Southbank Centre
Tim Cumming
The penultimate concert in the eclectic and impressive K-Music Festival of contemporary Korean music on Monday at the Purcell Room featured some of the most exquisite and affecting performances of the season, with the traditional Gayageum stringed instrument paired with an effects-laden, ambient-cum-exploratory jazz quartet featuring one of the most distinctive and arresting drummers anywhere, making remarkable music from her kit (shimmering cymbal solos, anyone?). K-Music tends towards surprising as well as enthralling its audiences, and that was certainly the case here.In 2016, solo Read more ...
David Nice
How many times have you heard live in concert a concerto for string quartet and instrumental ensemble? In my case, three, all of the occasions performances of John Adams's Beethoven-based giant scherzo Absolute Jest. Two more got added to the list last night in Vladimir Jurowski's typically rich and rare compendium which ticked quite a few boxes: as a showcase for strings, wind and brass respectively; as centenary homage to an independent Czechoslavakia; and (though this was not acknowledged in the programme) as a reminder that it was 80 years ago this coming December that the first Read more ...
David Nice
Lightness and gravity in perfect equilibrium have always graced Vladimir Jurowski's Stravinsky. From his first London Rake's Progress at English National Opera, proving that he could do the delicate and translucent after his Royal Opera debut conducting Verdi's Nabucco, via the Glyndebourne revival to this, much the most strongly cast, a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert staging – direction uncredited – executed with more ingenuity than several recent productions, Jurowski's sleight of hand has been paramount. Though the finesse is remarkable, there's no need to put words like "emotion" Read more ...
Tim Cumming
The young Dublin folk trio fuse vocal harmonies with superb acoustic musicianship, primarily on cello, fiddle and Nyckelharpa. They bring together Irish and Nordic – specifically Finnish – folk traditions, building them to dizzying heights on a foundation of acoustic drones and group interplay. The trio brought their second album, Starfall, to the Southbank for the last date of a UK tour on Wednesday night. Fresh from touring their original score for Swan Lake with Teac Damsa dance troupe, they’ve also performed with The National and headlined The Gloaming fiddler Martin Hayes’ Masters Read more ...
David Nice
Latvia is fighting fit. The recent elections did not see the expected victory for the pro-Kremlin Harmony party; support for the European Union and NATO will be well represented. Last week the feisty Lavtian Ambassador to the UK, Baiba Braže, landed a perfectly diplomatic punch on the smug mug of our latest apology for a Foreign Secretary, taking former Remainer Hunt to task for his outrageous parallels between the EU and the Soviet gulag by reminding him how Latvia had suffered under the USSR and how eagerly it has adopted the best European values. And last night's second Royal Festival Hall Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
During his quarter-century in charge of the Gewandhausorchester in Leipzig, the late Kurt Masur nobly held out a musical hand of friendship and collaboration from the other side of the Iron Curtain. So how heartening to hear that the Southbank Centre has inaugurated a five-year partnership with the venerable Saxons – just when, as Bob Geldof, Simon Rattle, Ed Sheeran, John Eliot Gardiner and other celebs have warned in their recent open letter, the “serious madness” of Brexit threatens to shut British music into an East German isolation of its own.For all his versatility as a conductor, Masur Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Not all composers require the finger of mortality pointing at them to develop what becomes a late style. Charges of detachment and even indifference have been levelled at the B flat major Piano Concerto K595 which Mozart completed early in the year of his death, but Mitsuko Uchida’s playing of it on Saturday night was as refined, as weightless and translucent as her trademark silk tops.Recent analysis of the manuscript source has suggested that in fact Mozart completed most of the concerto three years earlier, around the time of the last three symphonies. Without introducing a note of false Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In an era marked by virtue-signalling, it's perhaps no surprise that Isabelle Huppert – a woman who has always gone against the grain – has opted for a little vice-signalling. Unlike other French screen icons, she is not part of the female cohort that railed against the #MeToo movement, yet she has defined herself through roles mired in moral ambiguity, not least as the video games executive who seeks revenge on her rapist in Elle (pictured below). To therefore pair Huppert with her infamously lubricious countryman, the Marquis de Sade, seems like a marriage happily forged in the Read more ...
David Nice
You can always be sure of impeccable casting and spirited playing as Ian Page takes his Classical Opera through Mozart year by year. Just don't expect more than the glimmer of genius to come in 1768, though. It doesn't matter in those admirable showcase programmes highlighting the young Amadeus alongside more mature voices of the year in question. A three-act opera is rather more a vexation to the spirit, though. If the composer had no more than a few flashes of genius in his pre- and early teens, the libretto for La finta semplice could have been written by an average 10 year old ( Read more ...
David Nice
Questions of interpretation apart, Simon Rattle has yet again proved the great connecter, this time in concerts separated by just over a month. Having set his seal on his new, galvanizing partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra by asserting, as he has since the late 1970s, that Mahler's Tenth Symphony in Deryck Cooke's performing version is the true end of that composer's quest, he returned to London on his farewell tour with the Berlin Philharmonic to test the waters of a completion from fragments, the finale of Bruckner's Ninth.Unless you buy into Robert Simpson's assertion that Read more ...
David Nice
Yes, she sang, with her trademark artistry from the very first notes – four numbers, including a duet with daughter Jacqui Dankworth, and all in close partnership with her consummate players, including son Alec on double bass. Any worries that this would just be a chat with a bit of nonagenarian crooning were quickly banished: the legend remains a warm and witty human being, capable of transfixing her audience with those flashing eyes and spontaneous laughter, and her amazing technique still serves her well in her unique, wide-range vocalising.When she performed in Michael Tilson Thomas's LSO Read more ...
David Nice
Let's face it, Robert "Cabinet of Dr Caligari" Wiene's 1926 film loosely based on Strauss and Hofmannsthal's 1911 "comedy for music" is a mostly inartistic ramble. Historically, though, it proves fascinating. The composer mostly left it to Otto Singer and Carl Alwin to cut and paste large chunks of his opera, adding four old pieces and one new one - a major contribution to the art of through-composed scoring for silent film (Shostakovich's wholly original New Babylon music came three years later). Strauss's "house poet" saw the chance to shed new light on fascinating characters and to Read more ...