Classical music
Robert Beale
“Mozart, made in Manchester”, the project to perform and record an edition of the piano concertos plus all the opera overtures, seemed a distant destination and an unlikely marathon when Manchester Camerata embarked on it eight years ago.But with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Gábor Takács-Nagy sticking with it through thick and thin (including Covid), they got to the final tape last night at the Stoller Hall in Chetham’s School of Music. The hall didn’t even exist when it all began: the first performances were at the Royal Northern College of Music. But the idea has slowly taken flight and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The high level of entries for this year’s Leeds Piano Competition – 366, almost twice the number who entered in 2018 – is just one reminder that any young pianist wanting to make their name today is negotiating shark-infested waters. Technical excellence is a given – if you want to make a living, you need to have something extra to win the support of concert halls and critics.When I first see the 25-year-old Lithuanian Ignas Maknickas (the ‘c’ is pronounced ‘ts’) in St James Park, he doesn’t look as if he’s suffering too badly from the pressure – he’s tapping idly on his phone while surveying Read more ...
Robert Beale
A little piece of musical history was made last night at Manchester Chamber Concerts Society’s season-opening concert. Two of the greatest pianists of their generation, who met at the Royal Northern College of Music, celebrated the 50th anniversary of their first collaboration there. Peter Donohoe and Martin Roscoe played duets for two pianos: they’ve done it throughout their careers, and in Donohoe’s case with other celebrated partners. But there was a special chemistry between the two old friends that made for a magical evening.Their first appearance on the same platform was actually Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
It takes stiff competition to outshine Yuja Wang, who last night at the Barbican complemented her spangled silver sheath with a disconcerting pair of shades. But the super-heroine pianist, who played Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, turned out to contribute the (comparatively) restrained and low-key element of a London Symphony Orchestra programme that culminated in a wall-shaking performance of Saint-Saëns’ "Organ" Symphony, with Anna Lapwood at the manuals.In this, the third of Sir Antonio Pappano’s opening quartet of the LSO season’s concerts, glittering (or thunderous) panache of Read more ...
David Nice
A happy, lucid and bright pianist, a forbidding Everest among piano sonatas: would Boris Giltburg follow a bewitching, ceaselessly engaging first half by rising to the challenge of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” - a title he suggests, in his series of first-rate online essays about the sonatas, might be replaced more appropriately with “Titanic”?Absolutely; the focus and stamina were such that a sinking would have been impossible. Any difficulties rest with us, and I confess I have a problem with the biggest movements. Like much in late Beethoven, the material sometimes seems to elude easy grasp Read more ...
graham.rickson
Passage Secret – music by Bizet, Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Aubert Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle (piano duet) (Alpha Classics)There are many reasons to acquire this disc of French piano duets, one being the inclusion of the Feuille d’images by one Louis Aubert (1877-1968). A composer, pianist and teacher, Aubert sang the “Pie Jesu” in early performances of Fauré’s Requiem, and Ravel dedicated the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales to him. Auber’s delightful five-movement work is ripe for rediscovery, one of its quirks being the technical demands of the lower duet part, the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Out of emergencies may come revelations. Sir András Schiff has broken his leg, and we wish him a super-speedy recovery. At the Proms, his promised Art of Fugue will have to wait. Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, a past winner of the Chopin Prize, stepped in yesterday with a late-night recital programme that at first glance could hardly have looked more alien to the austere grandeur of Bach’s contrapuntal epic.Cho followed three pieces from Ravel’s Miroirs with the second book, “Italie”, of Liszt’s rhapsodic musical scrapbook of his travels of the 1840s, Années de Pèlerinage. The first revelation Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Hauntings, memories, echoes: Antonio Pappano has started his official tenure as chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra by looking back in time. Wednesday’s season opener gave us a MacMillan premiere “haunted by earlier musical spirits and memories”. Last night’s follow-up picked up the thread with the Elgar Violin Concerto – a work alive with stirrings and rustlings just out of sight, recollections that drift in and out of view, a human soul “enshrined” in its strange, otherworldly musings. Before you can launch a new era, after all, you need to put the ghosts of the musical past to Read more ...
David Nice
Somehow those of us required to translate the musical experience into words look for the moments which defeat us. One such was the extraordinary sound of muted first violins and cellos at the start of the second movement in Sibelius’s First Symphony last night. Pinpointing its essence feels impossible, but it could only have come from the London Symphony Orchestra’s special relationship with its new Chief Conductor Antonio Pappano.It can’t have been planned at the time of the commission, but an alliance was forged between the Sibelius symphony and the new work on the programme, James Read more ...
Alexandra Dariescu
This year, I am delighted to be supporting the Alexandra Dariescu Award at the Leeds International Piano Competition for an outstanding performance of a work by a female composer. This marks a significant milestone in the 60-year history of The Leeds, as it is the first year a piano concerto by a female composer has been added to the repertoire of the Concerto Final round with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.Clara Wieck-Schumann's Piano Concerto (the composer/pianist pictured below) has garnered much attention in recent years, and I am hopeful that you will discover and love it Read more ...
David Nice
The Proms’ Indian summer of big visiting orchestras is over – and what a parade it’s been – but renewal hit on the last Saturday before the Last Night with a rainbow of choral concerts, from the 26 voices of The Sixteen (yes, counter-intuitive, I know) and the 33 of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers to 250 from six choirs as crisp as a small ensemble under John Butt in a Messiah with a difference.Parry’s “I Was Glad” made sense as the beginning of the end, in a good way (though with some rather bizarre organ stops pulled out by Simon Johnson). It was always the choice for my church choir’s last Read more ...
David Nice
Mahler’s Sixth is one of those apocalyptic megaliths that shouldn’t be approached too often by audiences or conductors. It’s been a constant in Simon Rattle’s treasury since 1989, when he first recorded it with his City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (they performed it together at the Proms in 1995) to now, when the second of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra concerts followed a recording. Sophisticated, yes, but where was the feral intensity?Perhaps we've just now been spoiled at the Proms by two conductors who seem so mesmerisingly immersed in every moment. Rattle's Mahler no longer Read more ...