sat 14/12/2024

Liszt

Evgeny Kissin, Barbican Hall

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...

Read more...

Classical CDs Weekly: Nicola Benedetti, Liszt, Thierry Pécou

 Nicola Benedetti: The Silver Violin (Decca)Cheesy packaging and photos aside, Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti’s latest album has lots to commend it. This anthology of cinema-related music grew through Benedetti’s love of Korngold’s Violin...

Read more...

Classical CDs Weekly: Dubois, Sam Hayden, Liszt

 Théodore Dubois: Piano Concerto no 2, Ouverture de Frithiof, Dixtuor Les Siècles/François-Xavier Roth (Musicales Actes Sud)François-Xavier Roth’s period band have already given us invigorating takes on Stravinsky and Saint-Saëns, and now turn...

Read more...

Maurizio Pollini, Royal Festival Hall

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...

Classical CDs Weekly: Beethoven, Britten, Liszt, Vaughan Williams

 Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies Vienna Philharmonic/Christian Thielemann (Sony)Another Beethoven symphony cycle, released hot on the heels of Chailly’s Leipzig set. That Decca box earned rapturous praise. I’m not sure that Christian Thielemann’...

Read more...

Hough, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Alsop, Royal Festival Hall

Poor old Stephen Hough. The Liszt double. Again! Was he not at all Liszted out after last year's epic bicentenary? Were we not Liszted out by last year's epic bicentenary? Hough has been living, breathing and eating these two pieces for the past...

Read more...

Anne Schwanewilms, Charles Spencer, Wigmore Hall

Now that Margaret Price is no more and Kiri's well past her heyday, whose is the most limpid soprano of them all? "The beautiful voice" was a label slapped by PR on Renée Fleming, but that fitfully engaging diva is all curdled artifice alongside...

Read more...

Khatia Buniatishvili, Wigmore Hall/ Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Queen Elizabeth Hall

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...

Louis Lortie, Wigmore Hall

It was Chopin time when I last heard Louis Lortie, and a typical London clash of scheduling allowed me to catch his effervescent Op 10 Études before pedalling like crazy north of the river for the second half of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s even bigger all...

Read more...

Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Ivari Ilja, Barbican Hall

Tchaikovsky songs, the most obvious missing link in Olga Borodina's all-Russian programme a couple of Fridays back, formed a spare but unforgettable apex to this second recital in the Barbican's Great Performers series. That in itself, and unusual...

Read more...

Limen/Marguerite & Armand/Requiem, Royal Ballet

The cool physical activity of McGregor’s Limen, the crimson passions of Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, the symbolic sculpture of MacMillan’s Requiem - the weekend's new triple bill at Covent Garden shows three faces of British ballet-making over...

Read more...

The Last Night of the Proms, Bullock, Lang Lang, BBCSO, Gardner

Stately females sailed the corridors like grand multicoloured liners. Grown men in boaters and Union Jack waistcoats raced balloons to the Royal Albert Hall ceiling. Beachballs. Streamers. Flags. Fancy dress. One St George's Cross read "...

Read more...
Subscribe to Liszt