Classical music
Jasper Parrott
Fiftieth anniversary? It seems incredible but also so exhilarating not least because these times we live in now seem to me to be a golden age for music of all kinds and in particular for what we label so inadequately classical music. This flowering is all the more significant and exciting as we see politics and governments around the world set on courses which can only damage and undermine the environments in which what is best about human talent and endeavour - and especially for young people and even more for children and the very young - should be encouraged to thrive.It is sobering Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphony No 3, Dvořák: Symphony No 8 Bamberger Symphoniker/Jakub Hruša (Tudor)Brahms 3 and Dvořák 8 make for an interesting pairing: Brahms at his most autumnal and introspective coupled with Dvořák in ebullient mood. There's a useful interview with Jakub Hruša in this release’s booklet where he describes the differences between the two symphonies and the challenges of performing them in the same concert. Hruša is a serious, thoughtful conductor and it's no surprise that the Brahms suits him so well. He gets the first movement’s opening just right, and how good to hear the low Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Second performances are even more valuable than premieres, composers say, when it comes to launching a piece into the world. Spare a thought, then, for Jan Ladislav Dussek, who has had to wait over two centuries for this prize to be awarded to his Mass in G – really, a Missa solemnis – of a scale to rival Beethoven’s example. It was revived last night for the first time since its premiere in 1811 with exemplary spirit and dedication by Academy of Ancient Music forces under Richard Egarr.Like Beethoven, Dussek was a composer primarily for and at the piano. He flourished as a touring virtuoso Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s nothing like practising what you preach. “I say straight out that I regard all so-called 12-tone music, so-called serial music, so-called electronic music and so-called avant-garde music as utter rubbish, and indeed a deliberate conning of the public” said the composer Ruth Gipps to her biographer Jill Halstead. And sure enough, her Second Symphony – premiered by the then City of Birmingham Orchestra in 1946, and the opening item in this fascinatingly left-field programme from Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla – is unmistakably the work of what Arnold Bax would have called a “brazen Romantic”.It’s Read more ...
Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva
We’ve been friends for many years, since the mid-1990s when we were both studying at the Royal College of Music with the same inspirational piano teacher, Irina Zaritskaya. Our first duo performance was in 2001 at the Homecoming Festival in Moscow, when we realised we clicked musically. Things gradually developed from that point onwards with more festival appearances alongside our solo careers.Having both played at many festivals over the years, we found that one in particular really made its mark – Finghin Collins's New Ross Piano Festival. We first performed there in 2011 and loved the Read more ...
David Nice
You can't expect a full house when the only work approaching a repertoire staple on your programme is Berg's Lulu Suite. Yet Esa-Pekka Salonen was able to serve up what must count as one of the most enthralling Philharmonia programmes ever at the Southbank Centre simply by spotlighting four different styles surfacing in the anything-goes musical world of Weimar Germany. It's just a pity there weren't more people, indeed more young people, there to hear it, and that BBC Radio 3 wasn't on hand to broadcast it.You could even see it as part of a mini-festival within the series, that superb total Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Kings Place Hall One is a slightly strange venue, its small stage size seeming out of proportion for the dimensions of the room. It means only a chamber orchestra can fit on stage – and even then they often look uncomfortably squashed, especially with a piano for company. But making a virtue of this constraint, Aurora Orchestra has presented a five-year survey of Mozart piano concertos as chamber pieces, accompanied by wide-ranging repertoire from Bach to Ligeti. But where the programming has been innovative, and the small forces provide an interesting perspective, the disappointment last Read more ...
David Nice
Throughout his 11 years as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra to date, Vladimir Jurowski has focused on two elements, programme-wise: tellingly-linked concerts of the rich and rare, and fine-tuned interpretations of the repertoire's cornerstones over the seasons. Next month he'll be reprising his meticulously calibrated view of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony; last night it was again the turn of Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique" - an absolute pinnacle of depth and discipline, building on the sound which stunned us when the team unfolded Russian rarities at the Proms, but also Read more ...
graham.rickson
Floating Islands: Guitar music by Axel Borup-Jørgensen Frederik Munk Larsen (guitar) (OUR Recordings)Carl Nielsen cast a long shadow over the generation of Danish composers who succeeded him, and there's mention here of post-war musicians trying to reconcile “Danishness” with modernity. One of them was Axel Borup-Jørgensen, a maverick modernist who ploughed a very individual furrow from the late 1940s until his death in 2012. I’d urge anyone curious to seek out the OUR label’s glorious Marin, a lavish visual take on one of Borup-Jørgensen’s more extravagant orchestral pieces. Then buy Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The mid-1930s, when the Nazi government replaced the Weimar republic, was a bleak time for the composers featured in last night’s Philharmonia concert. Arnold Schoenberg was the first to leave for the US, followed by Paul Hindemith in 1938. Alban Berg avoided emigration only by the extreme measure of dying, suddenly, in 1935. But the music they were writing was not bleak, even when marking the death of a teenage "angel".The three composers shared something else apart from the disfavour of the Nazis: a veneration of J.S. Bach, and this was the thread that bound together the first half. Read more ...
Simon Halsey
I was greatly privileged to know Sir Michael Tippett and to chorus-master his recording of A Child of Our Time. In my childhood, the two giants of English composition were “Tippett and Britten” - in that order. Since their deaths, Britten has flourished internationally and Tippett has slipped back a bit in the public consciousness. I hope the new Tippett biography by Oliver Soden will help rectify this.As a teenager, I loved Tippett’s early works. My favourite LP was a Marriner/ASMF Argo disc of his string music. And I was knocked sideways by my first encounter with the opera King Priam Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata’s series of in-concert recordings featuring Mozart piano concertos with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is well under way now, and this programme, like others before it, included a couple of his opera overtures too. Why so? "Because all Mozart piano concertos are also mini-operas," to quote Camerata music director Gábor Takács-Nagy, who likes talking to his audiences about what he and his fellow-musicians are up to.Fair point – at least, it’s almost a truism that Mozart often introduces his themes as if they were full-fledged characters unveiling their personalities, that his Read more ...