Bartók
Peter Quantrill
The only reasonable explanation for the all too belated arrival at the Proms of the SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg Orchestra is that the festival’s house band, the BBC Symphony, is the one other ensemble reasonably entitled to claim the title of best orchestra for new music in the world. They came with a programme of Boulez, Ligeti and Bartók, 20th century classics all, and well-tailored to their talents. Too little, too late, as it turned out, but what an evening they gave us.…explosante-fixe… is one of those works, following Sachs’s wise words about Walther’s Prize Song, in which the form is Read more ...
David Nice
There were two reasons why I didn’t return to the Albert Hall late on Friday night to hear Andras Schiff play Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The first was that one epic, Mahler’s Sixth in the stunning performance by Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, needed properly digesting. The other was that at Easter I’d heard Jeremy Denk play the Goldbergs in Weimar, and I wanted that approach to resonate, too – dynamic, continuous, revelatory, in a very different way from how I know Schiff approaches Bach.Denk’s recitals are mandatory listening now, and the lunchtime recital yesterday at Read more ...
David Kettle
Two percussionists, two pianists, Adams, Reich and Bartók: Colin Currie and friends’ bracing morning recital at the Edinburgh International Festival made quite a pleasing change from the more traditional string quartets and vocal recitals elsewhere in the Queen’s Hall chamber programme. And it attracted quite a different audience, too – including many clearly there for the broader Edinburgh festival, unsure of what exactly they’d let themselves in for.Thankfully, they could hardly have asked for anything more lively, incisive and dramatic. And it started, ironically, with a performance of Read more ...
geoff brown
Considering the possibilities, we got off lightly when the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, always fearless in the face of the outrageous, performed Percy Grainger’s “music for an imaginary ballet”, The Warriors. The orchestra could have contained 30 pianists seated at 19 pianos, a prescription once followed when Grainger, the Australian wild boy of music, conducted it in concert in Chicago. In fact, we had just three of each.We could also have had the ballet staged. In which case, following Grainger’s imaginings, the already bursting Festival Hall stage would be wriggling with what Read more ...
geoff brown
Teetering on the edge of a Steve Reich weekend, Friday’s concert in the Minimalism Unwrapped series at Kings Place gave us a very mixed grill called “Pulses: Steve Reich and his Influences”. In the process it didn’t offer all that much of the concert’s organisers, the Aurora Orchestra – two flutes, two clarinets, two vibraphones, two pianos, two violins and cellos, and we were done. Still, Reich has never been at his best writing for conventional orchestral forces. And besides, Nicholas Collon, Aurora’s boss, is currently engaged with the Ulster Orchestra. Can’t be in two places at the same Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Is there an ideal way to programme Metamorphosen? Richard Strauss’s elegiac masterpiece requires 23 solo strings. That’s more than most chamber orchestras can muster, but with a full size symphony orchestra the piece leaves most of the players with nothing to do. In this Usher Hall concert the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose to let Metamorphosen stand in glorious isolation before the interval. Those players that could opted to stand – not an option for the lower strings – in a tight semicircle round principal guest conductor Thomas Søndergård, with the rest of the orchestra’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Kalevi Aho: Theremin Concerto, Horn Concerto Carolina Eyck (theremin), Annu Salminen (horn), Lapland Chamber Orchestra/John Storgårds (BIS)The theremin is the only instrument untouched by its player, whose left and right hands have to move in space to control volume and pitch respectively. Nip across to the Musée de la musique in Paris and you can try one for yourself. It's almost impossible to play well, and after aimlessly trying to play a tune you'll probably resort to frenzied atonal whooping up and down the seven-octave range. Finnish composer Kalevi Aho's magnificent 2011 Read more ...
David Nice
“If this isn’t nice, what is?” Kurt Vonnegut’s vow to repeat his Uncle Alex’s mantra when things were going “sweetly and peacefully” has been much on my mind during various idylls this war-torn summer. It certainly applied to hearing three boys and a girl in their early teens play a cloudless early Haydn string quartet in the beautifully restored small neoclassical theatre of a perfect Umbrian hill town. But as so often with troubles elsewhere always at the back of our minds, nothing was quite that simple.The young people were totally focused on the work in a performance of astonishing Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Miklós Perényi makes the listener re-think how a cello should sound. Forget the huge tone of the Russians - think Rostropovich or Natalia Gutman, or the attention-grabbing of Americans or even the flamboyance of the French. No floppy hair, no vanity or mannerisms here. Perényi plays with simplicity and accuracy, but with phenomenal craft and musicality. He dosn't force the tone, yet knows exactly how to project right to the back row of the hall. Technique, which is there in abundance, always seems to serve musical ends.Perényi has been a cello teacher at the Liszt Academy in Budapest since Read more ...
David Nice
With tickets only a couple of pounds more than screenings in the Ciné Lumière, back-to-back – sometimes overlapping - concerts by world-class pianists of all ages, and a lively roster of weekend events around the recitals, what more could you ask from the French Institute’s two-and-a-half day festival? Well, perhaps a better and bigger Steinway. The one that can now transform the cinema into a concert hall, and instigated the first It's All About Piano! weekend last year needed bags of restoration, and given the obstinately dull middle register you have to ask, was it worth it? But then again Read more ...
David Nice
Where did all the terrific programming energy of last year’s The Rest is Noise festival go? One answer – surprising given the orchestra’s former Friday night lite status – is into a two-concert adventure by the BBCCO. World to Come, World Once Known has been devised by Principal Conductor Keith Lockhart to reflect the Janus-headed phenomenon of music just before, during and after the First World War.While the first concert, to be broadcast this afternoon on BBC Radio 3, registered the shock of the new following the cataclysm, last night’s poignant sextet of works examined grief – for lost Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Dunedin Consort/John Butt (Linn Classics)Historically-informed recordings of Bach's Brandenburgs are the norm now. Which is a good thing, though exposure to each new set can leave me craving a bit of naughty inauthenticity – those old modern instrument sets by Karajan and Klemperer, with vast string sections chugging along at a sedate pace. You're immediately struck by the sound of the Edinburgh-based Dunedin Ensemble, which is softer grained and a little warmer than you'd expect. This is in part be due to the tuning; director John Butt's sleeve note convincingly Read more ...