Beethoven
Kimon Daltas
Maxim Vengerov’s four-year absence from the London stage is recent enough that any performance by him has the added value of having been clawed back from a jealous god. That a violinist of such explosive talent could have been permanently silenced by something as mundane as an injury sustained in the gym is barely thinkable, though the possibility seemed very real in the hinter years between 2008 and 2012.But back he is, and entirely on form too. That said – look away now if you deplore journalistic cliché – this was very much a concert of two halves: a solid but buttoned-up take on two early Read more ...
graham.rickson
Maxim Vengerov and Itamar Golan – music by Bach, Beethoven, Wieniawski and Brahms (Wigmore Hall Live)Violinist Maxim Vengerov’s recent Wigmore Hall comeback was rapturously received on this site. It’s superbly captured on this recording; microphones placed up close without sacrificing the beauty of the hall’s acoustic. Bravely, Vengerov opened the recital with Bach’s D minor Partita. In a reading that’s one of the best out there – big-boned, justifiably confident and played with a swagger commensurate with this player’s talent. This is flawless violin playing – the double stops in the Read more ...
David Nice
Viennese night in Glasgow’s Candleriggs was hardly going to be a simple matter of waltzes and polkas. True, its curtain-raiser was a Blue Danube with red blood in its veins rather than the anodyne river water of this year’s New Year concert from Austria’s capital; one would expect no less from Donald Runnicles after the refined but anaemic Franz Welser-Möst. In Runnicles’s programme, though, extreme contrast was all: J Strauss II spookily echoed by the elegiac 3/4s in Berg’s Violin Concerto, and another 12-tone boy, Webern, exercising restraint in arrangements of Schubert’s German Dances to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Listening to a recording can never replace the joys of live performance. But if you don’t live in London, opportunities to explore quirky new repertoire can be thin on the ground. CDs most often excel as introductions to composers and works that you’ve never heard before. We’ve all experienced those small moments of rapture when a previously unknown piece bowls you over. You immediately skip back to replay it, usually at higher volume, before you hassle your friends and family to listen too. Major label releases of standard repertoire can still delight; Beethoven and Tchaikovsky have had a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Why is music? A child’s question, a great question. One answered by Evgeny Kissin’s piano recital at London’s Barbican Centre last night, where you might want to engage analysis and come up later with answers but what happened was that you left the concert hall feeling more alive, emotions retooled, spirit lightened, range widened. Music is because. Why else would Beethoven compose 32 piano sonatas? What possible purpose of Haydn to write 62 of them? Because.Kissin is 41, which means he has left his child prodigy reputation far behind him and is now maybe midway through his career. I haven’t Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Piano Concertos 1 and 3 Leif Ove Andsnes/Mahler Chamber Orchestra (Sony)The best recent cycle of Beethoven piano concertos is Howard Shelley’s, recorded by Chandos with the Orchestra of Opera North. This first volume of Leif Ove Andsnes’s set might stack up to be a rival. It was taped in Prague’s Rudolfinum and acoustically it’s flawless – this is a recording where you suspect that the engineers have just set up a couple of microphones and sat back, letting the musicians get on with it. Ansdnes has come late to Beethoven, explaining that the project’s genesis came after Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies nos 5 & 7 Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)John Eliot Gardiner’s set of period-instrument Beethoven symphonies was a bestseller in the early 1990s. Technically brilliant, immaculately played and lavishly packaged, the readings followed Beethoven’s contentious metronome markings and remain a seminal listening experience, despite the claims of more recent sets by Emmanuel Krivine and Jos Van Immerseel. Gardiner’s new pairing of nos 5 and 7 was recorded live in Carnegie Hall a year ago. The pace still feels driven, the tension high Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The vibrant Elias String Quartet are 14 years young, well established, and well respected on the international scene. Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists and recipients of a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award in 2010, they are at that major crossroads in any quartet's life when they embark upon a complete cycle of the Beethoven Quartets. Unusually the quartet have decided to chronicle their preparation and progress through a revealing website.Further insights are offered with this audio podcast, in which Marie Bitlloch (cello) and Donald Grant (second violin) - one half of the quartet led by Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s Beethoven all right, but not as you know him. The scowl is there, and the broad heroic shoulders too, but the iconic tousled hair is glowing a rather unexpected shade of orange. A purple cloak sweeps down to the floor, setting off a jaunty pair of Elton John-style glasses and a leopard-print waistcoat.Wherever you go in Bonn during the 2012 Beethovenfest lifesize models of the city’s favourite son greet you, brooding out from inside shop windows, or posing casually (as casually as a bright green hulk-inspired mannequin can) on a street corner. Photos from previous years reveal a waxwork Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Over the next four seasons the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes will be embarking upon a “Beethoven Journey” that will clock up 150 performances in 55 cities all over the world. At the heart of this expedition will sit the five Beethoven Concertos and Choral Fantasia all of which will be committed to disc by Sony Classical in recordings made in Prague and featuring the Mahler Chamber Orchestra directed from the keyboard by Andsnes.Andsnes has, of course, cherry-picked his way through Beethoven piano literature in the past but this intensive exploration has come as something of a calling at Read more ...
graham.rickson
Fans of the Leeds International Piano Competition argue that this triennial event, now in its 49th year, has done more to raise the city’s profile than any other local institution. Supporters of Leeds United would doubtless disagree, but Dame Fanny Waterman’s long-running contest has grown into an influential, internationally renowned affair. Dame Janet Baker awards the prizes. Lang Lang is now the competition’s Global Ambassador along with Honorary Ambassador Aung San Suu Kyi. Waterman, now an improbably spritely 91, is still very much in control of proceedings.Perusing the names of winners Read more ...
Ismene Brown
You’ve never seen so many people at a Prom, thousands of them packed into every space of the Albert Hall inside, while outside a 100-metre line of hopefuls queued in vain to stand in a pit where a small cat couldn’t have been added. But then this was a luxury Prom: with the Vienna Philharmonic and two musicians of golden integrity and sensitivity, lifetime members of the high table, the pianist Murray Perahia and the conductor Bernard Haitink playing two works born in Vienna.Size matters in the Albert Hall - they played spacious Beethoven and epic Bruckner - but it takes musicians of special Read more ...