Strauss
Gavin Dixon
“A rich and eclectic sequence of works” was the promise made in this evening’s concert programme. It certainly was that, with the Last Night festivities taking in new and old, well-known and obscure, plus a handful of celebrity soloists for good measure. The audience was predictably ebullient, generating the kind of atmosphere you only get at the Last Night of the Proms. Musically, though, this wasn’t the high point of the season – everything was at least serviceable, and much was very good, but only occasionally did it meet the exceptional standards set in this hall over the last few weeks Read more ...
David Nice
In 1989 Neeme Järvi, already rated one of the world’s top conductors and soon to be voted “Estonian of the Century” by his compatriots, returned with his Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra to the homeland he had left for America nearly a decade earlier. I went with them then, and to experience a free Estonia 26 years later was a bracing surprise.Under Soviet rule, there had been violence on the streets and Järvi had departed prematurely in secrecy, fearing detention. Now “the little country that could”, as a former Prime Minister has called it, is so relaxed, productive and happy that Putin’s Read more ...
David Nice
In a curious deal, two operatic card games were running almost simultaneously last night. At the London Coliseum, Tchaikovsky’s outsider Hermann was gambling for his life on three hands of Faro in The Queen of Spades, while in home counties countryside, Robert Storch aka Richard Strauss thought he was relaxing from a performance with a nice game of Skat when in comes a telegram from his tricky spouse Christine, aka Pauline Strauss, unsigned as usual, accusing him of adultery.The Skat game (pictured below) is probably the first thing opera lovers who haven’t seen or heard it know about Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Songs of Vienna” by the Britten Sinfonia turned out to be a concert of chamber works, with never more than six performers on the stage at any time. It was built around two appearances by the Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, who performed pieces with voice by Chausson and Schoenberg. They are clearly part of her core repertoire, and she sings them with passion and from memory.The rest was something of a rag-bag: curiosities from the juvenilia of Mahler, Schoenberg and Richard Strauss, plus a couple of the pieces from the Second Viennese School's music for private performances: a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Visits by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra are always an adrenaline boost for musical life in London, and yesterday evening was no exception. The first concert in their brief residency took in Finnish, French and German music (plus one Russian piece – the big Swan Lake waltz for an encore), all presented with a distinctly American accent. This is an orchestra that trades in big sounds, delivered with clarity and confidence. It is a seductive combination, and while subtleties were often overlooked, they were rarely lamented for long, as the sheer joy of the music-making swept you along.Esa- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dohnányi: Variations on a Nursery Song, Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto no 1, Strauss: Burleske Valerie Tryon (piano), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Jac van Steen (Somm)This entertaining, well-filled disc collects three works which, if they were programmed more frequently, should fill concert halls. The pick of them is Dohnányi's inventive, unpretentious Variations on a Nursery Song – a piece which throws up fresh surprises with each listen. The best joke comes near the beginning, as a brooding, doom-filled opening slyly introduces the theme, Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman. Fourteen variations Read more ...
David Nice
When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been of such a vintage that I couldn’t possibly choose the best out of six fully-staged productions – three of them from our only native director of genius, Richard Jones, who as one of his favourite singers, Susan Bullock, put it to me, deserves every gong going – and one concert performance.Fortunately I didn’t need to lean too hard on my Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There have been legendary conductors, and then there was Herbert von Karajan. He was a colossus of post-World War Two classical music, equipped with fearsome technical mastery allied to a vaguely supernatural gift for extracting exquisite sounds from orchestras. But that wasn't all. An expert skier with a passion for high-performance cars and flying his own jet, he was as charismatic as a movie star or sporting idol.John Bridcut's superb profile surveyed the Salzburg-born Karajan as if he were Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn, considering the contradictions in his character as though studying Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphonies 1-4, Piano Concertos 1 and 2, Violin Concerto Staatskapelle Dresden/Christian Thielemann with Maurizio Pollini (piano) and Lisa Batiashvili (violin) (DG)Another nicely packaged, reasonably priced Brahms box hits the shelves. DVDs of these symphony performances have already been issued, but the concertos (now contained here on a single DVD), have previously appeared on CD. All a bit irritating – why couldn't DG have stuck to the same format for the whole lot? Carping aside, these are extremely enjoyable, cogent readings. Riccardo Chailly's recent Leipzig Brahms cycle fully Read more ...
David Nice
Had the BBC Symphony Orchestra been at full stretch, rather than in the neoclassical and otherwise selective formations of last night’s concert, it might have outnumbered the live audience. Perhaps I exaggerate, but not much; this was never going to be a box-office hit. A big-name soloist might have made a difference. But just about every orchestral principal last night was a star, thanks to the cornucopia of solos in Respighi’s Trittico botticelliano and Strauss’s Suite from Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Besides, the programming was clever and satisfying, no doubt about it, with the blue skies Read more ...
graham.rickson
Andrzej Panufnik: String Quartets 1-3, Lutosławski: String Quartet Tippett Quartet (Naxos)Andrzej Panufnik and Witold Lutosławski were close friends, the two men famously earning a living playing piano duets in war-ravaged Warsaw. Panufnik emigrated to the UK in the 1950s, while Lutosławski remained in Poland until his death. Having their respective quartets collected on a single disc makes for interesting listening, with Lutosławski's 1965 String Quartet the most obviously radical work here. It was delivered to early performers as a set of parts, with no score – Lutosławski not wanting Read more ...
David Nice
When I entered the light and spacious chief conductor’s room in Bamberg’s Konzerthalle, Jonathan Nott was poised with a coloured pencil over one of the toughest of 20th century scores, Varèse’s Arcana. He thought he might have bitten off rather a lot to chew the day after that night’s Bamberg programme of Jörg Widmann’s Violin Concerto, Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie and a new commission as part of the orchestra’s new Encore! project, David Philip Hefti’s con moto.An Amsterdam Concertgebouw special beckoned, a large-scale throwback to Nott’s days at the head of the Asko Ensemble and the Read more ...