Austria
Adam Sweeting
Having blazed a trail through choral music, Simon Russell Beale now focuses his attentions on the symphony in this new four-part series. At last able to put aside the mind-games and chicanery of his role as Home Secretary William Towers in Spooks (RIP), Beale emerged as an engaging and enthusiastic host in this opening episode. He wore his erudition with an ironic twinkle as he toured the garrets and palaces of Europe on the trail of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. He seemed especially to relish being able to bob about in a yacht off Dover, in emulation of Haydn's queasy cross-Channel voyage to Read more ...
David Nice
Pundits have always yoked architecture and Bruckner together, touting void and mass at the expense of the dynamic experience music ought to be. Abbado and his Lucerne Festival Orchestra favoured sinuous instability in the Fifth Symphony earlier this week, making the very foundations gyre and gimble. Relatively solid ground last night was due to a more sober conductor and Bruckner symphony: a mixed blessing. The grand design, in fact, came from Leif Ove Andsnes in Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, making overall sense of a work which has always seemed swooningly resistant to it.If that meant Read more ...
David Nice
It was bound, in vocal terms, to be a case of Beauty and the Beast. Stefan Vinke, though useful for killer heroic-tenor parts like this one in Mahler’s Song of the Earth, has made some of the ugliest sounds I’ve heard over the past few seasons, ineffable mezzo Alice Coote many of the loveliest, and with great communication, too. The wild card was fitfully engaged old-master conductor Lorin Maazel: would he stop dragging the Philharmonia behemoth-like behind him and let it be the bird of paradise Coote needed to share her deepest meditations?At first, that seemed unlikely. Maazel (pictured Read more ...
David Nice
Some great singers know how to modulate their beautiful instruments for long vocal life; others push technique and expression to the limits in countless concerts of a lifetime before burnout. Baritone Christian Gerhaher, it seems, belongs to the beautiful and the secure. I'm glad to have heard his Winterreise, a far from lonely journey given the partnership of pianist Gerold Huber, but it always felt like a songbook entrusted to a calm exponent of truth and wisdom rather than the first-person narration of Schubert's heartbroken winter wanderer.It all depends what you want from the richest of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The queues weren't quite Proms-sized but they were long enough for the little old Wigmore Hall to seem more than a little overwhelmed. Expectations were immense. The past year has seen baritone Christian Gerhaher cast a singular spell over London audience, through his introduction of a touch of intense Lieder-style intimacy to the orchestral and operatic stages. No wonder then that there was such a palpable buzz as we awaited his appearance in his natural Lieder habitat for a performance of Die schöne Müllerin at the Wigmore Hall.The usual arc of this poignantly personal tale of unrequited Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The Barbican committed a grave sin last night. It forgot that people matter more than art. That their responsibility to the families of those who Jack Unterweger (the subject of John Malkovich's music drama, The Infernal Comedy) murdered trumps any interest in the dramatic potential of Unterweger's bizarre life. However constraining to the autonomy of creativity this may be, these are the rules of common decency. A portrait of Ratko Mladić that did little to show the horror of his crimes and much to convey what a loveable rogue he was would be a disgrace. And so, Malkovich's Read more ...
josh.spero
Richard Nagy's gallery has said that they don't want millions of people rushing to see their show of Egon Schiele's drawings of women - it's only a small second-floor space on New Bond Street after all, and 50 fragile pictures crowd the walls. But don't let that dissuade you from seeing one of the shows of the year.Schiele instantly summons up consumptive young women, déshabillées, angular, all the colours of livid bruises. His pencil marks are as sharp as the malnourished women's ribs. This show, however, shows why he was able to turn tawdry subject material into transporting art.
The Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Popping up on royal wedding day from the Niebelheim where they spend most of their working life, the WNO Orchestra brought with them a birth-and-death programme: hatch and dispatch, rather than match. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was a thank-you present to Cosima for their baby son, born out of wedlock; Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony turned into an epitaph for Wagner when he died in 1883, though most of it was written while he was still alive but ailing.Might they have planned it differently had they known? Wedding marches and arrivals of queens of Sheba would have drawn the Valleys coach parties; Read more ...
David Nice
It's rare for demanding though not, I think, unduly cynical orchestral musicians to wax unanimously lyrical about a new conducting kid on the block. But that's what happened at the 2009 Besançon International Conducting Competition when BBC Symphony players in residence placed their bets on the obvious winner, 30-year-old Kazuki Yamada. He repaid their good faith last night in a real stunner of a London debut programme featuring two very different challenges to his long-phrasing vision and the most dramatic new violin concerto I've heard in the last two decades.That's saying something given Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Perhaps it was the effect of the elaborately mosaicked and marbled stage of the Wigmore Hall, but when a black-clad Thomas Zehetmair stepped out last night to occupy this space with just his violin and Bach for company, the image was incongruous. Even devotees of the hall will surely acknowledge the fussiness of its aesthetic appeal, the lingering visual excesses of a bygone age making it as unlikely a setting for Zehetmair’s deconstructed style as for the sharp architectural edges of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Yet host them it did, and in a characteristically uncompromising Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It’s a reasonable argument, I'd say, that it is only worth going out to see dance, or anything else, if it’s probably going to be better than telly or conversation with friends. And only if it’s also worth spending a couple of hours travel by train, say £30 to £40, tickets all told, plus a drink on the town. Something for the Arts Council to take on board when considering who to lash out £364,044 taxpayers’ annual subsidy on, no? Or too base a criterion?So much is now at stake for the future vigour of modern dance on British stages that we should not pussyfoot about any more. It might be Read more ...
sheila.johnston
The world is turned literally upside down in Revanche's long, eerie opening shot. We see trees reflected in a dark forest lake, hear animal and bird sounds - discordant, wild, somehow unsettling - and the faint boom of distant thunder. Then something (we can't see what) plummets into the water. This superlative psychodrama sends out ripples too, that last way beyond the tight parameters of its plot.A word about the title. The film, from Austria, is partly about revenge, but the common translation for that is Rache. Revanche, according to Götz Spielmann, its writer-director, involves much more Read more ...