Classical music
David Nice
Klaus Mäkelä, 26-year old chief conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris, lined up for the same role at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2027, knows exactly where he’s going: a crucial asset in the idiosyncratic ebb and flow of orchestral oddities by Sibelius and Strauss. So, too, does pianist Yuja Wang; boundless imagination matched to phenomenal technique made something far more fascinating than usual of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto.If you dwell too much on the age of one – yes, I mentioned it just the once – or the fashion sense of the other – she can wear Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Proper music tells stories just about itself, the stern pedagogues insist; it doesn’t (or anyway shouldn’t) paint descriptive pictures of places and people. Well, maybe not – but it was hard to banish all thoughts of geography, even of biography, at the Proms as the BBC Philharmonic under Eva Ollikainen travelled from Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s chthonic Iceland to Sibelius’s composite Italy-Finland by way of the intensely subjective journey embodied in Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Kian Soltani – Austrian-born with Iranian heritage, and something of a cross-cultural voyager himself – was the soloist in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The Ulster Orchestra’s Prom finished early to accommodate a late-night concert by the esteemed Tredegar Band – but by then, we’d already enjoyed one spectacular brass showcase. Under its justly-praised chief conductor Daniele Rustioni (formerly assistant to Antonio Pappano at Covent Garden), the Belfast-based outfit crackled and glowed in every department but especially at the back, where a robust, assured and often lyrical brass team delighted a virtually full house.Four mostly familiar and well-loved works; no interval; a closing time of 8.35pm that left the option of a leisurely supper in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Danny Elfman – the punk rocker-turned-film composer behind Batman, Spider-Man, Edward Scissorhands and The Simpsons – reports that he felt sceptical when first approached to write for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. Why? Simply because “they were a youth orchestra”. As Homer himself might say, “D’oh!”.Ask where Elfman has been hiding these last many decades and the answer is “Hollywood”. Tinseltown’s soundscapes (and sound-stages) lie unmissably behind the work that – duly enlightened about the NYOGB’s excellence – he went on to produce. Wunderkammer, named for the Romantic-era Read more ...
Mark Bromley
Television coverage of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee weekend included footage filmed in the monochrome world of postwar Britain. Old ways of doing things, however jaded and narrow, were deeply ingrained then. Yet they were offset 70 years ago by the optimism of the new Elizabethan age and its egalitarian spirit of growth and renewal. The National Youth Brass Band of Great Britain, a product of that spirit, is set to celebrate its own platinum jubilee on 6 August with a celebratory concert at London’s Royal College of Music.While the performance, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, is guaranteed to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Trickling or gushing in torrents, lapping rhythmically or slopping out all over the floor: water was the constant, flowing steadily through the centre of the Hallé’s Proms performance. In a tough year for audiences, Manchester’s finest and music director Mark Elder gave us a crowd-pleasing programme for a Saturday night: an atmospheric tourist-trip that took us from Respighi’s sun-drenched Rome (with its many fountains) to Puccini’s Paris (the Seine seething gently in the strings), with a quick stop in the domestic fantasy-landscape of Dukas’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice.The Paris of Il Tabarro is Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The giraffe still baffles me. This model beast appeared stage right at the Royal Albert Hall during Jennifer Walshe’s The Site of an Investigation, only to be loudly wrapped by a pair of percussionists and then removed. A critique of mindless consumerism, a satire on the destructive domination of nature (both among this work’s sprawl of themes), or a little absurdist interlude of the kind Walshe evidently enjoys? Never mind: we soon moved on to another mind-scrambling stunt in the genre-busting performance for voice and orchestra that the Irish composer staged for the Proms with the BBC Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Ireland: Orchestral Music Sinfonia of London/John Wilson (Chandos)Anyone new to John Ireland’s music should start with his effervescent Piano Concerto, via the superb recording by pianist John Lenehan on Naxos. That disc is conducted by John Wilson, who returns here with his Sinfonia of London to give us this fizzing anthology of orchestral music. There are some wonderful things here. Take A Downland Suite, composed in 1932 as a brass band test piece. Ireland later arranged two of its four movements for strings, the task completed by his pupil Geoffrey Bush in 1978. The brass Read more ...
David Nice
When I first came to Estonia with a then still-exiled Neeme Järvi and his Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in 1989, the world-class young musicians who dazzled at this year’s Pärnu Music Festival hadn’t been born.A new Estonian musical golden age is now reaping the benefits of a superlative musical education system, but experience also counts: the central force that makes this festival the most welcoming I’ve ever experienced, Paavo Järvi, will be 60 this year; father Neeme, back in Estonia’s lovely summer capital by the Baltic after two years’ enforced absence, and brother Kristjan marked their Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Once upon a time the Three Choirs Festival conjured up a single image, that of the English Oratorio – the grand choral solemnification of everything that was most profound in Anglican thought (though ironically its greatest exemplar, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, was irretrievably Catholic, and one Anglican bishop is supposed to have said he wouldn’t allow it into his cathedral). Today the festival’s image is more diverse, but it still sometimes hankers after the good old days, with their smug serenities and flowing pieties, and this revival of George Dyson’s 100-minute long Quo vadis, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The spirit of Sir Richard Burton loomed large over the Royal Albert Hall last night – a man who wrote about everything from falconry to erotica and whose death-defying expeditions took him across the Middle East, Africa and the Americas. Between 1885 and 1888 he produced a definitive translation of A Thousand And One Nights that galvanised intellectual Europe, not least because its content – which was often as illicit as it was exotic – could only be accessed by private subscribers.Rimsky-Korsakov was arguably the first composer to produce a definitive response to this controversial text and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Russia meets Iceland: not the most obvious of juxtapositions. But the connection between the four composers featured in Prom 8 is to be found in their filmic approaches: the two contemporary Icelanders are both better known as media composers than in the concert hall, while Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky’s sweeping styles have inspired film composers since there have been film composers. But while the Russians wear their hearts on their sleeves, the Icelandic composers’ pieces were inscrutable, detached and demanding of a different kind of listening.Jóhann Jóhannsson, who died at the age of 48 Read more ...