LSO
David Nice
The musical future looks bright indeed, at least from my perspective. There are more classical concerts than ever going on across the UK on most days of the year, so who can know with any authority what might have been missed? Yet each of theartsdesk’s classical music writers has a special take on the events of 2015, and part of mine has been the special privilege of following a trail of younger players in out-of-the-way places.Serendipity began in Fife’s East Neuk Festival, where travelling up a day earlier than originally planned meant I caught the second concert given by the young Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Imagine knowing Hamlet as a four-act play, or The Ambassadors without its bottom third. Imagine Mozart’s Requiem as a torso that halts eight bars into the Lacrymosa, or Mahler’s Tenth as the lone Adagio (as, indeed it too often appears). We might admire them all the more for what we ached to feel whole as their creators intended.So it is with Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, hitherto almost universally known as a three-movement torso. Almost four years ago the Berliner Philharmoniker played and recorded the final version of the most convincing of many attempts over the years to complete the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A full house for a premiere performance: Wynton Marsalis bucks the trend in contemporary music. He’s an established name, more for his jazz than his classical work. But in recent years he has produced a substantial body of orchestral music, so the flocking crowds know what to expect. His new Violin Concerto continues the trend. Popular American idioms – mainly jazz and blues – are integrated into a classically oriented orchestral style with an impressive craftsmanship that hides all the joins. Despite the generally conservative style, it is an ambitious work, its sheer length tending towards Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He’s an American jazz giant; she’s a Scottish doyenne of the classical violin. Anyone familiar with one more than the other – and that’s more or less everyone – would do a double take to see their names on the same bill. But this week at Barbican Hall, a new concerto by Wynton Marsalis will be premiered by Nicola Benedetti and the London Symphony Orchestra.What they have in common is a tireless commitment to promoting music education. Jazz at Lincoln Center of which Marsalis is both founder and artistic director has an educational programme, and he is also director of the Juilliard’s jazz Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Stravinsky and Bartók both escaped Europe at the start of the second world war to live in the USA. For Stravinsky it was the start of 30 years of mostly happy exile, while Bartók was to survive for only five years. Works from their time in America featured in Valery Gergiev’s penultimate concert as principal conductor of the LSO last night.Stravinsky’s neoclassical Symphony in C is not often heard in concert – it was the first time I had heard it live – and this performance was not a great advertisement for the piece. Written half in Europe, at a time when the composer’s wife, mother and Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Last night's perfectly-judged, superbly communicated performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony served as a reminder that the passion, experience and astonishing musicality of 86-year-old conductor Bernard Haitink are things to be cherished and never taken for granted. The symphony, first performed in 1901, was the main work in this second of Haitink's three concerts with the LSO before they leave together for Japan.The score contains a minefield of instructions to make constant subtle and sometimes radical adjustments to the tempo. Haitink's understanding of them and how to set them instantly Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Gergiev’s programme for this concert raised eyebrows when the Proms were announced: all five Prokofiev piano concertos, presented in chronological order, over the course of a long evening. As it turned out, he had some good reasons for his plan. The three Russian pianists he lined up – Daniil Trifonov (Concertos 1 and 3), Sergei Babayan (2 and 5), and Alexei Volodin (4) – had between them the talent to carry any programme. And the composer benefited too, with his Fourth and Fifth Concertos, both difficult works to programme, finding a natural home, and both appearing for the first time at the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Over the past decade Krystian Zimerman and Sir Simon Rattle have created and evolved a performing idea of Brahms’s D minor piano concerto which is still remarkable for its considered weight and grimly imposing grandeur, Michelangelo’s Mosè in music.As played at the Barbican in its latest appearance, hardly so refined as in Berlin but undeniably exciting, that idea of the concerto has attenuated and intensified, not quite towards self-parody but moving ever farther from the sense of a piece from 1858, written squarely if boldly in the tradition of Beethoven by a 25-year-old composer Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
How to respond to Mahler? That was the challenge set by the London Symphony Orchestra to Edward Rushton when they commissioned him to write an opener for this programme. Rushton’s response was to take a story from a biography of Alma and spin it into an orchestral fantasy. The story goes that Alma, listening to Gustav compose the Fifth Symphony, complained about the excessive orchestration, which he then dutifully toned down.Even by Rushton’s own admission the tale is apocryphal to the point of outright fiction, but it provided a starting point for a more idiosyncratic exploration of Mahler’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
With Kavakos, Faust, Shaham and Skride already been and gone, and Jansen, Ehnes, Bell and Ibragimova still to come, the LSO’s International Violin Festival has nothing left to prove. We’re not short of star power in London’s concert scene, but even by our spoilt metropolitan standards this is a pretty unarguable line-up. With excellence a given, then, it takes quite a lot to startle a crowd into delight – especially on a Sunday night. But that’s what Christian Tetzlaff did with the unassuming freshness and brilliance of his Beethoven.Ever thoughtful, Tetzlaff has taken the cadenzas that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Malcolm Arnold: Symphonies 1-9 London Symphony Orchestra/Richard Hickox, BBC Philharmonic/Rumon Gamba (Chandos)Malcolm Arnold's lasting reputation as a chameleonic comedian endures, though his more overtly serious cycle of nine symphonies shouldn't be overlooked. They span his compositional career – the bracing, bold No. 1 written in 1949, the alarming, sepulchral 9th completed in 1986. They exist in a very British parallel musical universe, miles from the European avant-garde. But Arnold wasn't an insular composer; these symphonies make overt reference to Berlioz, Sibelius, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Time was when a Boulez concert with the LSO would have been directed by the man himself, but that is no longer possible. In Peter Eötvös they have the next best thing, a conductor who has known the man and his music for decades, whose listening ear is scarcely less acute and whose most recent appearance wth the LSO, in Lachenmann and Brahms with Maurizio Pollini, made quite miraculous music from intensive rehearsal. It was evident that similar care had gone into the preparation of orchestral rites by Stravinsky and Boulez, preceded by the Livre pour cordes which the French composer fashioned Read more ...