Classical music
igor.toronyilalic
One after the other came their pleas. “Save us!” they cried, “Save us, or we will be no more!” Not the words of the enslaved Israelites of Handel’s oratorio, however, but the sentiments of the English Baroque Soloists, the Monteverdi Choir and their supporters during their pre-concert supplications. Never has the plea of a fundraising concert chimed so well with the thrust of the music. Moments after Sir John Eliot Gardiner - then Sir David Attenborough - had begged the crowd of sponsors to empty their pockets for the musicians, the choir of Israelites struck up their own Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra like to do things their way. They still show little compunction about discriminating on sexual and ethnic grounds and for over 70 years have maintained the idiosyncratic position of having no fixed principal conductor. Instead, like the prettiest girl in the school year, they carefully bestow grace and favour on a special chosen few. One of their longest running relationships has been with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a partnership whose early results – trail-blazingly authentic - regularly raised Viennese hackles. So it was a great disappointment to learn that Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
What exactly is the point of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies? I don't ask this with any malice or hostility, just in a tone of inquiry. It is a question that I think his new Violin Concerto, Fiddler on the Shore, raises. That is, is Davies still here to shock and annoy, or to assuage? The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Davies's baton presented the British premiere of the work last night, with Daniel Hope as the soloist, in the first of two proms that celebrated the composer's 75th birthday. Within its single-movement span were representations from the two opposing camps of Davies's life and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There aren’t many composers or musicians who can say that they changed society. And by that I mean really changed it. Few have ever come close to materially or politically transforming their surroundings in any truly meaningful way. There are many who claim they have, or wish they had: Wagner or Beethoven in the 19th century, Barenboim most notably – but doubtfully – in our own. But there is only one musician who actually did: the conductor, Kurt Masur.Earlier today, at the German embassy, the Mayor of Leipzig and the Sheriff of the City of London formalised the Barbican’s partnership with Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Early on in Phil Grabsky's documentary In Search of Beethoven (out today on DVD), handy fortepiano player and Ludwig van-lookalike Ronald Brautigam starts screwing up a section of Beethoven's very first, unpublished piano concerto. "If I concentrate on playing it," he laughs nervously, his hands covering his reddening face, "I might be able to do it." Brautigam is not just screwing up for our amusement. He's making a valuable point.The point is this: right up into his twenties, Beethoven wasn't first and foremost the great European composer; he was the great European pianist, a Lisztian Read more ...
robert.sandall
It’s pretty well understood that talent, good looks and hard work are not enough to guarantee you safe passage through the celebrity jungle nowadays. But for five years it looked as though they might be enough for Katherine Jenkins. Until recently the general view of Jenkins held that she was a nice, polite, touchingly naive, and unaffected young woman from Neath in South Wales, who just happened to be the most popular classically trained singer to emerge here in this century.Her reticence appeared almost saintly. Jenkins never talked in public about her boyfriends, never dissed less Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Among the most astonishing moments in John Adams's new opera Doctor Atomic (currently running at the English National Opera) is an aria at the end of the first act. The eponymous brains behind the Manhattan Project, Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, stands alone on stage with his new creation, a spherical A-bomb coated in wires and tubes like a patient in intensive care, and sings John Donne's holy sonnet "Batter my heart, three-person'd God".I say sings. It's really more of an explosion of anguish, rage and self-loathing, spat out with desperation, Gerald Finley superbly transforming this self- Read more ...