Classical music
Arditti Quartet, Wigmore HallThursday, 03 February 2011
Being a composer of contemporary classical music is a treacherous business. It's about the only art form in which stylistic choices can still force a creator into permanent exile. Two composers who have fallen foul of the British house style in... Read more... |
CBSO, Nelsons, Symphony Hall, BirminghamThursday, 03 February 2011
Mahler cycles in his centenary year are about as predictable as dead leaves in autumn. But they perhaps belong more in Birmingham than in some other cities. Mahler, after all, was a big factor in making Simon Rattle’s name, and Rattle was a big... Read more... |
Vogt, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Bělohlávek, Barbican HallThursday, 03 February 2011
As Mahler symphonies rain down from heaven - or flare up from hell, according to your viewpoint - in this second anniversary year, it's wise to choose carefully. But why earmark Jiří Bělohlávek's performance of the Sixth above the likes of Gergiev,... Read more... |
Magdalena Kožená, Private Musicke, Wigmore HallWednesday, 02 February 2011
The Wigmore Hall, with its laboriously marbled and gilded period interior, doesn’t exactly scream “rebellion”. Yet for the second time in as many months its conservative classical crowd saw recital conventions discarded like the too-tight bow tie... Read more... |
The Kingdom, London Symphony Orchestra, Elder, Barbican HallSunday, 30 January 2011
So Starbucks-like is its reach, so tarnished its modern legacy, it's easy to overlook just how brilliant the ideology of Christianity is. How seductively counterintuitive the idea of a God who was not just a man but a bum of a man must have seemed.... Read more... |
LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival HallSunday, 30 January 2011
It was with Mahler’s Opus 1 – folkloric cantata Das klagende lied – that Vladimir Jurowski so memorably launched his role as the LPO’s principal conductor, and it was to this work that he returned last night. Four years on and he asked his audience... Read more... |
Dame Margaret Price, 1941-2011Saturday, 29 January 2011
Perhaps her greatest achievement on disc is a role she would never have attempted in the theatre, Wagner's Isolde. Supported by the great Carlos Kleiber, the sheer meaning and luminous tone colours Price brings to every line make this one of the... Read more... |
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel, Barbican Hall/ Beethoven Masterclass, LSO St Luke'sSaturday, 29 January 2011
Believe it or not, some critics can't get enough of London's superabundant concert scene. I could hardly be sour about not catching Gustavo Dudamel's first Barbican concert on Thursday night, spellbound as I was by his predecessor at the Los Angeles... Read more... |
Maurizio Pollini, Royal Festival HallSaturday, 29 January 2011
Take one venerated living pianist and one venerated epic of the piano canon and what do you get? Two and a half hours of the most inert pianism imaginable.That there was a human with a pulse performing the first book of Bach's The... Read more... |
Christine Brewer, Wigmore HallFriday, 28 January 2011
Christine Brewer singing American song – it’s like Judi Dench in Shakespeare, or an Aaron Sorkin screenplay: it just doesn’t get any better. Forcing the restrained acoustic of the Wigmore to ring as though it were St Paul’s, and persuading a white-... Read more... |
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel, Barbican HallFriday, 28 January 2011
There had been murmurings that his star had dimmed. That Gustavo Dudamel's partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (greeted with such fanfare in 2009) had yet to set the West Coast on fire. Had this Icarus flown too high? Would their debut... Read more... |
Bronfman, Philharmonia, Salonen, Royal Festival HallFriday, 28 January 2011
"You have to start somewhere," remarked Debussy drily at the 1910 premiere of young Stravinsky's Firebird ballet. Even so, that was far more of a somewhere than the ultra-nationalistic Hungarian tone poem Kossuth, first major orchestral flourish of... Read more... |
