Classical music
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Colin Davis's year has not been a happy one. There've been heart problems, cancellations and, during a performance of The Magic Flute at Covent Garden last month, a major fall. Last night at the Barbican Hall he faced a strenuous Beethoven programme, the Third Piano Concerto with Jonathan Biss and the Seventh Symphony, and a new work by Romanian Vlad Maistorovici. Would the 83-year old conductor have enough energy to inject proceedings with the required welly?There was as much welly as you could wish for. Understandably, he had assigned the mastery of Maistorovici's Halo to an undertsudy Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Like so much fine music, Gerald Barry's new work began life as detritus. Feldman's Sixpenny Editions, which received its world premiere at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, are elaborations on the tacky little Edwardian jingles whose browning dog-eared scores are still to be found in music shops up and down the land selling in big plastic buckets for 5p. This - "as well as other kinds of trash", Barry admits in his tip-top programme notes - was the music he first grew to love. And out of these dearly beloved sows' ears, he's made eight extraordinary silk purses.Unusually for such Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Sir Simon Rattle's intriguing return to the London Symphony Orchestra podium after years away threw up a curious thought: what happens after Berlin? The fate of six of his eight predecessors at the Berlin Phil has been death on the job. Was last night a first step to finding another way out? Were we witnessing an early bit of courtship and re-familiarisation with a possible post-Berlin playmate? It certainly had all the hallmarks of an early date between old friends, with its bouts of overenthusiastic passion and moments of awkward fumbling.But what an intense programme to kickstart a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are few more beautiful sounds on this planet than a consort of viols well played. Like a quiet conversation overheard from across the room, it combines intimacy and secrecy, together with a kind of conspiratorial subtlety of feeling – intellect and passion fused but disguised. And the sound has a delicacy and refinement hardly matched in any music I know.All this is partly explained by the fact that in their heyday viol consorts played music that was one step away from the voice; they were the pioneers of instrumental chamber music. They let the catgut out of the bag; and once Read more ...
David Nice
It's rare for demanding though not, I think, unduly cynical orchestral musicians to wax unanimously lyrical about a new conducting kid on the block. But that's what happened at the 2009 Besançon International Conducting Competition when BBC Symphony players in residence placed their bets on the obvious winner, 30-year-old Kazuki Yamada. He repaid their good faith last night in a real stunner of a London debut programme featuring two very different challenges to his long-phrasing vision and the most dramatic new violin concerto I've heard in the last two decades.That's saying something given Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the later 19th century, violinist and composer Joseph Joachim was hailed as the most brilliant fiddler of his day, but today his name lives on via the great works that he helped to bring into the classical repertoire. Brahms dedicated his Violin Concerto to Joachim, while Bruch's First Violin Concerto was substantially revised by Joachim and became closely identified with him. Both the Schumann and Dvořák concertos were written for him, though Joachim never performed the latter."Every fiddle player who picks up the Brahms concerto sees Joachim's name inscribed on it as the dedicatee Read more ...
David Nice
What a versatile master is the Royal Opera’s resident dynamo Antonio Pappano. On Saturday night, he was in the Covent Garden pit getting big-band sounds and tender elegies from the whole orchestra in Turnage’s Anna Nicole. And here he was again, moving from a surprisingly fine score to a great one, the shadow-of-mortality approach to Chinese poetry that is Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, albeit in its ingenious chamber reduction by Schoenberg. Oh, and with the small detail of a mezzo’s ultimate challenge being faced by a baritone.That implies two degrees of colour-deafness before a note is Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Earlier this month something happened to me that's never happened before. Brian Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet roughed-up my critical faculties and left them for dead. I couldn't tell you what had happened, why, in what order, when. As it finished, small birds circled my head. So I entered Brian Ferneyhough Day yesterday at the Barbican as one would an egg-beater, knees a-knocking.I needn't have. The day was a revelation. As is usual with these BBC Symphony Orchestra composer portraits, many different ways into the composer's oeuvre were proferred. The first reductivist Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes historical recordings by a neglected violinist and interesting interpretations of Brahms and Mahler. A notorious choral blockbuster works its insidious magic, and Australia’s best-known classical musician takes on Kipling. Two young pianists shine in very different repertoire, and orchestral fireworks are provided by a provincial French orchestra. Can a respected British conductor cast new light upon a staple of 20th-century British music? And what does one of the world’s scariest film scores sound like played by four people? Spiritual sustenance is Read more ...
David Nice
So the Berlin Phiharmonic’s high-profile five-day residency staked its ultimate curtain-calls on one of the most spiritual adagio-finales in the symphonic repertoire (most of the others, like this one to the Third Symphony, are by Mahler). We knew the masterful Sir Simon's micromanagement and the Berlin beauty of tone would look to the first five movements of the Third's world-embracing epic. But would the sixth flame, as it must, with pulsing inner light and strength of long-term line?Let me leave that burning question until last, just as it somewhat suspensefully hung fire in this third of Read more ...
David Nice
Sir Simon Rattle's clever programming struck again last night, showing us that musical neoclassicism - for want of a better word, which would be something like neo-everything - didn't begin with Stravinsky, whose Apollo ballet is surely his most elevated set of gestures to the past. Tchaikovsky, the rococo twiddles of whose complete Nutcracker this team seems to have enjoyed so much on a recent recording, would probably take the palm, though Mahler, of all composers, will do, too. At least, his Fourth Symphony begins that way. And soon there was more music not of this world to match Read more ...
graeme.thomson
It’s the convention to review concerts on the first night of a tour rather than the last, but in this case it transpired it was rather wise to make an exception. These two groups may make very different kinds of music, but in their questing desire to escape classification last night they seemed to share a certain esprit de corps which added to the sense of occasion.Their jaunt around the UK was a joint headline tour, requiring each group to alternate top billing. It fell to Portico Quartet to open last night, which meant a shorter set that perhaps didn’t allow them time to settle in and Read more ...