LSO
David Nice
Shchedrin's best works, in my experience - and his output has been prolific of late - colour and treat the themes of others: chastushki or Russian street songs in the brilliant Naughty Limericks Concerto (to be heard in the second programme of the season), Tchaikovsky in the Anna Karenina ballet and Bizet in his best-known score, music from Carmen arranged for strings and percussion to fit the brilliance of his great ballerina wife, Maya Plisetskaya.Last night I found I liked the so-called Carmen Suite - ie the complete ballet score - a little less than I used to. Its more playful aspects Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The wind instrument in everyone's ears at the moment is the vuvuzela (pictured) a South African horn which comes in various lengths and pitches but is of unvarying volume: very loud. You'll be hearing a lot more of it during the World Cup, as it is the noise-polluter of choice for fans of Bafana-Bafana, the South African football team. If you're after a more euphonious blast of wind, however, there is an alternative. Early last year I sat in thunderous proximity to the LSO Brass Ensemble as they performed the iconically scary "Dance of the Knights" theme from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
If the second half of the 20th century saw opera throttled by existential crises, and left composers wondering whether the only future for the art form was for it to be hung out to dry, or to become an arcane intellectualised annex for the musical games then in vogue, Gerald Barry's one-act opera, La plus forte (2006) - receiving its UK premiere in a concert performance last night - marks the end of hostilities. So effortlessly does Barry seem to rise above the tangled, stagnant realities of recent operatic and musical convention, and return and restore the art form to the business of Read more ...
David Nice
"There is not one idea," wrote that intemperate critic Eduard Hanslick about Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, "that does not get its neck broken by the speed with which the next lands on its head." Rather a compliment, I've always thought, and certainly so as applied to James MacMillan's new Violin Concerto. As soloist Vadim Repin and conductor Valery Gergiev whirled us tumultuously through its hyperactive songs and dances, there was so much I wanted to savour, to hear again. That won't be a problem. So long as there are violinists of Repin's calibre able to play it, the work is here to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Communists had taken over the Acropolis, Britain faced a hung parliament and in the 20 minutes it took me to get down to the Barbican by bus the US stock market had fallen more sharply than at any time since 1987. In the face of global and political madness, it was nice to have a concert awaiting that seemed to offer a sense of cosy familiarity and unfashionability and monarchical approval. Sir Colin Davis and Dame Mitsuko Uchida were our guides, an unfussy programme our fate. Yet the concert unfolded with about as much good grace as the political day, the second half spinning almost Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It didn’t take long for memories of Anatoly Liadov’s The Enchanted Lake to fade in the dramatic shift Stateside which dominated Antonio Pappano’s latest outing with the London Symphony Orchestra. Every tone fleetingly shimmered as Liadov’s dreamy miniature hinted at an evening full of Eastern promise. A touch of Scriabinesque harmonic ripeness in the middle of the piece suggested the possibility of an effulgent climax. But none was forthcoming. Silky playing from the muted LSO strings rarely rose above mezzo forte. And then we were crossing not a lake but an ocean; the shores of the USA came Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It’s a very assured - not to say very brave - young conductor who chooses to make his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius’ notoriously challenging Seventh Symphony. Mighty talents have fallen at this particular fence, defeated by the work’s circuitous evolution and elusive logic. Robin Ticciati has no fear, though, and more importantly has been mentored by a man who knows the Sibelian psyche and terrain better than most – Sir Colin Davis. Could this be his heir apparent?Opening with rather rarer but more instantly accessible Sibelius – the orchestral suite of incidental music Read more ...
David Nice
Adams began with two Debussy preludes swept by a different kind of wind in Colin Matthews's ingenious, luminous orchestrations. Well, windswept was the idea, but there was no more elemental scouring here than by all accounts there had been in the Britten Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes on Sunday (interesting parallel programming, though). "Le vent dans la plaine" sounded more like an apiary of clockwork bees, droning away meticulously but with none of Debussy's dark undertow. Ravel's even more gorgeous-unsettling Valses nobles et sentimentales might better have been conducted by the Read more ...
edward.seckerson
What would you imagine the composer John Adams might choose to conduct – apart, that is, from a little something he himself made earlier? Well, the first of two London Symphony Orchestra concerts this week brought no big surprises: Sibelius’ Sixth Symphony was in essence a little like returning to his minimalist roots – a bunch of insistent melodic cells and dancing ostinati. Flanking it, as if to reassert that everything Adams writes is essentially operatic, was orchestral music born of opera: Adams’ own Doctor Atomic Symphony and the “Four Sea Interludes” from Britten’s Peter Grimes. Adams Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
When I last met Nitin Sawhney, I’d heard that he was a whizz at mental arithmetic. I asked him, perhaps impertinently, what was 91 times 94? “8,827,” he relied, quick as a flash. Several hours later, I worked out he was probably right. “Vedic mathematics,” he said. What I can say about last night’s performance was there was some interesting mathematics going on. Some time signatures rubbed friskily against others in certain scenes in ways a mathematician would love. The score had an enormous facility. But a question we have to confront is - imagine this said in the voice of Carrie from Sex Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It has always been a cornerstone of my personal philosophy that beauty and insight can be found in the very lowest of common denominators. That Big Brother, Friends, Love It magazine or Paris Hilton provide revelations about life that are of as much consequence, of as much wonder, as any offered up by the classic pantheon. That that which the people respond to must and usually does have plenty of merit lurking within it. And so I have always held out hope that Philip Glass, the most popular of living classical composers, is actually quite good, somehow, somewhere. But, actually, he really isn Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Singers are always calling in sick. The merest puff of wind can blow a voice into A&E. The tiniest tickle in the throat can leave 2000 people jilted. They build instrumental musicians more robustly, especially brass players, so when David Pyatt told the London Symphony Orchestra, for whom he is co-principal horn, that he has an infected wisdom tooth, that's what he's got.Sadly it means that on Thursday evening at the Barbican he won't now be performing Strauss's glorious Second Horn Concerto. Composed in the depths of wartime in 1943, it's the piece with which Pyatt won the BBC Young Read more ...