Southbank Centre
Peter Quantrill
With a trio of easy-on-the-ear 20th-century works, Thomas Søndergård marked his debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. A pleasingly full crowd took the opportunity to hear the work of a conductor rarely glimpsed in these parts outside the BBC Proms. His appearances there in charge of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales have given the impression of a contented, highly competent musician, at ease both with the players before him and the scores on the music stand.Whatever that summary leaves out was also missing on this occasion. However new, unfamiliar or classic the repertoire, a Read more ...
Helen Wallace
The Symphony of Psalms, which ended the Philharmonia’s Stravinsky series last night, is an indelible masterpiece, silencing the tired but persistent accusation that Stravinsky’s music is clever but cold. Abstract it may be, but suffused with an exile’s deep longing, spritual hope rising in harmonies of heart-stopping consolation until that final, revelatory C major chord. This performance (with three Swedish choirs) was of focused beauty and searing sincerity; I have never heard better. Its radical scoring sounded afresh, while spine-tingling intonation and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Read more ...
David Nice
Stravinsky's music, chameleonic yet always itself, offers so many lines of thought. One struck me immediately with the descending, even harp notes and tender, veiled strings at the start of his 1947 ballet Orpheus last night: the inexorable beat of time is so often pitted against an expressive, human voice. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who started out as a rhythm and textures man, now gets the humanity too. This triptych of three Greek myths startlingly revisited offered other dualities, giving him and the Philharmonia the chance to move constantly between heaven, hell and somewhere in between.It’s the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Vladimir Jurowski began his latest season as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic with a typically bold and adventurous programme. At its core were the two Szymanowski violin concertos performed by Nicola Benedetti, and these were framed by Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin Suite. The two concertos are stylistically distinct, the First impressionistic, the Second folk-influenced, so the pairings were apt. As ever, Jurowski delivered supple, well-crafted performances, and Benedetti shone, but the Read more ...
John Martin
The raising of a temporary structure theatre in the middle of the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais (pictured below) has brought the issue of arts in situations of crisis into sharp focus. This big brave act by two young Brits, opening a creative space to some of the most miserable and traumatised people in Europe, in some of the most squalid conditions and in sight of the English coast, has hit a nerve which we cannot ignore.People sat up, journalists sat up, activists sat up and realised that this is embarrassingly close to home but that, where governments, international bodies and Read more ...
Andrew Cartmel
The year 1987 was a notable one in music history. In February, Burt Bacharach won the Grammy for best song with “That’s What Friends Are For”, and two months later Joss Stone was born in England. At the age of 17 Stone would be nominated for three Grammies of her own, and at 19 would become a winner. She remains a platinum-selling singer and songwriter at the top of her game.But it’s Bacharach who has made the most astonishing mark as a writer and recording artist. One could cite his nine number ones and 66 top-40 hits, three Oscars and eight Grammies, but bare facts and figures can’t begin Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
And so it ends: Hagen drowns, Valhalla burns, and the ring returns to the Rhine, while somewhere beneath – Wagner’s dawn trumpets sounding faintly in the distance – the dwarf Alberich continues his lonely scheming. It would be hard to find a more apt conclusion to a week of power-grabbing and back-stabbing than Götterdämmerung, and harder still to see its climactic conflagration as anything other than horribly prophetic. But where politics wreak chaos, so art must console, and this Ring cycle is consolation at its absolute purest and most ecstatic.Opera North’s Ring has been such a triumph Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
For some of us, Siegfried is a perfect opera. Like L.627 it stubbornly observes the Aristotelian rules of space and time to cut a generous slice of life. There are almost no set-pieces to break the flow of one-on-one conversations, accusations, confessions, arguments. These encounters are inevitably stifled by a concert staging, where singers address themselves to us, never to each other. Peter Mumford’s video projections set the scene with trees and glowing embers like a piece of slow TV on YouTube or BBC4.Wisdom also holds that Siegfried is the Scherzo of the Ring. Maybe not only for its Read more ...
David Nice
Enter the human - and superhuman demands for at least four of the singers - in the second, towering instalment of Wagner's Ring cycle. It says so much for Opera North's achievement so far that no one fell in any way short of the sometimes insane vocal demands. There were only varying degrees of characterisation and commitment, none of them less than fine.Bad luck, perhaps, that the lower, though not exactly low, temperatures came in the first act as we meet the hero Wotan has fathered as free agent, or so he thinks, and the heroine sister whose incestuous love is a case, as the chief god puts Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is 30 years old, and last night it celebrated in style. The orchestra has a long association with the music of Weber, who became iconic of their pioneering work in presenting 19th-century repertoire on period instruments. His greatest work received an impressive performance last night, one that demonstrated the many virtues of their unique approach to the work of the Romantics. But it wasn’t all a success, and was let down by a surprisingly modest staging concept from the usually ambitious David Pountney.The music of the opera is framed by Pountney in Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Choleric humour, pathos and kindliness are mingled in conflict," wrote Robert Simpson of Nielsen’s 1928 Clarinet Concerto. The work was written for a player with a complex character, full of contradictions. Last night’s soloist, Mark van de Wiel, the Philharmonia's principal clarinettist, gave a fluent performance of the work convincing on its own terms, portraying the protagonist as an introvert and anti-hero. He mostly looked down, sometimes appeared anguished, occasionally tapped his feet in rhythm, and only sought out the conductor with his gaze in order to ensure that the more complex Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Looking past the ballets for Diaghilev, there are still many superb scores by Stravinsky honoured more in scholarship than performance. In Myths and Rituals, the Philharmonia addresses that lack of wider appreciation with five concerts from May to September. The series got off to a promising start last night with the tiny fanfare for three trumpets – Monteverdi with attitude and wrong notes – from 1955, which was one of Stravinsky’s first thoughts for his last ballet, Agon.The Symphonies of Wind Instruments are often played and heard as a Cubist funeral rite, moving in discontinuous blocks of Read more ...