LSO
David Nice
Adaptability backed up by funding has been the course of the most successful musical organisations since mid-March – but it’s been especially tough from November onwards. One abrupt lockdown meant that anything scheduled to be performed before a carefully limited live audience within or around that month bit the dust, and the London Symphony Orchestra’s series planned to match Beethoven piano concertos with Stravinsky’s smaller-scale orchestral works at the Barbican with Krystian Zimerman as soloist and Simon Rattle conducting was a major casualty. So was the Beethoven concertos marathon Read more ...
Maxine Kwok
2020: a year that at some point felt like the end of live performance for the world of the performing arts, certainly for the foreseeable future. Artists spent months without any form of collaboration, leading to a serious lack of motivation due to the decimation of performance opportunities. Coupled with the stressful change in their financial circumstances a huge percentage of people with professions in the performing arts found themselves completely rudderless.I myself wandered aimlessly around the Barbican Estate, gazing longingly at the Barbican Centre and feeling empty without the daily Read more ...
graham.rickson
Poulenc’s La voix humaine comes close, but Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle has to be the perfect lockdown opera, this heady tale of two mismatched souls stuck in a confined space (admittedly an enormous one) alarmingly pertinent. Simon Rattle’s London Symphony Orchestra should have been performing the work on a Japanese tour this autumn, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone feeling short-changed by this streamed performance, available to watch on the orchestra’s YouTube channel.Eberhard Kloke’s chamber reduction of Bartók’s score, which was advertised as the version used, allows for an orchestra Read more ...
David Nice
Big orchestras to serve the late romantic masterpieces and contemporary blockbusters still aren’t the order of the Covid-era day, even in streamed events, at least not in the UK. The London Symphony Orchestra is so far unique in bigging up the strings as well as bringing on the full brass and percussion thanks to the unique nature of what was previously its rehearsal space and venue for chamber concerts, LSO St Luke’s.Both for Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle the other month under chief conductor Rattle – due to be streamed, but not for free – and for his Dance Suite alongside Hannah Kendall’s The Read more ...
David Nice
One source of advance information told us to expect a reduced version of Bartók’s one-act Bluebeard’s Castle, among the 20th century’s most original and profound operatic masterpieces. Joining 19 other lucky invitees and some of the LSO brass upstairs at St Luke’s, I realized immediately that the sea of comfortably distanced musicians covering the entire floor space, from violins at the east end in front of a conferring Simon Rattle, Karen Cargill and Gerald Finley, to percussion below us at the west, could only mean the real, full thing: the largest gathering of players I’d seen in London Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Sunday night’s Prom by the London Symphony Orchestra was Simon Rattle’s 75th and surely his strangest. But, in his best style, it was eclectically programmed, balancing novelty with tradition, responded imaginatively to the restrictions in place, and was very well played in the circumstances. These circumstances allowed for more inventive programming than would normally be entertained, but the biggest irony was that the spatial effects that would have sounded so amazing in the hall were only possible because the hall was empty.The required distancing between players became the basis of the Read more ...
David Nice
Time to face the elephant in the room. Five of the six set-ups listed below are free to access; one is not. While big organisations like the Met – despite not paying its artists or staff since lockdown – and the London Symphony Orchestra can use their generous archive releases to plead for funds, the fact remains that classical musicians are penniless right now, and find themselves staring at blank calendars which will in some cases extend way into 2021. Diminishing pleasures in from-home films don’t pay; middle-range groups and institutions already face at the very least a much-reduced 2021- Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The absence of live concerts is not just affecting the "in the flesh" audiences, but also having a knock-on effect for the Radio 3 audience, used to hearing a live or as-live concert every night of the week. The BBC have instead gone to the archive of recentish concerts to keep the In Concert strand alive, and last week’s schedule (20-24 April) presented an array of appetising concerts showing the best kind of enterprising programming. Familiar music alongside the unfamiliar, a range of orchestras in a range of venues, and for me a delightful voyage of discovery and re-discovery.I don’t have Read more ...
David Nice
He may no longer be the Berlin Philharmoniker's Chief Conductor, but by a combination of serendipity and foresight on the orchestra's part, Simon Rattle's last concert in Berlin for the foreseeable future was filmed without an audience and led the way for other, smaller-scale ventures before gatherings of any sort beyond chamber music with players at a distance became an impossibility. The current stopgap is the kind "his" orchestra now, the London Symphony Orchestra, is offering: past films on the nights when a concert would have taken place.The latest, in place of what we would have Read more ...
David Nice
Three deep-veined masterpieces by two of the 20th century's greatest composers who just happened to be British, all fading at the end to nothing: beyond interpretations of such stunning focus as those offered by violinist Vilde Frang, conductor Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra, these works could ask for nothing more than intense silence from the third point of what Britten called the magic triangle with composer and performers - the audience. With hardly anyone these days daring to cough in a concert, and only those present who felt healthy, brave or foolhardy enough to turn Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
#Beethoven250 is in full swing at the Barbican. Like most venues, they are keen to show a different side to the composer in his jubilee year. And the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives ticks all sorts of anniversary boxes. The work is utterly obscure - not a single one of the musicians this evening had performed it before - but it’s large-scale and ambitious, with plenty of opportunities to shine, especially for the chorus and soloists. It was paired with Berg’s Violin Concerto, played by Lisa Batiashvili, an equally virtuosic performance, though of a more subdued work. An ideal balance. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Alina Ibragimova’s solo journey (in 2015) through the peaks and abysses of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas gave me vivid Proms memories to treasure for a lifetime. The Russian-born violinist’s Bach abounds in both majesty and tenderness, as well as a consuming fire of intensity when the music so demands. She brought something of the same quality to her performance last night of Mendelssohn’s E minor concerto at the Barbican. Nathalie Stutzmann conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a menu of well-seasoned 19th-century favourites that began with generous chunks of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Read more ...