Simon Rattle
graham.rickson
This week we've a glittering, shimmering ballet score with an aquatic theme, and a brilliant British pianist shows off his compositional skills. Plus, in a week where we all need cheering up, 20th-century music's scariest genius shows that he had a fully developed sense of humour.Other Love Songs: Songs by Brahms and Stephen Hough, The Prince Consort (Linn)Brahms at his most genial is paired with a new song cycle written by polymath British pianist Stephen Hough. He’s a treasure – one of the best virtuoso pianists around, as anyone who’s heard his Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov recordings Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There was a macabre irony at the heart of this final concert in the CBSO’s Mahler cycle in Symphony Hall. Everything was back to front. It started with a Resurrection and ended with a death. Like the universe, it began with a bang and ended, Eliot-fashion, with a whimper. And the Resurrection wasn’t even Mahler’s (that happened last month), but Messiaen’s: his Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, a work which reduces redemption to sounding brass and crashing gongs. Mahler’s was the death, in the wild and haunting shape of his Song of the Earth, not his last work but in many ways his truest Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Simon Rattle's intriguing return to the London Symphony Orchestra podium after years away threw up a curious thought: what happens after Berlin? The fate of six of his eight predecessors at the Berlin Phil has been death on the job. Was last night a first step to finding another way out? Were we witnessing an early bit of courtship and re-familiarisation with a possible post-Berlin playmate? It certainly had all the hallmarks of an early date between old friends, with its bouts of overenthusiastic passion and moments of awkward fumbling.But what an intense programme to kickstart a Read more ...
David Nice
Sir Simon Rattle's clever programming struck again last night, showing us that musical neoclassicism - for want of a better word, which would be something like neo-everything - didn't begin with Stravinsky, whose Apollo ballet is surely his most elevated set of gestures to the past. Tchaikovsky, the rococo twiddles of whose complete Nutcracker this team seems to have enjoyed so much on a recent recording, would probably take the palm, though Mahler, of all composers, will do, too. At least, his Fourth Symphony begins that way. And soon there was more music not of this world to match Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Anything anyone else can do, we can do better, seemed the mantra last night. It's probably a bit churlish to accuse the finest orchestra in the world of arrogance - surely that's their job? But the first night of the Berlin Philharmonic's four-day stay in London (yesterday, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, tonight and tomorrow, the Barbican), in which three of the four pieces required conductorless chamber ensembles, did seem decidedly show-offy. Can these very fine orchestral members really rattle off a quartet as well as a symphony? Not without Simon Rattle, they can't.That's not to say that Read more ...
stephen.walsh
My abiding memory of the Berlin Philharmonic’s second Prom under Sir Simon Rattle on Saturday will be of 6,000 people listening with rapt, or at any rate silent, concentration to Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. Has it ever happened before? Perhaps in Boulez’s day, though I’m not sure even he ever filled this hall for these particular composers. And what does it signify? That we were the stragglers who failed to get tickets for the previous evening’s Beethoven and Mahler? That we would put up with anything to hear Karita Mattila sing Strauss’s Four Last Songs? Or possibly that, after a Read more ...
David Nice
Call me a paradoxically wary old Mahler nut, but I reckon that given 24 months of anniversary overkill, it might keep things fresh to catch each of the symphonies live no more than once a year. So, having heard an Everest of a First Symphony from Abbado in Lucerne last August, I thought Rattle's might be the team likeliest to do this far-from-beginner's symphony similar justice. Did its Proms Mahler One compare well with the Swiss festival love-in? In terms of orchestral sophistication and dynamic range, certainly. As for cumulative impact, ease of phrasing and the ultimate electric charge, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 1860 Wagner sent a full score of his recently published Tristan und Isolde to Berlioz, inscribing it: “To the great and dear composer of Roméo et Juliette, from the grateful composer of Tristan und Isolde.” The bonds between these two works go far beyond emotion, as last night’s inspired piece of programming from Simon Rattle and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment proved. A phalanx of nine double basses watching over the swollen orchestral forces of the OAE set the tone for an evening whose “authenticity” was anything but dusty.Six years after their triumphant Rhinegold, the Read more ...
kate.connolly
"It was only on Monday afternoon that the final scores of three of the movements were put into my hands," says Sir Simon Rattle, chuckling at the memory and casting a mock glance of disapproval at the composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis who is sitting next to him looking rather sheepish. "It makes us realise that composers are human beings just like we are," the conductor adds. "I'm just praying I get all my tempos right by tonight."Even by the usual stressful standards of world premieres, the run-up to this one was a particularly nail-biting affair. I attended the dress rehearsal for Read more ...