Sibelius
David Nice
Hair-raising guaranteed or your money back: that might have been a publicity gambit, had there been one, for Sakari Oramo’s latest journey with the BBC Symphony Orchestra around a Nielsen symphony. That he knows the ropes to scale the granite cliff face of the Danish composer’s Fourth, “Inextinguishable”, Symphony was not in doubt (he gave a shattering performance with his own City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the 1999 Proms). Less expected was his confounding of much-maligned Barbican acoustics with layered impressionism in a Sibelius tone-poem and Zemlinsky songs, and of an utterly Read more ...
David Nice
Rattle and the Berliners went home at the beginning of the week with vine-leaves in their hair. There's now something else to celebrate. Exactly one week on from the second concert in their Sibelius cycle, the Barbican hosted even more of an all-out stunner, starting with Sibelius no less compellingly conducted than the best of last week’s symphonic cycle and ending with a performance of the "Inextinguishable" Fourth Symphony by this year’s other 150th birthday composer, the great Dane Carl Nielsen, which electrified from start to finish.In his first ever concert with a major London orchestra Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The Seventh Symphony was by some way the most scrappy and inaccurate of the performances in the Sibelius cycle given at the Barbican by, it must be said again, the world’s best orchestra. The oboes crunched a chord that fairly made you wince. A few bars later, the famous strings were all over the place. During that scherzo section, Sir Simon Rattle was willing the Berlin Philharmonic to move like The World’s Strongest Man with the bit between his teeth for a ten-ton truck.They did shift themselves, eventually, into an heroic drive towards the still-debated closure – or is it cliff-edge Read more ...
David Nice
Bass lines were Edward Seckerson’s starting point yesterday in welcoming the Berlin Philharmonic Sibelius cycle to London, and none strikes more terror from the depths than the subterranean growl that launches the most selectively-scored symphony of the 20th Century, the Fourth. Awe-inspiring is how it sounds on Sir Simon Rattle’s 1986 City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra recording, with a little help perhaps from the engineer, and those eight Berlin Philharmonic double-basses last night were not going to stint on its force either.Yet the beginning of the concert reminded us that cellos and Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Sir Simon Rattle’s Sibelian journey has been long and fruitful and has taken him all the way from Birmingham to Berlin, and more particularly the revered Philharmonic where the spaces between the notes now resonate in extraordinary ways and the bass lines are sunk deeper than with any other orchestra on the planet. Beginning their London residency with the first two of Sibelius’s symphonies (the rest to follow over the next few days) gave us a chance to feel how organically Sibelius became Sibelius and how the music effectively seemed to come up through the bass lines. The wonder of the Read more ...
David Nice
Was 1911 the best ever year for music? Works premiered or composed then include Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and the Tenth Symphony he’d completed in outline by the time of his death that May, Sibelius’s most austere masterpiece, the Fourth – for which the little oddity which opened last night’s concert, The Dryad, sounded like a sketch – and Nielsen’s Third, self-subtitled “Espansiva” but in this performance more like the “Inexhaustible” to blaze a path for the “Inextingishuable” Fourth. Even Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto of 1909, Read more ...
David Nice
Schubert played and sung through a long summer day by the water: what could be more enchanting? The prospect did not take into account the pain in that all too short-lived genius’s late work: when interpreted by a world-class trio, quartet and pianists at the 10th East Neuk Festival, it could be exhausting. So the hours in between were much needed balm on an afternoon and evening in the picture-postcard fishing village of Crail in the East Neuk (cf "nook") of Fife below St Andrews.Grey skies lifted by early afternoon, leaving the sun to bring out the honey colour of much of the local stone Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tigran Mansurian: Quasi parlando Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Anja Lechner (cello), Amsterdam Sinfonietta/Candida Thompson (ECM)Wolfgang Sandner's sleeve notes rightly mention the “extreme frugality of expressive resources” in the music of the Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian. This sounds like a put down, but the clarity, the lack of superficiality only adds to the power of the works collected here. Mansurian's Concerto no 2 “Four Serious Songs” dates from 2006, and its Brahms-referencing title hints at the work's gravity. There's real beauty here. Patricia Kopatchinskaja's Read more ...
David Nice
Depth, height, breadth, a sense of the new and strange in three brilliantly-programmed works spanning just over a century: all these and a clarity in impassioned execution told us why the BBC Symphony Orchestra was inspired in choosing Finn Sakari Oramo as its principal conductor. Their anniversary journey through Nielsen’s symphonies next Barbican season – itself a heady mix announced amid the palms of the singular conservatory before a vintage assembly of performances around the Centre – is more fascinating in prospect, for me at any rate, than the promised visits of the New York and Berlin Read more ...
graham.rickson
William Alwyn: Piano Music Mark Bebbington (Somm)William Alwyn was a Suffolk-based composer who died in 1985. He dabbled in painting and writing, and held the post of Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music for nearly 30 years. His output included a cycle of symphonies and the music to several well-known British films. Curiously, he was related to the actor Gary Cooper, even providing the score to Cooper's final screen appearance. Alwyn's piano output, as represented here, more than deserves an occasional hearing. Mark Bebbington gives us graceful readings of Alwyn's 11 Read more ...
David Nice
Among the diaspora of younger-generation Russian or Russian-trained pianists, there are at least four whose intellect and poetry match their technique. Three whose craft was honed at the Moscow or St Petersburg Conservatories – Yevgeny Sudbin, Alexander Melnikov and the inexplicably less well-feted Rustem Hayroudinoff – have made England their home. Boris Giltburg - the youngest of the group with a fifth, Denis Kozhukhin, close on his heels - left Moscow for Tel Aviv when he was a child and has had a different training. Coltish and capricious at times, his imagination may yet turn out to be Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Legends, myths, and Nietzsche’s Superman - which for the purposes of this London Philharmonic Prom was none other than Vladimir Jurowski himself. His extraordinary ear, his nurturing and layering of texture, was a constant source of intrigue and delight and at least one performance - that of Sibelius’ tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter - was revelatory in its musical insights. That began distinctively with a strange little serenade for cello (Kristina Blaumane) and took us to wild and wonderful places in the hinterland of Sibelius’s imagination.But on a blind listening who might we have supposed Read more ...