Lutosławski
Classical CDs: Fringes, canons and contestsSaturday, 27 January 2024
Leif Ove Andsnes: The Warner Classics Edition 1990-2010 (Warner Classics)It’s good to review a compendious box set celebrating a musician who’s very much still around. The 36 discs in this set certainly aren’t what you’d call historical... Read more... |
Classical CDs: mediation, survival and the conquering of shynessSaturday, 11 June 2022
Karel Ančerl: Live Recordings (Supraphon)Karel Ančerl’s nascent conducting career was interrupted by World War II, Ančerl and his family being sent to the Theresienstadt camp in 1942. Two years later, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz.... Read more... |
Prom 34: Argerich, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Barenboim review - erratic star, sleek ensembleTuesday, 13 August 2019
Perhaps those who came for the Argerich touch and left at the interval of this instant-sellout Prom were satisfied. After all, the legendary Argentinian pianist gave us some vintage minutes of her silk-spinning mercurialism. Yet it was in the midst... Read more... |
Orchestra of Opera North, Farnes, Leeds Town HallSunday, 06 December 2015
The few ensemble lapses and moments of insecurity during the first half of this concert had nothing to do with Richard Farnes’s conducting, or with the playing of an augmented Orchestra of Opera North. It’s in rude health; Farnes has refined and... Read more... |
High Society, Old Vic TheatreFriday, 15 May 2015
It took approximately 30 years for High Society to first make its laborious transition from screen to stage and there are good reasons for that. The indelible impression left by the movie and its star, Grace Kelly, was undoubtedly the biggest, and... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Lutosławski, Szymanowski, Jórunn Viðar, The Revolutionary Drawing RoomSaturday, 02 May 2015
Lutosławski: Concerto for Orchestra, Szymanowski: Three Fragments from Poems by Jan Kasprowicz Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Alexander Liebreich, with Ewa Podleś (contralto) (Accentus Music)I've never come across a lousy recorded... Read more... |
Moser, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Michail Jurowski, Royal Festival HallThursday, 31 October 2013
Imagine how discombobulated the audience must have felt at the 1962 premiere of Shostakovich’s most outlandish monster symphony, the Fourth, 26 years after its withdrawal at the rehearsal stage. Those of us hearing its natural successor, Schnittke’s... Read more... |
Mørk, Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen, Royal Festival HallFriday, 08 March 2013
Curious and curiouser. Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto, centrepiece of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s latest Philharmonia concert celebrating the Polish master’s centenary, adds ballast to the idea that the composer, like Schoenberg and Tippett, burrowed into a... Read more... |
Zimerman, Philharmonia, Salonen, Royal Festival HallThursday, 31 January 2013
The centenary bandwagon always passes some composers by: how many organisations in Britain will be celebrating George Lloyd or Tikhon Khrennikov? Other figures almost get steamrollered flat with attention; Britten, I’d say, is this year’s likely... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Memories of LutosławskiSaturday, 26 January 2013
While the history of 20th-century music is undoubtedly the history of the 20th century – from the decadent expressionism of fin-de-siècle Berlin to the imagined surrealist worlds of 1920s Paris – few composers lived or wrote the century quite as... Read more... |
Best of 2012: Top 12 Classical CDsSaturday, 15 December 2012
Listening to a recording can never replace the joys of live performance. But if you don’t live in London, opportunities to explore quirky new repertoire can be thin on the ground. CDs most often excel as introductions to composers and works that you... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Lutosławski, Mahler, SalonenSaturday, 08 December 2012
Lutosławski: Orchestral Works III Paul Watkins (cello), BBC Symphony Orchestra/Edward Gardner (Chandos)If your passing acquaintance with Lutosławski’s output goes no further than the masterly early Concerto for Orchestra, the 1950 Mała Suite... Read more... |
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