Brahms
geoff brown
Leonard Tanner, my old choirmaster, used to say that Brahms was a composer with his feet in three different camps: the Baroque period, the Classical period, and the Romantic. Possibly he had a fourth leg too, poking into the music of the future. Composers adept at these multiple postures filled Thursday’s sometimes lustrous orchestral Prom given by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and their chief conductor Donald Runnicles. Brahms was represented of course (the Second Symphony); also the great nostalgist Richard Strauss, watering his old age and the wasteland of defeated Germany with his Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost materialised yesterday. And I'm not talking about the transcendental appearance of the Holy Trinity of News International. I'm talking Proms. Last night's two saw a geriatric performance of the Brahms double, a brand spanking new way through an old Rite and a transfiguringly spectral invocation of Schubert's Quintet.
In the earlier prom, Myung-Whun Chung's Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France demonstrated what a capricious beast the French orchestra can be: one moment on top of their game, luminous, surprising, virtuosic; the next, heels dug in, Read more ...
David Nice
Here we are again. Marvel as you enter at the aptly gaudy lighting of Albert's colosseum, but know that unless your place is with the Prommers towards the front of the arena, the musicians will often sound as if they're in another galaxy - maybe one hinted at in the George Herbert words, if hardly the Judith Weir music, of the opening BBC commission, Stars, Night, Music and Light. Though spattered with Messiaenic orchestral paint - not to mention the obbligato sniffalong from my annoying neighbour - it felt like a very tame, rather olde-British gambit. Not so the great blazes and catastrophes Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How important is it to hear “the composer’s intentions” at a concert? Maybe only the interpreter’s intentions are possible. The young Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov challenges the golden rule of faithfulness to source with the resources of today’s piano - not the ropey old Soviet thing Shostakovich would have had, or the limited piano Schubert would have known, and last night at the Wigmore Hall delivered an ear-opener of a recital all about modern pianism at its most fascinating and provocative.Melnikov’s award-winning recording of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues was the peg on which Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last night Murray Perahia played Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin, and we heard, quite simply, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin. Nothing more need be said, if one follows the Cordelia principle to love, and be silent.Still, as you insist, I will add that it was an ideally private experience between him and me, and I dare say, private between him and every other individual sitting in the Barbican Hall. Perahia, now 63, has always had an inclination towards translucency, for making himself the finest possible veil through which to show you the composers, and yet what Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the later 19th century, violinist and composer Joseph Joachim was hailed as the most brilliant fiddler of his day, but today his name lives on via the great works that he helped to bring into the classical repertoire. Brahms dedicated his Violin Concerto to Joachim, while Bruch's First Violin Concerto was substantially revised by Joachim and became closely identified with him. Both the Schumann and Dvořák concertos were written for him, though Joachim never performed the latter."Every fiddle player who picks up the Brahms concerto sees Joachim's name inscribed on it as the dedicatee Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes historical recordings by a neglected violinist and interesting interpretations of Brahms and Mahler. A notorious choral blockbuster works its insidious magic, and Australia’s best-known classical musician takes on Kipling. Two young pianists shine in very different repertoire, and orchestral fireworks are provided by a provincial French orchestra. Can a respected British conductor cast new light upon a staple of 20th-century British music? And what does one of the world’s scariest film scores sound like played by four people? Spiritual sustenance is Read more ...
David Nice
So the Berlin Phiharmonic’s high-profile five-day residency staked its ultimate curtain-calls on one of the most spiritual adagio-finales in the symphonic repertoire (most of the others, like this one to the Third Symphony, are by Mahler). We knew the masterful Sir Simon's micromanagement and the Berlin beauty of tone would look to the first five movements of the Third's world-embracing epic. But would the sixth flame, as it must, with pulsing inner light and strength of long-term line?Let me leave that burning question until last, just as it somewhat suspensefully hung fire in this third of Read more ...
David Nice
Heartfelt birthday salutations to the great pianist first known as plain Stephen Bishop. For a recital in the early 1980s, when he first added the paternal Croatian "Kovacevich", introducing me to late Brahms piano music - Op 117, never more evanescent or troubling since - and the Beethoven Tempest Sonata, an incentive to tackle that work as best I could. For many unbudgeable CDs on the shelves, including the great duo partnership with one-time other half Martha Argerich and late Schubert sonatas. And for having the characteristic modesty, last night, to give a protégée the central spot in a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Do paws get any mightier than Llŷr Williams's? When not crashing down onto the Wigmore Hall Steinway like a ton of singing bricks, they were digging deep, like strong, nifty moles, foraging for the contrapuntal melodies that lay beneath the topsoil. Williams was made to tackle the beefy German classics on this programme.Busoni's transcription of Bach's great Chaconne in D minor was grand and bracing, like the lusty, lyrical stirring of a mighty male Welsh choir. The fluency and conviction and sweep of the rushing scales - in octave or alone - and those enormous chromatic climbs was Read more ...
Jasper Rees
No woman has ever achieved a higher profile on the French horn than Sarah Willis. Why? It's not as if she is a renowned soloist. But she is the first and only woman to join the brass section of the world's most celebrated and widely followed orchestra. It will be no surprise if this Saturday the BBC cameras as usual pick her out from row upon row of Teutonic males in the second of the Berlin Philharmonic’s two Prom 2010 appearances. But in addition to her Berliner duties, this year Willis has stepped out from under the orchestra’s giant shadow for the first time.She has recorded a CD of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Helmut Lachenmann is a sort of George Bush of contemporary classical composition, a bogeyman, a warrior, an ideologue. In my time his name has always been served up with an exclamation mark - "you like Lachenmann!?" - partly because his politics have always reveled in anti-social extremes, partly because his musical tools were always either abstraction, noise, difficulty or perversity (musica negativa, as Henze once put it), his enemy, having a good time. The results are as intimidating to the ears (and performers) as his medieval face (picture, left) is to the soul. And in 50 years of Read more ...