Beethoven
David Nice
It was a hefty evening, as it needn't necessarily have been throughout, since Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony can conceal more darkness between the lines in a lighter take. In his second full concert of his second season as the wildly successful and popular Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Pappano spared us none of the hard-hitting.Nor did the phenomenal pianist Seong-Jin Cho in Prokofiev’s colossal Second Piano Concerto, drawing as usual crowds of his fellow South Koreans. It was neither Pappano's nor Cho's fault if I’d recently heard interpretations of that and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This week Vladimir Putin tried to murder my hosts in Ukraine. He failed. In more hopeful days, I spoke at a seminar organised by the British Council’s branch in Kyiv. Its offices (along with the EU delegation) felt the force of a Russian missile strike on Wednesday night. No one died there, thankfully, although 23 more civilians in the city perished. As President Trump manoeuvres for a “deal” that would hand Putin most of his ill-gotten territorial gains on a silver platter, it was a bloody reminder that the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra – launched as musical ambassadors for their Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone seeking local genius in an international festival should look no further than the annual Ravenna concerts from Riccardo Muti – Neapolitan by birth, Ravennate by adoption – with his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra. Well, maybe a little further if you have basic Italian: 2025 sees the completion of a second walkabout theatre trilogy involving citizens of Ravenna and beyond, masterminded by two greats equal to Muti in their own unique ways, Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli.The first, spellbinding adventure, a Dante triptych, I discovered in its second year, a reinvention of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Sometimes, as the first act of Beethoven’s Fidelio closes, the chorus of prisoners discreetly fade away backstage as their brief taste of liberty ends. At Garsington Opera, in Jamie Manton’s revival of a production by John Cox, they slowly descended, one by one, through a circular trap at the front of the stage. We see and hear freedom’s loss, person by person, step by agonising step.Then I strolled out onto the Garsington terrace as the evening sun set with its midsummer languor over the Wormsley estate’s vast acres of lake, woods and grazing deer. And thought, as Beethoven insisted we must Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has had to put up with its fair share of artist cancellations over the last month, and the ensuing games of musical chairs led to the somewhat implausible scenario of this concert, where Richard Egarr, a conductor more closely associated with Bach and Handel, conducted the UK premiere of a work by Peter Eötvös, that darling of the avant-garde.In fairness to Egarr, he did nothing more than what he does with the Baroque music for which he is so renowned: he played it with the clarity, shape and the expression it needed to come alive. Shape, in fact, was critical Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
At the age of 83, Martha Argerich contains more personality in her little finger than many people do in their entire bodies.Her vigorous, technically dazzling delivery of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto began before she even touched the piano. As the orchestra played the opening passage she wasn’t just swaying in time to the music, she was hunching forward for the diminuendos and mouthing “ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum” along to the dotted rhythms. She couldn’t wait to be part of the performance, and right from the crisp ornamentation of her first entry she was its life and soul.Argerich has Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michael Tilson Thomas: The Complete Columbia, Sony and RCA Recordings (Sony)Big box sets continue to arrive. This one’s a whopper: 80 discs celebrating Michael Tilson Thomas’s 80th birthday. Artistic qualities aside, the production values here are superb, Sony’s 200-page hardback book accompanying individual discs replete with original sleeve art and spines that display each CD’s contents. This is a minor detail but a significant one, making it easy to find the performance you’re looking for. As with the recent Paavo Järvi set, it’s nice to see a celebration of a conductor who’s very Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong’s final concert of 2024 in the Hallé Manchester season was something of a surprise. At first sight, the sparkle in the programme seemed likely to come from James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni, Emmanuel – his percussion concerto, with the star name of Colin Currie as soloist – and from Malcolm Arnold’s Four Scottish Dances (especially the third of them) to precede it.Afterwards, it was to be Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony to finish, and that’s been played and heard many times before. In the event, the first two works did sparkle, but the symphony intrigued.The Arnold dances are great fun: Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Beethoven’s renown in his own day was not just as a composer but also as an improvising pianist. He wrote in a letter in July 1819 that “freedom, and to move forward is the purpose of the world of art, as it is of the whole of creation.’So it is a paradox that his written compositions are seen by many as immutable holy writ, and the very idea that musicians of subsequent musicians might take liberties with them still seen as transgressive. Django Bates recently told me that “I went to a piano room during my second week (as a composition student at the Royal College of Music, shortly before Read more ...
Robert Beale
The first piece by Grace-Evangeline Mason I heard was six years ago, a simple song in a multi-composer “Manchester Peace Song Cycle” performed at the Royal Northern College of Music when she was studying there.It was striking because of its eloquent melody and evocation of child-like joy. Subsequent experience has confirmed the impression that she writes music that immediately communicates, that is often about something, rather than abstract (and she’s not afraid to tell us that), and that it does what it says on the tin.Her ABLAZE THE MOON, premiered by the BBC Philharmonic in the 2023 Read more ...
David Nice
A happy, lucid and bright pianist, a forbidding Everest among piano sonatas: would Boris Giltburg follow a bewitching, ceaselessly engaging first half by rising to the challenge of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” - a title he suggests, in his series of first-rate online essays about the sonatas, might be replaced more appropriately with “Titanic”?Absolutely; the focus and stamina were such that a sinking would have been impossible. Any difficulties rest with us, and I confess I have a problem with the biggest movements. Like much in late Beethoven, the material sometimes seems to elude easy grasp Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In their lyrical, often intensely moving afternoon concert at the Proms, Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos demonstrated such seamless communication that at points it was tempting to imagine that even their heartbeats were in sync. It’s an obvious statement to say that brilliant music making is as much about listening as playing, yet these three musicians took it to another level, deftly negotiating the Brahms and Beethoven with the elegance of bats finding their way by echolocation.No surprise, perhaps, given that Ma and Ax have known each other since they were teenagers at the Read more ...