Mahler
Sebastian Scotney
The mid-way point of the BBC Proms has just passed. Attention during the eight-week season will inevitably tend to gravitate towards the novelties, “events” and one-offs, but one pre-condition for the summer to be going well is that the Proms' backbone ensemble, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, which plays no fewer than 12 of the concerts, has to be on good form. Ideally, they should be playing well across a wide range of repertoire, they should be getting full or nearly full houses, and their relationship with their principal conductor should be positive and productive. On the evidence of last Read more ...
David Nice
Few 87-year-olds would have the stamina to conduct over 100 minutes of Mahler. Bernard Haitink, though, has always kept a steady, unruffled hand on the interpretative tiller, and if his way with the longest of all the symphonies, the Third, hasn't changed that much since his first recording made half a century ago with his Concertgebouw Orchestra, there's still reassurance in the sheer beauty of the music-making. Not the excitement, mania even, you might expect from younger conductors in the outlandish opening movement, but it's quite something to know at the start that the end, in the form Read more ...
David Nice
After a grey start, there was a spectacular sunset around midnight on the second of my two days in Reykjavik. It's what brings one of Iceland's most brilliant younger-generation talents, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson (and yes, he's worked with Björk), back to his homeland every June. He launched Reykjavík Midsummer Music in 2012, the first full year of programming at Olafur Eliasson's ever amazing Harpa concert halls and conference centre on the harbour. Clearly Ólafsson relishes working with distinguished friends, but he also happens to be a programme-maker of genius whose ideas work as well in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Aukai Markus Seiber (Aukai Music)In a week where there’s been rather too much news to get one’s head round, a spot of ambient calm is very appealing. Aukai is the pseudonym of German guitarist and ‘soundscape artist’ Markus Seiber, and this debut disc is a sequence of 13 brief instrumentals. No notes are provided other than a list of Seiber’s collaborators, but this eloquent, appealing music has enough charm to stand up on its own. The pace is unhurried and the textures are spare; think of this disc as a more consciously melodic backward glance at Brian Eno’s 1970s ambient LPs. Similar Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Left, alone, Hans Abrahamsen’s new piano concerto for the left hand, swirls out of the darkness to a jagged motor rhythm. Piano and orchestra clash and interlock; you’re reminded of Prokofiev and Ravel. Then something happens. A piano plays, but the soloist is motionless. It’s been there all the time, of course – an orchestral piano, up on the percussion risers. But now it’s turned threatening: upstaging the soloist with its full two-handed range and stealing his musical voice, his very identity. And although it doesn’t really intervene again until the last movement, you’re continually aware Read more ...
David Nice
Who wouldn't wish to have been a fly on the wall during those pre-recording days when composers and their friends played piano-duet arrangements of the great orchestral works? Any notion that we don't need such reductions anymore was swept aside by Antoine Françoise and Robin Green in the fourth concert of an untrumpeted but brilliantly conceived piano-duo series matching transcriptions of 20th-century Viennese masterworks with Mozart and/or Schubert and five world premieres. Such ambition was last night crowned by an hour-plus performance of Mahler's Sixth Symphony arranged by Zemlinsky, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Wim Henderickx: Symphony No. 1 At the Edge of the World, Empty Mind, Groove! Royal Flemish Philharmonic/Edo de Waart and Martyn Brabbins (Royal Flemish Philharmonic)Elliptical sleeve notes are a given with each new release of Wim Henderickx’s music, and this two-disc set is true to past form: “He invents new tonal palettes with abandon and mixes them with care.” Hmmm. Maybe it’s the translation. Fortunately, the music here is really terrific, and this compilation of orchestral pieces is Henderickx's most approachable yet. His first symphony, At the Edge of the World, is a substantial Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
An auspicious debut with the Royal Philharmonic for Vasily Petrenko. Just watching him conduct, it is clear that he is a natural communicator, always giving a clear, generous beat and never missing a cue. No surprise, then, that the orchestra was on his wavelength from the start last night in Mahler's Second ("Resurrection") Symphony, reflecting back all his dynamism and focus. That immediacy was balanced by careful planning on Petrenko’s part, with tempo choices finely calibrated for dramatic power and structural coherence.Symphonic order was Petrenko’s guiding principle in the first Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
I've never thought of myself as a Shostakovich fan, tending to regard what I know of his output as bleak and forbidding. Photographs of the stone-faced composer with the mortuary attendant's demeanour haven't helped.All this changed after a night out with the Oslo Philharmonic under the wizardly baton of Vasily Petrenko, who yields to none in his commitment to Shostakovich's work. Their performance of the composer's Fifth Symphony was a revelation (to me, at any rate) in its heart-stopping leaps between minimalist shivers of strings and catastrophic detonations of brass and percussion, its Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
"It’s all very well, but you can’t call it a symphony". So said William Walton of Mahler’s Third, all six movements and a hundred minutes of it. Jakub Hrůša conducted the Philharmonia last night on fine if hardly infallible form in a performance notable for its restraint in a work remarkable for the excess which raised Walton’s eyebrow.There is a Czech tradition of Mahler which means something in the Third most of all his symphonies. Not for Kubelík, Neumann or Běhlohlávek the heaped-up schmaltz or knife-edge Modernism of Mahler from further West. Hrůša is eminently worthy of that tradition. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Roger Doyle: Time Machine (Heresy Records)Roger Doyle’s Time Machine is a suite of 11 linked pieces, its starting point being the composer’s archiving of telephone messages recorded while living in late 1980s Dublin. Younger readers won’t know what an answering machine is, let alone understand the joys of living in a world without smartphones. One where calls could only be made or received if you were actually at home, and people turned up punctually to meetings. Happy days indeed. Doyle half-thought that his cassettes might eventually come in useful, and began to assemble the work from 2010 Read more ...
David Nice
The musical future looks bright indeed, at least from my perspective. There are more classical concerts than ever going on across the UK on most days of the year, so who can know with any authority what might have been missed? Yet each of theartsdesk’s classical music writers has a special take on the events of 2015, and part of mine has been the special privilege of following a trail of younger players in out-of-the-way places.Serendipity began in Fife’s East Neuk Festival, where travelling up a day earlier than originally planned meant I caught the second concert given by the young Read more ...