Classical music
geoff brown
Roger Wright’s reign as director of the BBC Proms has luckily spared us some of the more desperate themed programming that ran through the seasons in Nicholas Kenyon’s day. "Music and Shakespeare", I remember; music and the sea; and one year of Spain, Spain and Spain. I never wanted to hear another castanet again. But individual concerts still need careful planning. And if you’re hunting for a convenient hook, the name of Serge Koussevitzky – fiery Russian conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 25 years, double-bass player, minor composer, famed promoter of the new – is as plausible a Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Third in line to share their summer reading selection with theartsdesk is Colin Currie (b 1976), the leading percussionist of his generation. A driving force behind new percussion repertoire for more than a decade, in 2000 Currie was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award for his inspirational role in contemporary music and is in the unique position of being the only instrumentalist to enjoy close collaborative relationships with many of the leading composers of today, notably Rautavaara, Steve Reich and Elliott Carter. His latest CD release, which features Jennifer Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The fact that the world’s most popular ballet score had never, until last night, been performed in full at the Proms says something about the lowly regard in which musical circles long held composition for ballet. The fact that the Albert Hall’s capacity audience bayed six times for Valery Gergiev’s return to take their appreciation of his and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra’s performance of it last night says something about it being about time that musical circles stopped being so snobby.Those of us who haunt ballet theatres have become inured to shoddy performances of Swan Lake, its Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To lose one performer (to misquote Oscar Wilde) may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose three begins to look like carelessness. With last night’s Prom killing off soloists faster than you can say Sinfonia da Requiem there are few who wouldn’t have forgiven a comfortably adequate sort of Sunday evening. As it was, however, despite the loss of Christopher Maltman, John Mark Ainsley and conductor Jiří Bělohlávek, the combined BBC Symphony, Chorus and Singers under Mark Wigglesworth delivered a performance that grasped not only the casual brilliance of Benjamin Britten’s virtuoso writing, but Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It has been, we can safely agree, a truly terrible week. Art, culture, call it what you will, is unequal to the task of diagnosing a nation’s ills, let alone curing them. But on a night such as the inaugural Comedy Prom, it comes equipped with healing balm. This evening was maybe not perfect. There were wrinkles, little bits here and there that didn’t quite work. But the Saturday night that the BBC Proms gave over to the business of laughter could not have been more opportune. This is going to sound hokey, but comedy on this occasion brought its audience close to a state of grace. For which Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we've a glittering, shimmering ballet score with an aquatic theme, and a brilliant British pianist shows off his compositional skills. Plus, in a week where we all need cheering up, 20th-century music's scariest genius shows that he had a fully developed sense of humour.Other Love Songs: Songs by Brahms and Stephen Hough, The Prince Consort (Linn)Brahms at his most genial is paired with a new song cycle written by polymath British pianist Stephen Hough. He’s a treasure – one of the best virtuoso pianists around, as anyone who’s heard his Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov recordings Read more ...
David Nice
Several Prommers fainted, possibly out of boredom, in a longer than ever first movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto. The boredom, palpable around me, came not from pianist Dejan Lazić transcribing the fiddle part for his own pleasure - a communicative musician might have made us forget the original - but from the failure of Brahms's song to soar. Dyspeptic by half-time, I found everything awry: several obscure concert overtures would have worked better than Frank Bridge's Rebus, I'd have preferred many short cello-and-orchestra pieces to Holst's Invocation and thought any conductor might Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“The text of Britain’s teaching, the message of the free…”. No, not the Last Night of the Proms or the Olympic Games ahead of time. This is the final chorus of Elgar’s concert-length cantata Caractacus, which was given a vigorous work-out in this star concert of the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester Cathedral under Sir Andrew Davis. And before you start jeering and bringing up the problems on Britain’s streets, let me tell you that the choruses in this work are as brilliant as any in the language, and quite thrilling enough to persuade you that the message, however facile and inopportune, Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
One thing became clearer to me last night – just how much Steve Reich has borrowed from world music in his compositions – we had the flamenco-tinged Clapping, Electric Counterpoint, using Central African guitar lines, and Music for 18 Musicians, a mix of West African rhythms, Indonesian gamelan and other elements. It was also clear how much a sold-out late-night Prom audience had taken this music to their hearts, nearly 40 years after some of it was written. It still sounds fresh and, rather than being mindlessly repetitive, most of it shimmers away. Like an endless. Like an endless Read more ...
geoff brown
What a difference a change of scene makes. During Sakari Oramo’s 10 years at the helm of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra he wasn’t exactly diffident; but you felt you could invite him to tea without any crockery getting broken. Now, I’m not so sure. Last night at the Proms, conducting one of his three current babies, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, his arms spun like windmills. His torso lunged to the left, then to the right. With energetic facial expressions he made love, picked a fight, grinned like a clown - whatever was needed to propel the emotional dramas of his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This year’s Choral Sundays at the Proms are a wonderfully mixed bag. Mighty choral touchstones are represented by Mendelssohn’s Elijah, both the Verdi and Mozart Requiems and Beethoven Missa solemnis, but there’s also an enticing strand of curiosities. Looming largest among these has of course been Brian’s Gothic Symphony, but emerging now from its sprawling shadow are less obscure but no less interesting works – Britten’s Spring Symphony, and last night Mahler’s folkloric Opus 1 cantata Das klagende lied.While a work of the composer’s youth (he was just 20 at completion), Das klagende lied Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Youth was everywhere to be seen at the Proms last night. Whether in the massed ranks of Britain’s National Youth Orchestra, soloist Ben Grosvenor (even younger than the precocious Benjamin Britten when he debuted his own Piano Concerto in 1938), Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, or DJ-turned-composer Gabriel Prokofiev, it was an evening celebrating the scope of the teenage experience. Even the Late Night Prom joined in the party, coming courtesy of Nigel Kennedy, still surely the oldest and most defiant teenager in classical music.It doesn’t get much more self-consciously youthful and hip than Read more ...