Bartók
Robert Beale
Perhaps it was the thought of “Blue Monday”, which fell a week ago, that stimulated the choice of Lili Boulanger’s D’un soir triste as the opening piece of this concert. Certainly there can be few short pieces of music filled with such unremitting misery from start to finish.Anja Bihlmaier, the BBC Philharmonic’s principal guest conductor, is normally not one to wallow in lugubrious gloom – far from it. But she entered the spirit of music written by the tragic composer who died very young in 1918 and whose last work this was, completed not long before her demise in piano trio form. It was Read more ...
David Nice
After the myriad intricacies and moodswings of Janáček's The Makropulos Case on Tuesday and Thursday - I was lucky to catch both performances, the second even more electrifying than the first - the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle seemed to be enjoying a relative holiday last night. They could leave the most fiendish element in Bartók's Second Violin Concerto to the astonishing Patricia Kopatchinskaja, delivering every aspect of a work that might have been written for her, and other poetic extremes to mezzo Rinat Shaham, before letting their hair down in Falla's complete ballet Read more ...
David Nice
How often is an orchestral concert perfect in every texture, every instrumental entry, every phrase? Wednesday's Phiharmonia Prom struck sound-spectrum gold, but its chief conductor, Santtu Matias Rouvali, could do with more humanity. My colleague Rachel Halliburton found his fellow Finn Klaus Mäkelä challenging in Mahler’s Fifth on Saturday night, but on Sunday afternoon neither he nor his fellow musicians put a foot wrong; indeed, feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.Mozart might have been a style challenge for the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra's chief conductor elect, most familiar Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Fresh from their triumph at the Proms, the Budapest Festival Orchestra arrived at the Edinburgh International Festival with a programme that centred on dance, and culminated in as fine a performance of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (the complete score, not the suite) as you’d hope to hear. This is music that the Budapest players have in their blood, and you could tell that in the way they conjured up sound that managed to be grimy and nasty but lush at the same time. Iván Fischer paced the manic opening more slowly than you’d expect, but he shaped the unfolding drama with masterful edge, Read more ...
David Nice
“Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night,” quoth Blake. Beethoven and Bartók knew both extremes, but Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra led us from the most dancing of Seventh Symphonies to the endless night of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, from explosive A major to quietest C sharp minor. If not everything along the way was perfect, or even in one major case present, the outlines were bold and engaging.Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was the last major work I heard at the Pärnu Music Festival only a fortnight ago. It bears repeating that young Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two established favourites from big names of the 20th century plus a new-to-me piece by a forgotten figure worthy of re-discovery.And the LSO under Susanna Mälkki didn’t disappoint in any regard: this was a great night in the Barbican hall. I came across the black American composer Julia Perry (1924-1979) a few years ago, but this was my first chance to hear her music live. There are a few black and women composers getting performed these days who, I fear, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Quartets Through a Time of Change: music by Ravel, Durey, Tailleferre and Milhaud Brother Tree Sound (First Hand Records)There are plenty – and I mean plenty – of recordings of the Ravel String Quartet, the majority, I would guess, paired with the Debussy Quartet, in what has become something of a programming cliché. The Brother Tree Sound quartet take the rather more enterprising approach of putting it alongside three other French quartets written between 1917 and 1919, none of which are very well-known if they are known at all. It works really well, both as exposure for the lesser Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last Monday my colleague Boyd Tonkin was delighted by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective’s playing at Hatfield House – and on Thursday it was my turn to be impressed by their colourful Wigmore Hall recital, which featured the marvellous clarinettist Carlos Ferreira in Bartók and Brahms.In Bartók’s Contrasts, Ferreira (pictured below) was following in the footsteps of Benny Goodman, who co-commissioned the piece in 1938. There are distinctively Goodmanesque moments in which Bartók channels the recently deceased George Gershwin, and Ferreira found a rich and resonant American accent for Read more ...
The Henschel Quartet
We vividly remember the image of Martin Lovett, the cellist of the legendary Amadeus Quartet, bursting out laughing. He tells his favourite true travel story. After boarding a plane, the Amadeus Quartet has taken its seats and Martin is just about to strap his cello into the seat next to him when a fellow traveller approaches him. Oh no, marvels the inquisitive man, there's a whole string quartet on board. "How many are there in a string quartet?" comes the sudden question. Martin answers spontaneously and with deep conviction: "Five!".What a marvellous story, one we still like to tell Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sir Neville Marriner: The Complete Warner Classics Recordings (Warner)Assembling Sir Neville Marriner’s complete discography would probably require a crate; this weighty but compact box (80 CDs), released to celebrate his centenary, collects just the discs he recorded for EMI between 1970 and 2000 (he also worked extensively with Decca and Philips). Marriner rivalled Herbert Von Karajan as one of the classical industry’s most-recorded conductors and the majority of these performances were made with his own Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The group began life in the late 1950s as a Read more ...
David Nice
It’s hard to know which aspect of this adventure to praise the most. Perhaps the fact that of the four recent works originally programmed, the two freshest were by young beneficiaries of the LSO Panufnik Composers Scheme. There was also the pleasure orchestral members took in their colleagues’ playing, not just Rebecca Gilliver’s as soloist. The culminating glory was their response to François-Xavier Roth’s mastery in Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.More by accident than design, the living composers were bracketed by two great Hungarians. Admirably, Roth and the orchestra adapted to the sad Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Violinist Jonas Ilias-Kadesha was placed front and centre of the publicity for this concert. This is his first season concert with the SCO, though back in 2019 he stood in for an indisposed soloist at short notice for one of their European tours. Inviting him back is a vote of confidence, so I was looking forward to hearing him as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Ravel’s Tzigane.His Mozart turned out to be a very mixed bag, however. It began well, with clipped, precise playing from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the opening tutti, and an improvisatory opening flourish from Read more ...