Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
The quest for the spiritual in the musical has been the dominant preoccupation of Jonathan Harvey’s since his earliest works. Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy has been an acknowledged influence on the composer, who has made a career of exploring what Steiner described as “the special character of the individual note”, which “expands into a melody and harmony leading straight into the world of the spirit”. So when Swiss theologian Hans Küng and the Berlin Philharmonic were looking for a composer to set Küng’s massive new libretto as a full-length spiritual work for chorus and orchestra Harvey was Read more ...
theartsdesk
By day, Friar Alessandro Brustenghi lives and works in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi. In his spare time, he works as a carpenter. But he also has a new career as, in the words of his producer Mike Hedges, “the next Italian tenor”. The fruits of his entry into Abbey Road’s recording studio is Voice from Assisi. You can listen here on theartsdesk to the entire album, exclusively until midnight on Thursday.Voice from Assisi consists of traditional and modern sacred songs, from Schubert’s Ave Maria and “Sancta Maria” from Cavalleria Rusticana and a recently discovered Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s Beethoven all right, but not as you know him. The scowl is there, and the broad heroic shoulders too, but the iconic tousled hair is glowing a rather unexpected shade of orange. A purple cloak sweeps down to the floor, setting off a jaunty pair of Elton John-style glasses and a leopard-print waistcoat.Wherever you go in Bonn during the 2012 Beethovenfest lifesize models of the city’s favourite son greet you, brooding out from inside shop windows, or posing casually (as casually as a bright green hulk-inspired mannequin can) on a street corner. Photos from previous years reveal a waxwork Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Over the next four seasons the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes will be embarking upon a “Beethoven Journey” that will clock up 150 performances in 55 cities all over the world. At the heart of this expedition will sit the five Beethoven Concertos and Choral Fantasia all of which will be committed to disc by Sony Classical in recordings made in Prague and featuring the Mahler Chamber Orchestra directed from the keyboard by Andsnes.Andsnes has, of course, cherry-picked his way through Beethoven piano literature in the past but this intensive exploration has come as something of a calling at Read more ...
David Nice
Can two half-orchestras playing together ever be better than one well-established organism? The second and third concerts in yet another special project masterminded by Vladimir Jurowski, drawing together British and Russian perspectives on war and peace, proved that they could. It may have been disappointing to find the Russian National Orchestra on Thursday evening launching so cold-bloodedly into the feral start of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony. But when many of their key players upped their game by joining colleagues from the London Philharmonic Orchestra the following evening in Read more ...
graham.rickson
James MacMillan: Veni, Veni Emmanuel, A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, Ì (A meditation on Iona) Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic/James MacMillan (Challenge Classics)James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni Emmanuel, premiered by Evelyn Glennie in 1992, is a rare beast, a percussion concerto which always sounds like music, not a cabaret act. The theological baggage underlying MacMillan’s work may unsettle some listeners but never gets in the way; this piece is tautly constructed and highly entertaining. What you miss is the visual element – being able to see the remarkable Colin Currie rapidly Read more ...
David Nice
Somehow the manic cry of “Scooby-Doo man!” from the back of the stalls didn’t seem too incongruous. We were in the thick of Shostakovich’s craziest symphony, the Fourth, composed in the mid 1930s when such maverick Russian talent was about to be stamped on and potentially quite a sledgehammer of a season opener for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Instead dapper Jukka-Pekka Saraste - a more than satisfactory replacement for the great Neeme Järvi - ran through this nightmarish world like an open razor, every cutting gesture aimed with deadly accuracy, having allocated the spiritual healing to a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“For if their musicke please in earthly things/How would it sound if strung with heavenly strings?” Listening to viol consort Fretwork last night, the audience at the Wigmore Hall didn’t have to imagine the answer to Gibbons’ question. Listening to the vitality and variety of tone colour this group so reliably produce, it’s hard to remember that this is ear(th)ly music – hardly the wan and consumptive sound so many people still stubbornly associate with viols.Joined by the Hilliard Ensemble to form a sort of Renaissance supergroup, Fretwork gave us a programme of Orlando Gibbons, passing his Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Wagner was not averse to highlights being plucked from the mighty Ring, even though it is an all-encompassing drive-through drama. Perhaps it’s as well, since the bicentenary celebrations of his birth are getting up steam and concert planners are at pains to pull out a few plums. After all, we can’t wallow in the whole of the cycle all of the time.For the start of his second season as Chief Conductor of the BBC Phil, Juanjo Mena (pronounced Huanho Mayna, he being a proud Basque) chose favourite dramatic excerpts from Götterdämmerung. Not a choice for the fainthearted, featuring the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sting, Debbie Harry, the Pet Shop Boys, Brahms, Mozart, Schumann. This is the kind of thing an average year throws up for the Gateshead-based Northern Sinfonia. Their visits to London are mostly to provide a backing track for the top pop acts. Which is not only perverse but verging on the criminal. Because, as so many have noticed before, the Northern Sinfonia aren't simply another middle-of-the-road band of freelancers, they may well be the finest chamber ensemble working in the country today. That's certainly the conclusion I came to at their opening concert of the season Read more ...
David Nice
What, another review of an LPO/Jurowski concert in less than a week? Reasoning the need, it only has to be said that other orchestras may kick off their seasons by mixing the unfamiliar with core repertoire, but none would dare launch with not one but two programmes featuring this only-connect kind of singularity (and more to come in the “War and Peace” series next week). Last night the known quantity of Rachmaninov’s masterly choral symphony The Bells looked back to less familiar fare which shared two of its themes: the sounds of some very unorthodox tintinnabulations and the Russification Read more ...
edward.seckerson
John Wilson Orchestra’s stunning 2010 Prom celebration of Rodgers and Hammerstein was as close as those who heard it could imagine to being guests on the 20th Century Fox soundstage c. 1955... the sound, the style, the feel of how this music in these arrangements should go was “right” - every sigh, every swoon, every inflection - it couldn’t have been “righter”. John Wilson is an authority on what the great Hollywood movie arrangers and orchestrators did for the movie versions of these classic scores.The received wisdom is that Richard Rodgers - arguably the greatest popular melodist of them Read more ...