Schubert
igor.toronyilalic
Even Schubert’s very earliest compositions terrify. His first songs, written when he was only 13, are unforgettably vivid, gory, messy, mangled, full of darkness and horror, like dead little birds. He never shakes off this Gothic sensibility; it’s never ironed out of him. A part of him remains untutored, untamed, right to the end, and over time his dark preoccupations gather a more and more frightening shape. Pitch blackness is reached in his Piano Sonata in A minor, D784, one of strangest pieces in the whole piano repertoire, a work of utter nightmarishness and a focal point for last night’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There’s something beyond detailed and attentive musicianship that’s needed in Schubert’s last, most desolate song-cycle, Winterreise (“Winter’s journey”). It’s a dramatic arc that unites these 24 songs into a journey, the number of breaths in time and miles in distance that elapse from the first poem to the 24th, and bring you a sense of contact with the person undergoing this terrible suffering. Someone who is not Schubert, the composer, or Müller, the poet, but a third person.How much biography should we read into it? Schubert was dying slowly from years of syphilis, at the ridiculously Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Michael Tilson Thomas’s association with the London Symphony Orchestra runs deep - he was its principal conductor for eight years, and for his latest return to his old band last night the American programmed works that, while they had a Viennese theme, also seemed vividly designed to show off the jewels of this great orchestra, its wonderful wind players. How the clarinettists, oboists, flautists, horn-players and trumpeters must have delighted to see what they were to play: Schubert’s Donizetti-like Rosamunde, with its haunting woodwind songs, Mahler’s richly picturesque song cycle Des Read more ...
Ismene Brown
At its best (ie when it’s not trying to be gimmicky and snare so-called “new audiences”), Rambert is unique in Britain in providing music and dance as theatre. No other company matches it in commitment to this, not even the Royal Ballet, which long ago adopted cloth ears when it comes to new ballet music. Last night at Sadler’s Wells Rambert’s newest triple bill was a fine sample of this kind of evening, a delight to anyone with musical interests, and parading three unbeatable British choreographic talents.Long ago Henri Oguike shone out among the younger generation of choreographers as Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When you go to a Schubert recital, you’re plunged into a whirlpool of emotional ambivalence, heat and chill running together, music and lyrics not always playing the same tune. When Schubert seizes on a poem, it’s not because he’s interested in Mickey-Mousing that poet’s sentiments - on the contrary, he may see a purple passage of words and set it simply, as if deflating it, or he may take a plain statement of action (looking out of a window, say) and fill that phrase with complex music containing a world of dark feeling.When Matthias Goerne is the singer, this counterpoint gets a third layer Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra like to do things their way. They still show little compunction about discriminating on sexual and ethnic grounds and for over 70 years have maintained the idiosyncratic position of having no fixed principal conductor. Instead, like the prettiest girl in the school year, they carefully bestow grace and favour on a special chosen few. One of their longest running relationships has been with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a partnership whose early results – trail-blazingly authentic - regularly raised Viennese hackles. So it was a great disappointment to learn that Read more ...