Classical music
jonathan.wikeley
York is a bit like Oxford, I’ve always thought: that perplexing contrast between the central squares and marketplaces, in all their twee glory – all aimless, besatchelled French students and anoraked tourists queuing for tea at Betty’s – and the simply glorious architecture and hidden back streets, from the ever-breathtaking splendour of the Minster to the endless succession of tiny hidden churches that inhabit every other corner. You could, potentially, hate it, but you always come away feeling pleasantly surprised, and surprisingly inspired.
And it’s a good place to hold an early Read more ...
theartsdesk
Robert Sandall, the music writer and broadcaster, and one of the first members of The Arts Desk, died this morning from prostate cancer. He was 58. His wit, easy style and energetic intelligence were seen in a number of book and concert reviews he did for this site, despite the encroachment of cancer. His range of interest and enthusiasms were shown in the subjects he covered, from his acute interview with Katherine Jenkins to his study of the Steve Jobs effect on the music industry. He was a presenter of Radio 3's eclectic Mixing It and Late Junction, a former Sunday Times rock critic and a Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
What a thrilling sound the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra can make when it chooses! What a grippingly deep tone, from a lower strings section that sounds like you’ve got the bass on your car stereo turned up daringly high, what clinical precision (in the best sense of the word) in the wind section, what power in the brass. At times you could almost see the surges of energy shooting off into the auditorium. You could certainly hear it.
This was a Romantic behemoth of a concert: dripping with over-the-topness and oozing slush, the sort that is guaranteed to sell out the Albert Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It becomes increasingly hard for a music festival to stick out from the crowd these days. But high culture, high summer and high altitude create a rousing major chord each July in Verbier, which can genuinely claim to be the only festival you reach by cable car. When you get up there you are greeted by an alpine symphony of glaciers slithering off peaks and pastures clanging with cowbells. Streams descant and trill along gutters between chalets. No wonder stellar musicians drop their fee to return, both to play and listen. Egos are left at the bottom of the mountain.But location is only part Read more ...
David Nice
Numerologists may have been fretting over whether Proms forces could match the apocryphal thousand of the mightiest Eighth Symphony's 1910 world premiere, which Mahler feared would turn into a "catastrophic Barnum and Bailey show". With nothing like 350 in the children's chorus, for a start, not a chance. Anyway, the resplendent sound produced by the choristers who filled the seats either side and in front of the Albert Hall organ, as well as by the players of Jiři Bĕlohlávek's BBC Symphony Orchestra on the platform and up in the gallery, made the question of numbers - circa 600, for the Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's that time again. The BBC Proms - in classical music terms, the greatest show on Earth - begin tonight with Mahler's massive Eighth Symphony. From Bryn Terfel in Wagner on the second night of the Proms to Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Monteverdi's Vespers on the second-to-last night. theartsdesk's music writers choose the performances they're looking forward to. IGOR TORONYI-LALICThe credit crunch has no doubt played havoc on this year's season. Only one visit from an American orchestra and three big-gun orchestral visits from Europe will find their way to the Royal Albert Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are some recitals where you think only about the abstracted music - the harmonic arguments, the structural cleverness, the textural ingenuity - and there are others where you are forced to confront the presence of a set of living, breathing, leering musical beasts. Last night's stunning Wigmore Hall debut by Sarajevan-born pianist Ivana Gavrić - to a sellout crowd - was a very compelling example of the latter: a performance where the musical storytelling was being so well communicated that it was almost as if she was speaking to the audience or rolling a projector. Read more ...
David Nice
So most of us blinked and missed Martha Argerich gliding into Kings Place's Argentine celebrations last week. Yet here I am writing again about this liveliest of venues' Chopin marathon, and like a would-be Prommer who joins the last night party without having been to the Albert Hall more than once in the season I'm culpable of marking the grand finale after experiencing only a slice of modest Cypriot pianist Martino Tirimo's 10 concerts devoted to our bicentenary boy. Never mind: both the encyclopedic recitals I did hear seemed to take us through a turbulent lifetime. That would be true just Read more ...
David Nice
It's been quite a week for youth and the vernacular in the world of so-called “classical” music. Multiply by four the seven fledgling stage animals currently firing up John Adams’s “earthquake-romance” in London's East End, add an orchestra of 13-to-24-year-olds from four continents, student dancers, amateur choirs young and old and just a handful of professionals, and that's only the starting-point for this hair-raising, goosebump-inducing, 500-strong performance of what many of us believe to be Bernstein's most cohesive masterpiece.The real starting point, in fact, was nine months ago, this Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
One of the greatest pianists (and latterly conductors) of his generation, founder and artistic director of the Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev, has been charged by Thai police with raping a 14-year-old boy, according to the BBC. Police also raided his Thai home in connection with a paedophile ring and found, say prosecutors, several "compromising" photographs with underage boys.Extraordinary. Echoes of conductor Robert King, who was convicted of sexually assaulting five minors a few years back, who is making his British comeback this year at the Wigmore Hall. Pletnev will no doubt Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A packed Festival Hall and a cheering, stamping, standing ovation – hardly the usual welcome for an evening of contemporary music. Sitting, wizened and waistcoat-clad, at the centre of the front row was the reason: Ravi Shankar. Framed by the mathematical minimalism of John Adams’ Shaker Loops and Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Shankar’s first-ever symphony was last night given its world premiere by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.At 90 years old – an age at which few composers are working, let alone breaking new ground – Shankar has produced Symphony, the culmination of decades of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Before Covent Garden's performance of Manon the other day, I had always presumed I'd rather have my eyes out than listen to an entire opera by Massenet. How wrong I was. This Saturday I hope to be proved wrong again, when my colleague on theartsdesk David Nice will attempt to open my ears to another great French worshipper of the pretty in music, the first true master of ballet music before Tchaikovsky, Léo Delibes - whose music I've been even more studious in avoiding.David has spent the last three weeks listening to different versions of the complete ballet of Coppélia for this week's Read more ...