Southbank Centre
Gavin Dixon
It’s Beethoven with everything for 2020, the composer’s 250th anniversary year. But the London Philharmonic has devised an interesting approach for their Beethoven-themed programming. “2020 Vision” is a series of concerts which couple a work by Beethoven, or occasionally one of his contemporaries, with a piece written 100 years later and another written 200 years later. The result is a series of gloriously eclectic programmes, not least for the obscurity of the later works chosen. In this opening concert, Beethoven’s First Symphony (1801) was followed by Snatches of a Conversation (2001) by Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Visiting conductor Mark Wigglesworth is a good match for the Royal Philharmonic. The orchestra’s repertoire is usually at the popular end of the spectrum, so they know how to make the most of a good tune. Wigglesworth gives the players the space to phrase and shape the music, but his approach is more about drama and discipline. That’s a great musical virtue, but it’s hardly glamorous. Fortunately, pianist Khatia Buniatishvili was on hand to provide charisma and pizzazz in an electric performance of the Liszt Second Piano Concerto.To begin, Walton’s Portsmouth Point Overture. It’s a great Read more ...
David Nice
Of Wagner's four Ring operas, Siegfried poses the biggest casting problem. Most heroic tenors with the lungs to last the evening are not going to be ideal incarnations of the stroppy adolescent who learns and fights his way through an often nightmarish fairy-tale landscape. Torsten Kerl, not an agile mover to say the least, certainly wasn't. But complemented by similarly strong vocal performances of varying degrees of dramatic expressivity, and above all perfectly supported by the iridescent safety net of the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, who show clarity of Read more ...
David Nice
In Beethoven anniversary year, there will probably be many more "Moonlight"s, meaning the Sonata, than the real thing (though we've been lucky to see the crescent in close conjunction with Venus these past two nights). Not many pianists would dare to place it at the beginning of a programme. Denis Kozhukhin's paradoxically no-nonsense poetry meant that a constant sense of motion culminated in the whirlwind of the finale, a steady move towards implosion mirrored in the piano transcription of Ravel's La Valse at the end of the programme. In between came perfection in the form of pure song from Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Concert programmes that set out to tell us a story can prove a mixed blessing. Yes, it’s valuable and stimulating to find ideas, and narratives, embodied in the musical flow. But great pieces, well-performed, have a habit of cutting loose from the frame of concepts someone has devised for them. At the Royal Festival Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia gathered three singular, idiosyncratic works under the rubric of “Voices of 1945”. No ordinary year, of course: immediately, the title primed us to listen for after-echoes – direct or oblique – of the conflict that had lately shattered Read more ...
David Nice
Horns fanfared, coasted and chorused through yet another Philharmonia winner of a concert to match the impressive planning of its Weimar season last year and no doubt a plan close to the heart of principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who started his musical life as a horn-player. Between the dark-woods harmonies of Weber's Overture to Der Freischütz and the scampery of Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, the orchestra's former first horn Richard Watkins perfected his way – or, to paraphrase the simile of horn-playing by another top exponent, Barry Tuckwell, drove his car sleekly on black ice – Read more ...
David Nice
Admirable as it was of the London Philharmonic Orchestra to launch its concerts in 2020 with a performance celebrating the Ravi Shankar centenary, the hard fact remains that this lively spectacle might have worked better without two-thirds of its players. The often thick scoring of Sukanya, fine for the Kathak dance sequences vibrantly choreographed by Gauri Diwakar, meant that the operatic voices needed amplifying, and that often resulted in hard edges where the music suggested a luminous or vibrant spirituality.Still, Sukanya should be here to stay, and would reach larger audiences around Read more ...
Susanna Hurrell
In 2010, my best friend and I made a whimsical decision to go backpacking in India over the Easter break. I had developed an interest in Eastern philosophy through exposure to the teachings of the ancient Vedas, and through the practice of Transcendental Meditation, so I jumped on the opportunity to experience the culture that gave birth to so much wisdom and ancient knowledge.I went with stars in my eyes and was shocked to discover it was nothing like the romantic India of my imagination. It was louder, more aggressive, more heavily polluted and far more chaotic. On our first night, in a run Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 10 years this month since Kate McGarrigle gave her last concert, the annual Christmas concert that meant so much to her, at the Royal Albert Hall. Next month, 18 January, marks the first decade since her passing at the tragically early age of 63. So this year’s seasonal celebration was always going to be poignant and extra-special, as Rufus Wainwright, the elder of her two children with Loudon Wainwright III, noted at the outset.The concert was billed as "Rufus and Martha Wainwright – A Not So Silent Night", and the siblings ran the show with musical director Dan Gillespie Sells, Read more ...
David Nice
Music and visual art, at least at the highest level, should go their own separate ways; put them together, and one form will always be subordinate to the other. A composer being inspired by an artist's work, or vice versa, is something else altogether. Last night at the Southbank Centre gave the perfect context to appreciate the exchange – charged up from the Bridget Riley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, reviewed on theartsdesk with appropriate wonderment by Florence Hallett, you could walk the shortest of distances to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to hear what the equally astonishing Austrian Read more ...
David Nice
"Sadler's Wells! Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman?," a cheery bus conductor is alleged to have called out around the time of this towering masterpiece's premiere in 1945. The side of a "Grimes bus" today would probably proclaim over Britten and the work itself the "brand" of two stalwart perfomers - conductor Edward Gardner and leading protagonist Stuart Skelton, dominant forces of the opera over the last ten years.With English National Opera and more recently presenting his Bergen Philharmonic as one of the finest orchestras in the world - last night's concert performance Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Given the number of audience members playing air-piano along with parts of Pictures at an Exhibition, Behzod Abduraimov should perhaps be described as a pianist’s pianist. He is nevertheless a great deal more than that. Ten years ago this young musician from Uzbekistan, via Kansas City, emerged victorious from the last-ever London International Piano Competition; he was 18 then and if his artistic growth thus far is anything to go by, we are dealing here with a rare and enchanting musician.Having chosen what appeared to be a programme of miniatures, he made each set of pieces a cohesive Read more ...