Southbank Centre
Boyd Tonkin
Great conductors, like efficient auto engines, apply a lot of torque – they can use a little energy to achieve great surges of movement. Now aged 91, the American-born Swedish maestro Herbert Blomstedt sometimes hardly seems to raise his baton-free hands. His feet, meanwhile, remain more or less immobile. Yet, like some highly-geared sports car, last night the Philharmonia zoomed, boomed or swerved at the merest distant kiss of his fingertips.Quietly but completely in command for the second of his Royal Festival Hall Concerts with the orchestra, Blomstedt shares with his fellow- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Gilbert and Sullivan did the Bible it would sound a lot like Hubert Parry’s Judith. Premiered in 1888 and last heard in London a year later, the oratorio – whose principal claim to fame is as the original home of tearjerker hymn tune Repton, better known as “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind – has been lovingly restored to life by conductor William Vann and the English Song Festival, who will record it with Chandos later this year.Fire and lashings of Old Testament brimstone all come tied up in a hearty musical bow. The setting may be Judah but the bucolic clarinets and horns are pure Albion Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Mozart in E flat (the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro) and in G (the K.453 Piano Concerto), and Schubert in C – the “Great” C major Symphony, no less – ushered spring into the Festival Hall on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon.Slimmed down to a pocket Philharmonia during the first half, the orchestra sounded a touch scrappy and a size too small for the hall during the overture. Having fluffed the concerto’s opening line, they also took a while to settle and attune themselves to the supple and urbane manner of soloist Jonathan Biss.Not yet 40, Biss (main picture) plays with the relaxed and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
No successor has yet been named to Vladimir Jurowski as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic, so it is interesting to note that Edward Gardner is making several appearances with the orchestra this season. The two conductors are similar in their dynamic approach and brisk, efficient tempos. But where Jurowski focuses on detail, drawing exceptional clarity from the ensemble, Gardner seems more impulsive, structuring the music with similar care, but punctuating to greater dramatic effect with surprisingly emphatic tuttis. This concert, of Beethoven, Elgar and Mahler, demonstrated an Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Standing next to the warm brown beast of a piano built by Blüthner in Leipzig in 1867, Sir András Schiff advised his audience last night to clear their minds and ears of preconceptions. He told us that his rendering of Brahms’s first piano concerto – tonight, he will return to play the second – “should be like a first performance”. In reality, he added, that premiere (in 1859) turned out to be “a colossal failure”. In contrast, his own version – antique instrument and all – scored a triumph that pulled much of the Royal Festival Hall crowd to their feet.However, this “historically informed” Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Feelings run high at the Hayward Gallery in a fascinating pairing of two artists from widely differing backgrounds. Kader Attia muses on unhappy, conflicted relationships between cultures in visual meditations on variations of colonialism. Diane Arbus, who died at the age Attia is now, photographed people who were often at the margins of society.Once criticised for what might appear as an obsession with freakery, it is increasingly evident how her curiosity was flavoured with sympathy and empathy. Attia is mesmerisingly obsessed with the difficulties of groups and societies, while Arbus Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just as our brief, premature spring collapsed into the bluster of Storm Freya, the Enlightenment certainties of Haydn’s more dependable cycle of nature blew into the Royal Festival Hall. Perhaps because its lovely but (for the most part) serene music tends to occupy the sunlit uplands, The Seasons has never quite secured the automatic respect accorded to the cosmic and human drama of its immediate forerunner, The Creation. Sprinkled from first to last with imitative bird calls, hunting horns, babbling brooks, croaking frogs and an entire meteorology of weather-effects, the second great Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When a pianist directs from the keyboard, the result can be a sedate affair: a matter of minimalist time-keeping while the soloist shows his or her fancy moves. Not so with Dame Mitsuko Uchida and her long-term partners, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Clad in a sort of blue magician’s gown over severe black, Uchida – who has just turned 70 – stood to conduct, vigorously, the opening passages of last night’s two Mozart concertos at the Royal Festival Hall. Even when safely back on her stool, she frequently indicated every sign of wanting to leave it as her arms – when not otherwise occupied – Read more ...
David Nice
Pianists most often cite Radu Lupu alongside Martha Argerich and Grigory Sokolov as the greatest. So it was hardly surprising to see so many top musicians in a packed audience, buzzing with expectation for the 73-year-old Romanian's most recent UK appearance with a conductor he respects, Paavo Järvi. Lupu appeared at Steven Isserlis's 60th birthday event at the Wigmore towards the end of last year, but before that hasn't been seen here since 2014. I heard him then, but in Stockholm, giving a magisterial performance of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto. Last night's Fourth was exquisite at Read more ...
David Nice
Harpers on the undeniably offensive aspect of Wagner the man might question attending a concert performance of his second Ring opera on World Holocaust Day. Fortunately there's nothing anti-semitic to be found anywhere in Die Walküre. As embodied by the cruel and tender score, the poet-composer's transformation of barbaric Northern mythology into the most essential of themes for our or any time - the power of love versus the love of power (not my coinage, but says it all) - is pure compassionate genius. It's crystallised in an interpretation as phenomenal as that of Vladimir Jurowski - too Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The London Philharmonic’s year-long Stravinsky festival, Changing Faces, concluded here in spectacular style, with a tribute to “The Swingling Sixties”. Vladimir Jurowski, the soon to be leaving – and soon to be much-missed, Principal Conductor of the LPO, devised an adventurous and innovative programme, pairing Stravinsky’s late masterpiece Threni with the contemporaneous Sinfonia of Berio. Aesthetically, these pieces were from different worlds, yet each in its way is suffused with the Sixties zeitgeist. Add to this superlative performances, and the result was a satisfying conclusion to one Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Mitsuko Uchida continues her world tour of Schubert sonatas with two concerts for the home crowd, this the second of her appearances at the Festival Hall. The tour coincides with Uchida’s 70th birthday, but the years have done little to diminish her technique. And Schubert is an excellent choice, arguably her strongest suit – perhaps a joint first with Mozart – though her many recordings and performances in the past are little preparation for her always unpredictable approach.Schubert’s piano sonatas make demands on the pianist, both in technique and interpretation, and every player Read more ...