Chopin
Pires, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Ticciati, Usher Hall, EdinburghFriday, 07 February 2014
This is more an excuse for celebration than a review. Six years after the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1974 – the birth year we were marking last night – I rolled up in a foggy Edinburgh one February day and chose it as my alma mater on... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Stavanger: A touch of FröstSunday, 01 September 2013
Three great pianists, one of the world’s top clarinettists and two fine string players in a single concert: it’s what you might expect from a chamber music festival at the highest level. What I wasn’t anticipating on the first evening in Stavanger... Read more... |
10 Questions for Amateur Musician Alan RusbridgerMonday, 21 January 2013
Had we but world enough and time... A new book by the editor of the Guardian makes it clear quite how many hours in the day it takes to run a national newspaper in the digital age. There is the unyielding nature of 24-hour news, while the internet... Read more... |
Yevgeny Sudbin, Westminster Cathedral HallMonday, 14 January 2013
It was the kind of programme that great pianist Vladimir Horowitz used to pioneer, with the simple balm of Scarlatti offset by Scriabin’s flights of fancy, and a dash of virtuoso fireworks to conclude. Though he is an admirer of the master, and even... Read more... |
Benjamin Grosvenor, Queen Elizabeth HallThursday, 01 November 2012
Benjamin Grosvenor made his Southbank recital debut last night in a sold-out Queen Elizabeth Hall in another milestone in his unstoppable evolution from wunderkind to fully-fledged concert star. It has been a good year for the 20-year-old pianist,... Read more... |
Murray Perahia, Barbican HallFriday, 08 June 2012
What an era for pianists it was in the four decades from 1800 to 1840, the era covered by Murray Perahia’s recital last night. Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Chopin all in full verdant flight, selected for a programme of much fantasy and dancing... Read more... |
Maurizio Pollini, Royal Festival HallWednesday, 07 March 2012
Their bicentennial years may have been and gone, but even Mazeppa’s wild horse wouldn’t be able to stop the world’s top pianists playing Chopin and Liszt almost every month. Last night Maurizio Pollini and his aristocratic art returned to the Royal... Read more... |
Evgeny Kissin, Barbican HallSaturday, 03 March 2012
For more than 10 years now I have been waiting in vain for the pianist Evgeny Kissin to shatter the stereotyped image built around him by music critics who haven’t always liked what they’ve heard. You know the kind of thing: Kissin the visitor from... Read more... |
Richard Goode, Royal Festival Hall (2012)Monday, 13 February 2012
You couldn't imagine a less likely acrobat than avuncular American Richard Goode. But when it comes to the piano, there's no mistaking it. A nippy little tumbler he undoubtedly is. Today we saw his fingers bounce about the keyboard like a troupe of... Read more... |
Khatia Buniatishvili, Wigmore Hall/ Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Queen Elizabeth HallThursday, 08 December 2011
Before his slightly over-extended majesty drops behind a cloud at the end of this bicentenary year, and following Louis Lortie’s light-and-shade monodrama on Sunday, Franz Liszt has moved back to left-of-centre in two ambitious midweek concerts. In... Read more... |
Homage to Fokine, Mariinsky Ballet, Royal Opera HouseSaturday, 30 July 2011
Mikhail Fokine, choreographer to both West and East, looked forward and back, too. He studied in the old Imperial Theatre School when the tsars ruled Russia, and he was also Diaghilev’s creative genius at the Ballets Russes, moving dance into the... Read more... |
Set The Piano Stool on Fire: on filming Alfred BrendelWednesday, 01 June 2011
When Alfred Brendel first mentioned Kit Armstrong to me, in early 2008, I knew there was a film there. He was brimming with excitement: Kit had come to him with an interpretation of a Chopin Nocturne that displayed a command and maturity that was... Read more... |
