to say not just “what a tragic life” but also “what ingenious treatment of great ideas, what a range of universal human emotions”. And even, walking on air away from the second concert in the Pacifica Quartet’s Wigmore Shostakovich cycle, “how accepting, how at one with the world”.That light-serious aspect to Shostakovich’s music has usually been a bit booted aside, often by the composer himself. Knowing that Russian quartets like the legendary Borodins understood from personal experience something of what Read more ...
David Nice
Pundits have always yoked architecture and Bruckner together, touting void and mass at the expense of the dynamic experience music ought to be. Abbado and his Lucerne Festival Orchestra favoured sinuous instability in the Fifth Symphony earlier this week, making the very foundations gyre and gimble. Relatively solid ground last night was due to a more sober conductor and Bruckner symphony: a mixed blessing. The grand design, in fact, came from Leif Ove Andsnes in Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, making overall sense of a work which has always seemed swooningly resistant to it.If that meant Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We're living through a golden age of Bruckner conducting. A revolutionary age. Young sparks like Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Ilan Volkov are doing extraordinary things with the Austrian's music, experimenting with speeds and phrasing, reshaping him in a more extraterrestrial, more lithe and modern mould. All of which means that trying to get yourself noticed conducting Bruckner in the 2010s is a bit like trying to get yourself noticed as a footballer in 1970s Brazil. Good luck.But before we got a chance to assess whether the living legend Claudio Abbado made the grade in his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Nearly 50 years have passed since Britten’s War Requiem premiered at the consecration of the reconstructed Coventry Cathedral in May 1962. The intervening years have seen British military campaigns in the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and while the process and practice of war has changed beyond recognition, the horror that the pacifist Britten perceived so acutely remains the same. With Remembrance Sunday approaching, it would be hard to imagine a more vivid act of commemoration and testimony than the performance the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus delivered at the Barbican Read more ...
David Nice
How can even a generously proportioned documentary do justice to one of the musical world’s greatest life forces? John Bridcut knows what to do: make sure all your interviewees have a close personal association with your chosen giant in one of his many spheres of influence, then get cellist-disciples from Rostropovich’s Class 19 in the Moscow Conservatoire – here Moray Welsh, Natalia Gutman, Karine Georgian and Elizabeth Wilson - to watch and listen to their mentor talking and playing. The result is a towering model of its kind.Even without that special dimension of on-the-spot reaction to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ravel: Complete Music for Violin and Piano Alina Ibragimova, Cédric Tiberghien (Hyperion)Ravel’s output for violin and piano clocks in at around 50 minutes, so there’s a generous bonus on this CD in the shape of Guillaume Lekeu’s Violin Sonata. Lekeu, a pupil of Cesar Franck, died in 1894 aged 24 and his sonata was written for the great Eugene Ysaÿe. For Lekeu, good music was all about feeling, not charm. He was so highly strung that hearing the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan at Bayreuth caused him to faint and be carried unconscious from the theatre. His sonata is an accomplished piece, Read more ...
David Nice
In Italian opera, where lustrous Verdi mezzos are rare indeed, Olga Borodina tends to a first-the-music-then-the-words approach. In Russian song, the sole focus of last night's Barbican recital until the second encore, her classy, naturally inflected and beautifully coloured realisation of great as well as more generic native poets leaves you in no doubt what you're supposed to feel and think.That was true from the first phrase in the first Rimsky-Korsakov song, the ground well prepared by spacious thirds from her immaculate if - perhaps understandably - slightly obeisant pianist Dmitri Read more ...
David Nice
He's just launched the last of seven phenomenally successful seasons as music director of a transfigured Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Subscriptions for the Edinburgh and Glasgow concerts have doubled, attendances soared, and Stéphane Denève is a popular figure not just in the musical world but also in Scotland's wider cultural scene, not least as measured by his special guest appearance in the Sunday Post's long-running cartoon series The Broons.The charm of his concert presentations to his Scottish chums belies a rigour and a seriousness in a preparation that marries intellect with Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
William Glock once claimed that Pierre Boulez could literally vomit at music he believed to be substandard. I wonder what he would have made of my friend, who fled at the interval of the opening concert of the Southbank festival on Friday blaming Boulez's Domaines for setting off a panic attack. Her physical response was certainly a welcome corrective to the nonchalance with which the critical world increasingly greets Boulez's language, many of whom still insist that the days of serialism provoking anger or revulsion are in the distant past. Boulez can still upset. He even upset me a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio in A minor; Shostakovich: Piano Trio in E minor David Trio (Stradivarius)A logical coupling of two Russian chamber works, played by a young Italian trio. The massive scale of Tchaikovsky’s A minor trio will surprise the unwary. A few years before its completion in 1882, the composer had claimed that he’d never written a piano trio because he couldn’t bear the sound of solo strings pitted against piano (“sheer torture”). When the work appeared, dedicated to the memory of Tchaikovsky’s pianist friend Nikolai Rubenstein, the composer worried that the trio was “symphonic Read more ...
David Nice
It was bound, in vocal terms, to be a case of Beauty and the Beast. Stefan Vinke, though useful for killer heroic-tenor parts like this one in Mahler’s Song of the Earth, has made some of the ugliest sounds I’ve heard over the past few seasons, ineffable mezzo Alice Coote many of the loveliest, and with great communication, too. The wild card was fitfully engaged old-master conductor Lorin Maazel: would he stop dragging the Philharmonia behemoth-like behind him and let it be the bird of paradise Coote needed to share her deepest meditations?At first, that seemed unlikely. Maazel (pictured Read more ...