Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
A weekend of extremes at the Proms took us from stark solo Bach on Saturday to the massed forces of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, gathered under Donald Runnicles for Verdi’s Requiem. As a showcase for the kinds of repertoire the awkward Royal Albert Hall really does do well, it was pretty nigh perfect.It’s always good (and far too rare) to see Donald Runnicles in London. The chief conductor of the BBCSSO announced his arrival by immediately wrong-footing his audience. Refusing to fulfil the promise and expectation of his massed musical forces Read more ...
David Nice
It only takes one outstanding musician with links to an out-of-the-way place to gather his or her top-notch friends and give a mini-festival of international quality. They’re springing up all over the UK: guiding lights that come to mind are violinist Anthony Marwood in Peasmarsh and tenor Toby Spence at Wardsbrook Farm. Now another leading British tenor, Ben Johnson, has set up a Young Artists' Programme and a band of the brightest and best young string players in the village of Southrepps, less than two miles from the beautiful North Norfolk coast. What I heard in two of the seven concerts Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
What would you expect of an ensemble performance played from memory? That the odd lapse, entirely understandable over the span of a 40-minute symphony, would be more than offset, perhaps, by gains in intimacy and flexibility as the players could look around and phrase together, respond to a conductor’s nudge and turn on a sixpence.In the event, the Aurora Orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony didn’t turn out like that. It was fast, loud, not quite together and not very well in tune. The tempi weren’t problematic in themselves, close to the composer’s metronome marks and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
While Friday night’s triptych of solo Bach began and ended in a sombre, contemplative place, the arc created for the second sequence by pairing the final sonata for solo violin with the second and third partitas is altogether more dramatic. In Ibragimova’s ordering we opened with the monolithic D minor Partita, warming through the C major Sonata before ending joyfully with the E major Partita.As a complete cycle of six works it makes sense, treating the D minor, with its weighty Chaconne, as the central point of climax. In terms of performance, however, it left Ibragimova faced with the task Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
I can’t be alone in often leaving a Proms violin concerto convinced that the Bach encore was the best bit. The Royal Albert Hall is a chameleon space, capable of dwarfing the largest orchestra and muting the weightiest of Wagnerian singers, but also of amplifying solo performances, lending them a clarity, an intimacy, unique to this unlikely venue. It’s a well-documented phenomenon, which makes it all the more surprising that so many of Bach’s solo works for violin are receiving their complete Proms premiere this weekend.2015 is the year of solo Bach at the Proms. Schiff’s Goldberg Variations Read more ...
graham.rickson
Reich: Music for 18 Musicians Ensemble Signal/Brad Lubman (Harmonia Mundi)Playing Steve Reich's music demands incredible precision and accuracy. You wonder whether the ideal Reich recording could be realised in a studio, using sequencers, samplers and loops. The intent would be missing, of course, and this fantastic new account of Music for 18 Musicians demonstrates just how much performers can bring to a score. This is the best performance of a Reich piece I've heard. It sparkles and glitters. The different instrumental strands are brilliantly delineated. Harmonia Mundi's sleeve art is Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Roger Wright may be gone from the BBC Proms, replaced for now by a committee, but his legacy lives on. His zeal to recover areas of English musical culture that may be considered the festival’s birthright resulted last night in a first Proms performance of Sancta Civitas, which Vaughan Williams late in life accounted the favourite of his choral works.Not so much unperformable as unprogrammable, Sancta Civitas (1923-5) requires forces hardly shy of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, yet lasts barely half an hour – or a little longer than that in this solemnly monumental if well-prepared performance, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Gergiev’s programme for this concert raised eyebrows when the Proms were announced: all five Prokofiev piano concertos, presented in chronological order, over the course of a long evening. As it turned out, he had some good reasons for his plan. The three Russian pianists he lined up – Daniil Trifonov (Concertos 1 and 3), Sergei Babayan (2 and 5), and Alexei Volodin (4) – had between them the talent to carry any programme. And the composer benefited too, with his Fourth and Fifth Concertos, both difficult works to programme, finding a natural home, and both appearing for the first time at the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
In his memoir As I Remember Arthur Bliss is reticent about his experiences on the Western Front. He describes his “purely automatic” impulse to enlist in August 1914, and later recounts the nightmares that troubled his sleep for a decade after the Armistice. He barely touches upon the injury that felled him on the first day of the Somme, the experience of being gassed late in 1918, or indeed the death in battle of his beloved younger brother Kennard – describing an unending sense of loss in a single paragraph.And yet, he writes, “I cannot make a logical sense of my life without depicting 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
A packed Albert Hall told an instructive story: programme Holst’s The Planets at the Proms and you can dare to do anything in the first half. Besides, though it will be a red letter day when we don’t have to put “women” in front of “conductors”, the Marin Alsop Last Night effect may have kindled interest in Susanna Mälkki, top of a still too-small list from the two concerts I’ve heard her give with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Mälkki seems just as authoritative in mainstream romantic and 20th century scores as she is in thornier so-called contemporary music (she spent seven years with Ensemble Read more ...
David Nice
From now until 12 September, when Wigmore darling Iestyn Davies returns to open the new season, the biggest names in instrumental music are to be heard in the biggest venue, the Albert Hall. With all eyes and ears turned by maximum publicity towards the Proms, folk may have forgotten that the Wigmore Hall concerts were ongoing until last night. The finale was unexpectedly spectacular: while Leif Ove Andsnes was offering pure spring-water Beethoven over in South Kensington, young Israeli pianist Matan Porat served a hard-hitting cocktail of a programme, beginning and ending with fireworks but Read more ...