Classical music
Ismene Brown
Yehudi Menuhin's influence continues to reach out a hand to young instrumentalists. His Menuhin Violin Competition for young players under 22 is internationally known; last weekend in the Waterloo Chamber of Windsor Castle - a staggeringly picturesque setting - some exceptional violinists, violists and cellists sought the laurels at the Windsor Festival International String Competition, Britain's major professional prize for string players set up in Menuhin's honour three years ago.In the event it was a prodigious student who beat a brilliant young professional to the top prize on Friday. Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Send in the clowns. Or at least that was Vladimir Jurowski’s musical thinking in bringing together the mighty foursome of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Haydn and Shostakovich and seeing just how far their capricious natures might take us. The allusions and parodies came thick and fast and just when you thought there was no more irony to tap, in came the most outrageous instance of misdirection in the history of 20th-century music: Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony. And that is no joke.Jurowski has fashioned some brilliant programmes in his time but I really cannot think of another where the ingenuity Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Italian unification under Victor Emmanuel II - the exiled king whose supporters chanted "Viva Verdi!" (Verdi = Victor Emmanuel, Re D'Italia). Naturally, Italy's premier orchestra, the Orchestra dell'Accademia di Santa Cecilia, under their conductor Antonio Pappano, chose to celebrate this in Basingstoke.Basingstoke has, in The Anvil, a thunderingly good 1,400-seater concert hall regularly visited by top orchestras (Maazel and the Philharmonia soon, the Bolshoi soon after). It is a fine and moving thing to see that as anonymous a place as this Hampshire Read more ...
stephen.walsh
This latest BCMG concert had its pleasures; and it had its irritations. Among the pleasures was a pair of works, one of them newly commissioned, by the under-performed Japanese composer Jo Kondo. The irritations were of the BBC variety: long pauses between short works while technicians in headphones faffed around with microphones and music stands, in sovereign disregard for the convenience of a large paying audience.Finally Oliver Knussen, who has himself always done difficult things without palaver, brought the players on for Birtwistle’s Silbury Air while the technos were still faffing. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Colin Davis's year has not been a happy one. There've been heart problems, cancellations and, during a performance of The Magic Flute at Covent Garden last month, a major fall. Last night at the Barbican Hall he faced a strenuous Beethoven programme, the Third Piano Concerto with Jonathan Biss and the Seventh Symphony, and a new work by Romanian Vlad Maistorovici. Would the 83-year old conductor have enough energy to inject proceedings with the required welly?There was as much welly as you could wish for. Understandably, he had assigned the mastery of Maistorovici's Halo to an undertsudy Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Like so much fine music, Gerald Barry's new work began life as detritus. Feldman's Sixpenny Editions, which received its world premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, are elaborations on the tacky little Edwardian jingles whose browning dog-eared scores are still to be found in music shops up and down the land selling in big plastic buckets for 5p. This - "as well as other kinds of trash", Barry admits in his tip-top programme notes - was the music he first grew to love. And out of these dearly beloved sows' ears, he's made eight extraordinary silk purses.Unusually for such Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Simon Rattle's intriguing return to the London Symphony Orchestra podium after years away threw up a curious thought: what happens after Berlin? The fate of six of his eight predecessors at the Berlin Phil has been death on the job. Was last night a first step to finding another way out? Were we witnessing an early bit of courtship and re-familiarisation with a possible post-Berlin playmate? It certainly had all the hallmarks of an early date between old friends, with its bouts of overenthusiastic passion and moments of awkward fumbling.But what an intense programme to kickstart a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are few more beautiful sounds on this planet than a consort of viols well played. Like a quiet conversation overheard from across the room, it combines intimacy and secrecy, together with a kind of conspiratorial subtlety of feeling – intellect and passion fused but disguised. And the sound has a delicacy and refinement hardly matched in any music I know.All this is partly explained by the fact that in their heyday viol consorts played music that was one step away from the voice; they were the pioneers of instrumental chamber music. They let the catgut out of the bag; and once Read more ...
David Nice
It's rare for demanding though not, I think, unduly cynical orchestral musicians to wax unanimously lyrical about a new conducting kid on the block. But that's what happened at the 2009 Besançon International Conducting Competition when BBC Symphony players in residence placed their bets on the obvious winner, 30-year-old Kazuki Yamada. He repaid their good faith last night in a real stunner of a London debut programme featuring two very different challenges to his long-phrasing vision and the most dramatic new violin concerto I've heard in the last two decades.That's saying something given Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the later 19th century, violinist and composer Joseph Joachim was hailed as the most brilliant fiddler of his day, but today his name lives on via the great works that he helped to bring into the classical repertoire. Brahms dedicated his Violin Concerto to Joachim, while Bruch's First Violin Concerto was substantially revised by Joachim and became closely identified with him. Both the Schumann and Dvořák concertos were written for him, though Joachim never performed the latter."Every fiddle player who picks up the Brahms concerto sees Joachim's name inscribed on it as the dedicatee Read more ...
David Nice
What a versatile master is the Royal Opera’s resident dynamo Antonio Pappano. On Saturday night, he was in the Covent Garden pit getting big-band sounds and tender elegies from the whole orchestra in Turnage’s Anna Nicole. And here he was again, moving from a surprisingly fine score to a great one, the shadow-of-mortality approach to Chinese poetry that is Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, albeit in its ingenious chamber reduction by Schoenberg. Oh, and with the small detail of a mezzo’s ultimate challenge being faced by a baritone.That implies two degrees of colour-deafness before a note is Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Earlier this month something happened to me that's never happened before. Brian Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet roughed-up my critical faculties and left them for dead. I couldn't tell you what had happened, why, in what order, when. As it finished, small birds circled my head. So I entered Brian Ferneyhough Day yesterday at the Barbican as one would an egg-beater, knees a-knocking.I needn't have. The day was a revelation. As is usual with these BBC Symphony Orchestra composer portraits, many different ways into the composer's oeuvre were proferred. The first reductivist Read more ...