Sibelius
graham.rickson
Sibelius: The Seven Symphonies, Kullervo Minnesota Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä (BIS)Osmo Vänskä’s first BIS Sibelius cycle caused a stir in the late 1990s, as much for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s light, transparent playing as for Vänskä’s inclusion of the original four-movement version of Symphony No. 5. This second cycle was recorded with the Minnesota Orchestra, and while Vänskä’s timings haven’t altered significantly, the orchestra’s weightier sound and BIS’s closer recording offers a real contrast. Vänskä’s penchant for extremes of dynamic is less problematic here, the quieter passages Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Artists’ management Harrison Parrott has started a concert streaming platform called Virtual Circle on emusiclive.com, launched two days ago and only available as a live event - no catch-ups. Watching its debut concert - the Oslo Philharmonic with the much-buzzed-about Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä - it struck me that it must be terribly difficult to film an orchestra effectively. Ah no, responded a friend in the know: it’s actually easy, but you have to go with how the music feels, not what it is doing. I wish someone had told the camera directors of this otherwise admirable Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“This year was supposed to be so very different” said Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra when he spoke to theartsdesk earlier this year. Talk about an understatement. The CBSO has hardly been alone in having cherished plans wrecked. But in the orchestra’s centenary year, the sudden cancellation of a programme of celebrations that had taken the best part of a decade to plan felt like a particularly cruel blow. And having finally pieced together a skeletal replacement season (the CBSO’s main venue, Symphony Hall, was able to re-open its doors only Read more ...
David Nice
Necessity has certainly been the mother of invention over the past three weeks, and orchestras especially, left in the dark with no means of coming together other than virtually, have had to adapt double-quick. The players, of course, are artists, and in league with good technical teams they've yielded some winners which may bring more people to the real thing when life as we knew it resumes.From pianists livestreaming in terrible sound to a whole bunch of players taking on orchestral music with state-of-the-art engineering for a polished end result has been quite a leap. The first that Read more ...
David Nice
So much pressure is on for Lise Davidsen to be the next Kirsten Flagstad or Birgit Nilsson, but the question has to be asked: is this just The Voice - a big "just" when a dramatic Wagnerian soprano is at stake - or The Complete Artist? Intimations of the latter flashed through much of a well-planned programme - elements of it already featured in her Wigmore Hall debut recital - in partnership with consummate, calm pianism from James Baillieu, but settled in the divine shape of Sibelius's Luonnotar, nature-spirit and sea mother, haloing her in mysterious glory.Though this tone-poem for voice Read more ...
David Nice
Culturally, "the little country that could" - as Estonia's ex-Prime Minister and historian Mart Laar dubbed it - punches well above its weight. While it educates the young with a musical instrument made available to every child, Estonia continues to shine through its musical leaders. Grand old man Arvo Pärt continues with his jewel-like craftsmanship, shining in a blissful reworking of an early piece in Zurich; and while fellow octogenarian Neeme Järvi may just have handed over his post as music director of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (henceforth here ERSO, Eesti Riiklik Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra marked the first performance of composer Mieczysław Weinberg at the Proms, an important milestone in the recent surge of interest of his music. When Weinberg, a Russian composer of Jewish descent and Polish birth, died in 1996, he was little known in the West, and had fallen from favour in a post-Communist Russia that associated his music with its Soviet past. But a staging of his opera The Passenger at Bregenz in 2010, sparked a huge revival of interest, especially in Germany, Poland and Russia. This year marks the centenary of his birth, the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
I’m not quite sure that I should review this Prom, since I performed in it. Before anyone summons the white coats, let me clarify. As the encore to a mind-expanding evening, Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto returned to the stage with his band of folk musicians. He asked the audience to hum a sort of drone, and then sing open-mouthed, as they sung and played a traditional song. How did we do? OK, I thought. It made a fittingly unorthodox finale to a rule-flouting programme which will have delighted many ears but left some concert purists not just with open mouths, but jaws on the floor.How Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: The Piano Quartets The Primrose Piano Quartet (Meridian)Schoenberg complained that performances of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet never pleased him (“the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings”). You suspect that he’d have approved of this recording, the Primrose Piano Quartet’s John Thwaites using an 1870 Viennese piano made by Johann Streicher. Brahms owned and loved an identical instrument. Plus, the other players use gut strings, easier to balance against a lighter-toned keyboard. This is a thrilling, volatile performance: historically Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Visit Ainola, Sibelius’s woodland house by Lake Tuusula north of Helsinki, and you’ll be told the story of the green stove. It appears that the famously synaesthetic Finnish composer identified the shade of his heating installation with the key of F major. Asked to attach a colour to the lustrous performance of his D minor violin concerto given last night by Viktoria Mullova and Paavo Järvi with the Philharmonia, I’d plump for a rich autumnal red-brown, glinting with bright golden highlights at the top but grounded in earth tones of a sumptuous depth.Mullova, of course, has played this piece Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: The Cello Sonatas The Fischer Duo: Norman Fischer (cello), Jeanne Kierman (piano), with Abigail Fischer (mezzo-soprano) (Centaur Records)Comparing Brahms’s pair of cello sonatas is like looking at the two piano concertos. There’s the youthful, three-movement grumpy one. Then a long gap before a major key work in four parts, with a last movement frothy and exuberant. Veteran cellist Norman Fischer describes listening to both works as giving “a full Brahmsian yin-yang experience”. As with the piano concertos, I’m more yin than yang, and the earlier work’s craggy magnificence is Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No 3 Düsseldorfer Symphoniker/Adam Fischer, with Anna Larsson (alto) (Tonhalle Düsseldorf)Mahler's vast Symphony No 3 is his longest and most ungainly on paper, but on record it’s one of the easiest to get right. At least I can't think of many dud performances. This huge, six-movement work is relatively easy to follow – a picaresque, picturesque journey from murky uncertainty to radiant positivity. Adam Fischer gets pretty much everything right in this compelling live performance from his Düsseldorfer Symphoniker, one of Germany’s oldest orchestras but one not well Read more ...