Classical music
igor.toronyilalic
Police. Placards. Protests. And bag checks. It meant only one thing. Jews were performing at the Proms. Here we were in the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2011 witnessing a stage of musicians being barracked and abused for having the gall to be Jewish. Last year, four more Jewish musicians, the Jerusalem Quartet, had the cheek to perform and broadcast a recital at the Wigmore Hall. They were again heckled and hounded off air. No, not a portrait of Europe in the early 20th century, but Britain in the 21st. I wonder. In a few years, will Jews be able to make music publicly in Britain at all?If Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Over the past six weeks of the Proms the BBC’s hard-working Symphony Orchestra has performed everything from Britten to Brahms, Verdi to Volans. Their Mahler with Ed Gardner was an operatic epic, their programme of English music for Mark Wigglesworth glowed with wit. Yet hearing their ragged and unlovely account of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony last night it was hard to remember their triumphs, hard even to remember the delicate account of Graham Fitkin’s new Cello Concerto that they delivered in the first half, so complete was their collapse.Conceived as a programme of boundary-breaking works, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
David Fray certainly has the locks to be a piano virtuoso (eat your heart out, Franzi). And he has the looks, the troubled brow, the pallor and a suitably eccentric manner (the Glenn Gould hunch and hum came out for all the runs). But does he have the hands?He definitely has hands. And on last night's viewing they were the right hands for Mozart. The understated Piano Concerto in C major K503 has never been the most popular of Mozart's concertos. Eschewing virtuosity and outward emotion for sunny but sensitive inward mooching, the work requires an especially careful and Read more ...
David Nice
Born in Russia in 1972, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's principal conductor has galvanised the capital's music scene with some of the most thoughtful, groundbreaking and carefully prepared concert programmes today. His operatic credentials at Glyndebourne have been no less impressive, with attention to the right individual style in Verdi, Wagner, Rossini, Tchaikovsky and Mozart, among others. Widely read as well as a serious film buff, and sometimes baffling his fellow musicians with the breadth of artistic reference he brings to bear on his craft, Jurowski offers typically eclectic Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Hooray for Hollywood! The title of last night's Prom didn't officially have an exclamation mark. But if any concert deserved a screamer, it was this one. A delirious mutual enthusiasm pinged back and forth from stage to audience all night as the slick John Wilson Orchestra and its eponymous chief (with excellent vocal support) romped through the highways and byways of the golden age of the American musical."Shall we give in to despair or dance with never a care?" sings jazzer Clare Teal early on in a number from Fred and Ginger's 1937 movie Shall We Dance? The answer is of course never Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Mendelssohn loved looking back. And nowhere more so than in his blockbuster oratorio, Elijah. But what was most striking about last night's monumental performance at the Proms was how much he was also clearly looking forward and outward, and how feeble an appellation oratorio seemed to be for what we were witnessing. We were being bombarded with pre-echoes of the adventure-laden Hollywood epics of the 1950s. We were being hit by a microclimate of such unstable energy that it could easily have registered on the Beaufort Scale. Prototype movie. Tropical hurricane. Last night's Elijah was Read more ...
David Nice
After three days' motoring and clambering around the most awesome natural landscapes I've ever seen, how could a mere concert hall in a city the size of Cambridge begin to compare? Well, it helped that the façades in which that great visionary Olafur Eliasson played his part evoke basalt columns on coast and islets, that the welcoming red interior of the Eldborg Concert Hall references the age-old lava flows of an extinct volcano we'd just climbed and that the shifting light which always strikes new visitors to Iceland plays its part in the daily drama of "Harpa", as the harbourside arts Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Twelfth-century abbess, healer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen had no formal musical training. Perhaps because of this her music – exquisite arabesques of chant melody, animated by the conviction of her religious beliefs – creates a language all its own, a “swaying bridge between heaven and earth”, as she characterised it.Contemporary composer Stevie Wishart herself provided a bridge between the medieval mysticism of Hildegard and the more earthly concerns of Harrison Birtwistle and Benjamin Britten, in a Proms Saturday Matinee at Cadogan Hall that invited its audience to meditate upon the Read more ...
graham.rickson
A legendary septuagenarian wind player from Switzerland returns to the repertoire with which he made his name 50 years ago, and there's an exciting live reading of a gloomy fin-de-siècle symphony conducted by a contemporary French giant. The same conductor also treats us to a sparkling Stravinsky rarity, and a youthful duo lighten the mood with some Russian fireworks on Merseyside.Bach: Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis - Concertos and Sinfonias for Oboe Heinz Holliger (oboe), Camerata Bern/Erich Höbarth (ECM)
None of Bach’s original concertos for oboe survive in their original form; yet it’s now Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The spectacle of an orchestra named after Mahler playing Stravinsky irresistibly calls to mind Stravinsky’s report of a performance of the Eighth Symphony in Zurich in 1913. “Imagine”, he wrote to Maurice Delage, “that for two hours you are made to understand that two times two makes four.” Oddly enough, repetition is the lifeblood of Stravinsky’s own music, though he rarely makes two times two equal four, and his symphonies don’t last two hours (nor, incidentally, do Mahler’s).Sir Colin Davis did, it’s true, make the Symphony in Three Movements last longer than Stravinsky thought it should. Read more ...
hilary.whitney
The career of acclaimed tenor Ian Bostridge (b 1964) has taken a somewhat unusual trajectory. He was reading for a PhD on witchcraft at Corpus Christi College, Oxford before he decided to turn his hobby of singing into his profession, despite not having any formal musical training – he has admitted that he probably picked up several bad habits singing along to records of German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.Initially he was best known for his performances of German lieder but his extensive repertoire also embraces opera - his operatic debut was as Lysander in Benjamin Britten's A Read more ...
David Nice
Having been away in remote mountain places, I hadn't heard that the BBCSO's chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek was taking a month off to recover from a virus. So it was a bracing last-minute shock to find the man stepping up to the podium to conduct Wagner's Meistersinger Prelude not the orchestra's wise Hans Sachs but a Walther von Stolzing in conducting terms, tipped unexpectedly by one source outside the BBC as Bělohlávek's successor. Lean and hungry Dane Thomas Dausgaard masterminded the most brilliantly co-ordinated Prom I heard last year, and he excelled again last night. As the programme' Read more ...