Classical music
David Nice
It will remain one of the most unforgettable times of my life - the privilege of spending four hours alone with the curator in the house of Jean Sibelius outside Helsinki, deep in a snowbound March scene.In fact, I just couldn't stop writing about it once the initial commissions had been put to bed, so vivid had the impression been that the composer might walk into the room at any moment. Slowly, the images of the composer working or relaxing at home, sometimes in the company of his long-suffering but devoted wife Aino, are coming to light. Now the film company Aho & Soldan has produced a Read more ...
David Nice
That in itself was enough to tell us that Petrenko isn’t just a supremely elegant conductor, an easy stylist able to make Stravinsky’s fiddly early Scherzo fantastique sound natural and to paper over the cracks of a tottering soloist, Oleg Marshev, in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, but already one with the wow factor, the ability to go beyond merely brilliant music-making to something altogether deeper and more unexpected.For the first three movements of Shostakovich’s hour-long narrative, I went along with all the sonic marvels but I can’t say I felt it in every bone of my body. This is Read more ...
ash.smyth
For hundreds of years now the island currently known as Sri Lanka has had a thriving musical culture (or cultures, not to politicise the issue). There’s been folk music for as long as there’ve been folks. The various strata of society have refined their ceremonial music, be it sacred or profane. Each ethnic group in each part of the island has hived off its own sub-genres over the centuries. And in the colonial era (eras) a whole new batch of influences arrived, fully formed, ready to be adopted wholesale or adapted and integrated for local use.As we push on into the second decade of the 21st Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 1932 English pianist Harriet Cohen commissioned the best of Britain’s composers – Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Walton, Howells – to produce transcriptions of Bach for piano. The result, A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen, is a true document of its time, no less fascinating for its rather conservative contents. Conservative is not an adjective that could be directed at Angela Hewitt’s 20th-century reinvention of the project however. With composers including Brett Dean and Robin Holloway, and works inspired by Bach alongside straight transcriptions, it makes for a joyously diverse programme; last Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes two seasonal releases – one a selection of Tudor choral music and the other a popular Christmas ballet. There’s yet more ballet in a new disc from Russian forces, and late-Romantic orchestral music is represented by two live performances from London orchestras. We’ve piano concertos by Mozart and Ravel, and piano duets by Schubert played by two of Britain’s best younger musicians. An underrated American pianist gives an intelligently planned recital, and a recorder virtuoso teams up with a master lutenist. The curiosities include a live recording by one of the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Because it was the capricious Finn who got us going and provided us with the evening's only chunks of nourishment. His performance of Rodion Shchedrin's Fourth Piano Concerto was joyous and thrilling. I wasn't expecting a great deal from Shchedrin after the critical drubbing the opening salvo in this mini-celebration received on theartsdesk. But, despite passages that stewed in a vat of concentrated Shostakovich for far too long, I was pleasantly surprised overall.The piano voice of this Fourth Concerto is quite unlike any other. Soaked in Carnatic flavours and free-form jazz, it emerges into Read more ...
David Nice
She did more to make Prokofiev remembered and reassessed than most of the great performers. Noëlle Mann, who died earlier this year from cancer at the age of 63, was the doyenne of Prokofiev studies: vivacious guardian of the Prokofiev Archive at Goldsmiths College - without which the fresh research in the first volume of my Prokofiev biography would not have been possible - and editor of the impeccably produced journal Three Oranges; instigator of the Centre for Russian Music, now in the expert hands of Alexander Ivashkin; and passionate driving force behind numerous events, conferences and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Hard to believe that Mark-Anthony Turnage, the bovver-booted, tank-topped composer of Night Dances and Greek in the 1980s, has reached his half-century. The Essex-boy image is still intact, somewhat mellowed perhaps; the boots have gone, the tank top remains, and the music has lost not one iota of its original brilliance and pizzazz.All but one of his four works in this birthday concert were from the last decade, but the only traces of middle age were in the better absorption of influences, the freer control of form, slightly more thorough risk assessment in the handling of the instruments. Read more ...
David Nice
It's always tough sharing a programme with Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Could a promising 21st-century composer and a dream-dance concerto of the early 1930s begin to make the kind of sounds the visionary Frenchman conjured in 1830? Not a chance, especially since Stéphane Denève, who had taken his now fizzing Scots orchestra through Berlioz's explosive masterpiece twice already during their first six seasons together, seemed this weekend to have stripped it down to the classical foundations, worked on every jolt and buffet in the symphony's electrifying string writing and managed to make Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
First, an admission. I have a blindspot for the chamber work of Fauré, Saint-Saëns and Ravel. I've tried my best, acquainted myself with the most stirring recordings of the finest pieces, got friends to hold my hand. But I've never been able to shake off the feeling that these French composers are mostly a bit drippy in this genre, a bit Watercolour Challenge, a bit I-eat-yoghurt-vote-Lib-Dem-and-don't-have-much-of-a-pulse. So last night was laser-eye-treatment time. If Steven Isserlis and his clever colleagues couldn't banish my blindness at their Wigmore Hall recital, no one could. Read more ...
David Nice
Where is the real Elgar to be found – in his boisterous self-portrait at the end of the Enigma Variations, the warm, feminine sentiment of the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony’s Adagio, or the nightmares of the Second Symphony? No doubt in each of them, and more. John Bridcut’s painfully sensitive documentary hones in on the private, introspective Elgar, the dark knight of "ghosts and shadows", always with the music to the fore. And by getting the good and great, young and old of the musical world not just to talk but to react to the works as they hear them, he may have broken new Read more ...
stephen.walsh
How much do you know about centaurs? Probably you know they are horses below the withers, human above. But did you know they were heavy drinkers who once got out of hand at the wedding of the King of the Lapiths, tried to rape the bride and got beaten up for their pains?This fight is the Centauromachy of Simon Holt’s new work for the BBC NOW, whose Composer-in-Association he is. From the title, I expected some rough-housing, perhaps even a corpse or two, certainly a few ASBOs. But it turns out that Holt quite likes centaurs and is intrigued by the musical possibilities of their double nature Read more ...