Classical music
edward.seckerson
The Baltic Youth Philharmonic (founded in 2008) is part of a much larger and bolder enterprise embracing the 10 nation states bordering the Baltic Sea. At a time of financial duress when governments are downgrading culture as a low priority the BYP is forging ahead with privately funded and ever more ambitious schemes whose aim is to celebrate the national identity and cultural diversity of its members as surely as it seeks to develop unity between them.The BYP’s director, Krystjan Järvi, speaks of creating “new vibes” in order to instill an open and lively approach to music and music-making Read more ...
graham.rickson
Xavier Montsalvatge: Orchestral works BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2002) was a Catalan composer who remained true to his regional roots, resisting any stereotypical notions of what Spanish music was supposed to sound like. He was attached to the habanera, but would have pointed out that the rhythm came from Cuba and was brought to Barcelona by Catalan emigrants returning home at the start of the 20th century. Just as certain chunks of Vaughan Williams will always evoke grey skies and boiled cabbage, Montsalvatge’s music at its best suggests a piquant Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Benjamin Grosvenor made his Southbank recital debut last night in a sold-out Queen Elizabeth Hall in another milestone in his unstoppable evolution from wunderkind to fully-fledged concert star. It has been a good year for the 20-year-old pianist, during which he added a Classic Brit and two Gramophone awards to a Critics’ Circle accolade, Decca recording contract and tenure on the Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme.Back in 2004, when he won the piano section of the Young Musician of the Year at the age of 12 (losing out to a 16-year-old Nicola Benedetti in the final), his preternatural Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Some symphonies are natural curtain-raisers: Sibelius’ Third is one. Music began with rhythm and in this piece the cellos are the distant drummers who bring us back to basics with their curt opening measures. Osmo Vänskä clipped the rhythms are kept them on a tight rein - because he knows how this piece goes, how Sibelius’ search for new found economy and textural leanness lends the music an uneasy tension.There’s an extraordinary passage of complete stasis at the point at which one might expect the development of the first movement to start. Vänskä took the dynamics down to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Hans Werner Henze, the composer who died on Saturday aged 86, wrote the music for one of Margot Fonteyn's signature ballets, Ondine, a ballet about an inhuman spirit who longs to be joined to a man - but when she does, he must die. It might almost be a metaphor for the death of the thought the moment it is realised.A 1958 collaboration with Britain's major choreographer Frederick Ashton, Ondine was the first full-length ballet score to be commissioned by the emerging Royal Ballet, and it was, for the very young, and creatively fluctuating Henze, a process that confirmed his instinct that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nicola Benedetti: The Silver Violin (Decca)Cheesy packaging and photos aside, Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti’s latest album has lots to commend it. This anthology of cinema-related music grew through Benedetti’s love of Korngold’s Violin Concerto, which she first heard in Heifetz’s chromium-plated 1953 recording. Still dismissed by some as hokey schlock, it remains an endearing, compact piece, with Korngold’s impossibly anachronistic style hard to dislike. This is a noirish, overripe score which reeks of Hollywood, never more than in the swashbuckling finale. Me, I’m always bowled Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a sadness to all lovers of the French horn that Mozart’s four horn concertos, the product of his longest friendship, make their appearance all too rarely in the concert hall. Though the building blocks of the repertoire, perhaps their apparent frivolity counts against them. But last night the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its principal horn Roger Montgomery brought out of mothballs the best-known concerto, K495, and planted it in the middle of a programme celebrating Mozart the entertainer.First up was Symphony no 36, K 425, dashed off on the way back from Salzburg in 1782, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. That's quite a mouthful. Bruckner's symphonies can be too. But this is one of the reasons why Skrowaczewski has acquired quite a cult following for his Bruckner performances; it's why I once drove all the way to Zurich to hear him conduct one. His Bruckner is never offered as an indigestible slab of meat. It's never hard or chewy. What you get from Skrowaczewski's Bruckner is tenderness and deliciousness. I know this not from my trip to the Tonhalle which was a bit of a failure - I got lost in the Black Forest and was turned away at the doors ten minutes late - Read more ...
David Nice
The prospect of adventuring from one unpredictable day to the next in the course of Michael Tippett’s Triple Concerto, and from dawn to twilight in just over an hour’s orchestral music from Wagner’s Ring, seemed very much weighted in the English composer’s favour. Frankly, had Mark Wigglesworth only conducted Siegfried’s Funeral March in this concert’s second half, he would have consolidated an already glowing reputation as a top-notch Wagnerian. That he and the BBC Symphony Orchestra burned their symphonic way through Dutch percussionist Henk de Vlieger’s audacious, unbroken “orchestral Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies nos 5 & 7 Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)John Eliot Gardiner’s set of period-instrument Beethoven symphonies was a bestseller in the early 1990s. Technically brilliant, immaculately played and lavishly packaged, the readings followed Beethoven’s contentious metronome markings and remain a seminal listening experience, despite the claims of more recent sets by Emmanuel Krivine and Jos Van Immerseel. Gardiner’s new pairing of nos 5 and 7 was recorded live in Carnegie Hall a year ago. The pace still feels driven, the tension high Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It is considerate of Manchester’s two professional symphony orchestras to have organised their opening Wagner celebration salvoes so that they dovetail so neatly. The BBC Philharmonic opened their season three weeks ago with the Wesendonck Lieder, famously inspired by the composer’s infatuation with Mathilde, the wife of his wealthy sponsor Otto Wesendonck, and featuring those two well-known studies for Tristan und Isolde, "Im Treibhaus" (In the Hothouse) and "Traume" (Dreams). Last night came the Hallé with the Prelude and Liebestod of that very opera.With principal guest conductor Markus Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The vibrant Elias String Quartet are 14 years young, well established, and well respected on the international scene. Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists and recipients of a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award in 2010, they are at that major crossroads in any quartet's life when they embark upon a complete cycle of the Beethoven Quartets. Unusually the quartet have decided to chronicle their preparation and progress through a revealing website.Further insights are offered with this audio podcast, in which Marie Bitlloch (cello) and Donald Grant (second violin) - one half of the quartet led by Read more ...