Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
A 70-minute song cycle for soprano and violin, the Kafka Fragments is the magnum opus (the irony of its miniature forms seems entirely deliberate) of György Kurtág, a composer known for the inscrutability of his music. His lines arrive at the ears fully armed, unwilling to surrender their meaning. A performance of the Fragments at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2008 famously drove a musically literate audience from the room, so can Peter Sellars's staged interpretation really offer a more engaging experience? Up to a point.The fragment: embodiment of an absent presence, encoding loss while Read more ...
David Nice
"Who?" many readers may be asking. You'll have to take it on trust - and a handful of outstanding recordings - that the Russian conductor, viola player and arranger, who died on 2 November aged 86, really was up there among the musical greats of his generation. He played with Rostropovich, Richter and David Oistrakh; he had as close a line to Shostakovich as any recreative artist. But he was no globetrotter following his emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel in 1976, and, as yet another of those "musicians' musicians", he rarely stepped into the limelight.A founder member of the great Read more ...
David Nice
In the last year of his life he was, as a colleague noted when we learned of Charles Mackerras’s death, the wise old gamekeeper in the spring forest of Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. No wonder Mackerras, we were told last night by his conductor nephew Alexander Briger, wanted that most ecstatic celebration of the natural order for his memorial, just as Janáček had had it played at his funeral. Was it trivialised by an encore number from Mackerras’s deliciously arranged Sullivan potpourri-ballet, Pineapple Poll? Not a jot, mate.He gave his final unforgettable concerts with the Philharmonia Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not often that a serious musician goes into the recording studio to play requests. But as the closest that classical music strays to The X Factor (unless you count Paul Potts), Nicola Benedetti has a different kind of relationship with audiences. At the age of 23, several years into a professional career which began at 17 with a hugely popular victory in the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition, Nicola Benedetti has released a CD which lacks an agenda or a slant. There’s no new work, no transcriptions or retrieving unknown bits and pieces from dusty archives. Instead she recorded Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last year I took my musical instrument to Tower Hamlets. The heartland of the capital’s huge Bangladeshi community is not a part of London where you expect to hear much orchestral playing. Nor are boroughs like Hackney and Newham ordinarily seen as wellsprings of classical musicians. But they all have a dedicated music services department among whose tasks it is to stimulate instrumental learning.For the last four years the council’s music services department has been teaming up with teachers to get children to take up instruments. It has been a remarkable success. Already there are 7000 Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Glaswegian James Dillon (b 1950) is one Britain's most critically acclaimed living composers. Early detours as a drunken and drug-taking wastrel gave way to what he calls "musical terrorism". By which he means his blistering career as one of the most intoxicating and uncompromising of the New Complexity school of composers. His music has won awards (an unprecedented three from the Royal Philharmonic Society) but few British establishment friends or commissions, which has forced him into almost permanent exile. Now, for his 60th birthday, he makes a rare return to Glasgow for one of the Read more ...
edward.seckerson
John Wilson and the orchestra which bears his name created an absolute sensation at the 2009 Proms with their celebration of 75 years of MGM musicals. A total of 3.5 million people watched the broadcast live; countless more all over the world will relive the experience on DVD. Wilson has made a speciality of restoring and recreating great movie scores and presenting them in all their very particular glory in concert halls up and down the UK.He is about to embark upon a national tour of the now celebrated MGM Prom hitting Manchester, Gateshead, Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff, Bournemouth, and Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
We have good days and we have bad days. Ian Bostridge, at last night’s concert at the Barbican, was not having one of his better ones. But time and CD releases wait for no man, and so he gamely ploughed through his programme of music written for three great Baroque tenors (no prizes for guessing what the title of the album is – do you think EMI would pass up an opportunity like that?), and by the end appeared a little more comfortable than at what was a rather tentative start.The concept is actually quite an interesting one. Most of us could tell you about that castrato-extraordinaire Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There is an excess about the Wigmore Hall’s Arts and Crafts cupola that lends itself to extravagant musical passions. The mural’s cloudy images may profess to picture music as an abstract creature, but the golden tangle of rays and warmly naked limbs make a rather more human case for its attractions. It was a case matched for persuasive enthusiasm (and significantly bettered for taste) last night by The English Concert and Alice Coote, in a programme of charged highlights from 16th and 17th-century repertoire.To the passions of love and death – those stalwart emotional bookends of the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Helmut Lachenmann is to instrumental technique what The Joy of Sex was to suburban nookie. A conduit to a whole new carnal world. Even those of us supposedly well versed in what a stringed instrument can do watched the Arditti Quartet perform the Lachenmann string quartets at the Queen Elizabeth Hall mouths agape. You can do that? With that! And you're going to stick that where?! We were an audience of gawpers and grimacers, smilers and starers. Who knew that so much could be done with the back of a violin? Or that the metallic screw at the heel of the bow could play little melodies Read more ...
David Nice
Eighty years ago yesterday, the 41-year-old Adrian Boult launched the distinguished history of what was then a 114-strong BBC Symphony Orchestra with Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture in Portland Place. Three months later ice-and-fire Ernest Ansermet was over to conduct Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in a programme which included the composer at the piano. Both works were indispensible to last night's celebrations: crispbread and butter wrapped around an equally representative contemporary filling that spread its wow factor relatively thin.Not that the live-wire soloists weren't hugely Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s releases include two contrasted crossover discs, one in tribute to Armenian Orthodox church music, the other by, er, Phil Collins-era Genesis. There’s an Elgar oratorio, and a disc of choral music inspired by the untimely death of a young royal. Orchestral fireworks can be found in a recording of a well-known British work and there’s some approachable Modernism from a modern Polish master. There’s a thrilling compilation of viola concertos, and a classic recent set of Rachmaninov piano concertos reappears at a lower price. Gershwin turns up on an interesting French disc Read more ...