Brahms
David Nice
Earth stood hard as iron in parts of this awe-inspiring recital from a true song partnership, but theirs was an autumnal odyssey, not a winter journey. For all their preoccupation with death and occasionally desolation, neither Schubert at 31, in the last utterances gathered together as Schwanengesang ("Swansong"), nor Brahms, completing the Four Serious Songs on his 63rd birthday, was ready to leave this earth. You could argue that there's smiling spring in some of Schubert's inspirations, but not the way Gerald Finley or Julius Drake saw them, tellingly placing Brahms's monumental tetralogy Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Expectations ran high for this recital, Brahms from an all-star piano trio of Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma. The group has recently recorded the three Brahms piano trios for Sony, and this concert was part of a promotional tour of the US and Europe. The high-profile event also served to open the Barbican season. The performance certainly lived up to its billing, with exemplary performances from all three, and fine ensemble between them.A group made up of three concert soloists begs the question of who will lead proceedings. The answer here was quite clearly Yo-Yo Ma. He is the Read more ...
Prom 55, Lisztes, Lendvai, Lendvay, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer review - unity and strength
Jessica Duchen
There seems no limit to the sheer creativity that fizzes from Iván Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra. For their second night at the Proms, packed out this time, the theme was the meeting of classical and Gypsy musical traditions. And though Fischer, talking to the audience from the podium, kindly explained that the Gypsy tradition is distinct from both Hungarian folk music and classical conservatoires, what emerged was a sense that they have far more in common than might be admitted.Nothing asserts “Hungarian Gypsy music” quite strongly as a cimbalom centre stage. In case you haven’ Read more ...
David Nice
Unanticipated miracles happen every summer in the quiet paradise of Estonia's seaside capital. The first this year came as a total surprise. Having got off the afternoon coach from Riga last Monday and dumped bags at my villa base in Pärnu's garden zone, I headed back into town for the first event. Long on the cards were super-subtle Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing playing Massenet and Saint-Saëns conducted by Paavo Järvi, the festival’s chief mind and heart, and young Estonian musicians from the Järvi Academy in Lepo Sumera’s bracing Musica Profana. But until I opened the programme, I Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berio: Rendering, Schubert: Symphony No 9 Soloistes Européens, Luxembourg/Christoph König (Rubicon)Schubert's unfinished Symphony No 10 has been completed by various hands. I took part in a performance of Brian Newbould’s realisation several decades ago and had totally forgotten about the piece: how its chirpy first subject sounds like a G&S overture, and how modern-sounding the trombone passage near the close of the first movement is. This is vintage, exploratory Schubert. Luciano Berio's Rendering takes a different tack, treating Schubert's sketches as a three-movement fresco to Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The heart of Prom 33 was Brahms’s massive German Requiem, a piece that eschews Christian dogma and Day-of-Judgment terrors for a humanism focusing on consolation of the bereaved. It feels very much like a requiem for our times as much as the composer’s, and last night’s performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Richard Farnes, although very traditional in style, had a striking immediacy.But first came Thea Musgrave’s Phoenix Rising, the Proms premiere of a 20-year-old piece. In the year the Proms committed to increasing its representation of women composers it is also marking Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a particular quality to light seen from shadow. Think of the surface of the water glimpsed, hazy and haloed, as you swim upwards after a deep dive, or the smudged edges of city lights seen from a night flight. This concert by Ben Gernon and the BBC Philharmonic was an exercise in adjusted perspective. The sunny landscapes of Brahms’ Second Symphony and the smoky, slow-motion horror of 9/11 as viewed through Tansy Davies’ 9/11-inspired What Did We See? share little, but collided as they were here, each reframed the other, repositioned the listener.Premiered by English National Opera in Read more ...
David Nice
Have you ever wondered why the Steinway grand piano is invariably the instrument of choice in every hall you visit, great or small? Why do the halls in question not offer a choice between two or three pianos of different manufacture, as so many did before the Second World War? How is it that the hand-crafted pianos pioneered by Julius Blüthner in Leipzig from 1853 onwards, and still being made to the highest specifications on a different site just outside the city, don't usually get a look-in?Famous for their layered, mellow richness, cited by more than one great pianist as enablers for Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Brahms violin sonatas make a perfect spring evening recital. The Second and Third were inspired by a summer retreat, but all three are light, bright and with direct melodic appeal. Violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien conveyed that carefree spirit perfectly, the long melodic lines simply but elegantly shaped and the accompanying textures always carefully calibrated. They also made the most of the occasional dramatic outbursts, providing valuable contrast, while always maintaining the essential intimacy of expression.Brahms (pictured below) places much of the violin Read more ...
David Nice
STOP PRESS (10/4/2020): this performance is up for a short period on the Deutsche Kammerphilhamonie's website for free viewing. Paavo Järvi is offering a live Q&A on conducting Brahms on Saturday 11 April 2020.They did things differently in 1858. Between the movements of Brahms's surprising new Requiem in the Biblical German of Martin Luther, resounding in Bremen's Romanesque Cathedral on Good Friday, came "Erbarme dich" from Bach's St Matthew Passion, Schumann's "Abendlied" and "I know that my redeemer liveth" from Handel's Messiah. Absent from the Requiem at that time was Brahms's own Read more ...
David Nice
Edinburgh, October 2015. Robin Ticciati is still flying high from a remarkable performance of Brahms's First Symphony, the start of an intended cycle with his Scottish Chamber Orchestra in his seventh season as principal conductor. After a revelatory dissection of the thinking that shaped the interpretation, we both look forward to the end of the experience later in the season, with the Fourth. As he puts it: "That begins to transcend symphonic norms, for me it becomes quite esoteric, and for that characterisation and world, and distance from the rabid searching of No 1, I hope the year will Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone passionate about great conducting would jump at the chance to hear 89-year-old Bernard Haitink giving three days of masterclasses with eight young practitioners of the art, his eighth and possibly last series in Lucerne (though he's not ruling anything out). That was the hook to visit this year's Easter Festival. Concerts and a site-specific event may have looked like optional extras, but turned out to be also of the essence, including a profoundly well planned and executed programme masterminded by András Schiff and a rare staging of Schumann's Scenes from Faust as the Festival's very Read more ...