Philharmonia
Bernard Hughes
This Philharmonia concert from the Royal Festival Hall comprised three masterworks of English music, following a (welcome) trend that has emerged in COVID-era streamed concerts in digging out a couple of smaller-scale, less often programmed pieces to put alongside a sure-fire hit. So we had Britten’s last, tormented vocal work Phaedra and Tippett’s wonderful Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli before finishing with the banker: Elgar’s Enigma Variations.The conductor was Sir John Eliot Gardiner (pictured below) who, in a mid-concert interview, revealed this was his first appearance Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s an old rule in the theatre that you don’t have to go on if there are more people on stage than in the audience. Last night I counted less than 15 people listening in the cavernous auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall pitted against a fairly full-sized Philharmonia (with the now familiar onstage social distancing) but the show went on anyway, for the benefit of an unknown number of people watching the livestream. It made for a somewhat dispiriting experience in the hall. I enjoyed the Philharmonia’s virtual Prom last month and I’m prepared to concede that this concert may have come Read more ...
David Nice
It may be only six and a half months since many of us saw a production of Beethoven’s Fidelio in the opera house, but that was another world, and this post-lockdown admittance to Garsington Opera’s spacious, award-winning pavilion with its impressive acoustic was always going to be something extraordinary. It turned out to be all the more so given the revelations of what you can hear in Beethoven’s score as arranged by Francis Griffin for an ensemble of 13 Philharmonia players – as conductor Douglas Boyd pointed out, not better than the original, but startlingly different – and the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Unlike the other two Proms I’ve reviewed this season, last night’s by the Philharmonia did not have any bells and whistles when it came to the staging, nor did it explore the edges of the repertoire. But the repertoire choices were good: progressing from the chamber orchestra forces of the first two pieces to finish with Mozart’s last and beefiest symphony, although Mozart at his beefiest is still no Bruckner.The originally-billed Esa-Pekka Salonen withdrew from the concert and his late replacement was Paavo Järvi (pictured below). He clearly enjoyed himself, conducting with a wry smile Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like it or not, we live – as Beethoven did – in interesting times. In place of the revolutions, wars and occupations that convulsed the cities he knew, we now confront a silent, invisible foe that breeds an equal terror. Hence the empty seats in the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday: a small proportion of the whole, but still noticeable. They greeted this unique concert, compèred by a top-flight celebrity, which gathered several of the best-loved works in the repertoire into one bumper package over a long Sunday afternoon.Directed by Gerard McBurney, narrated by Stephen Fry, and anchored by the Read more ...
David Nice
So many performances of Mahler's most theatrical symphony every season, so few conductors who have something radically fresh to say about it. Two who do are London Philharmonic Orchestra chief Vladimir Jurowski, perfecting his vision over the years, and now the Philharmonia's Principal Guest Conductor, Jakub Hrůša. With total command, he captures the scope of a monumental canvas, every nuance in the phrasing – quite often it's simply that Mahler's meticulous instructions need following, but how rarely that happens – and pointillist jabs of colour.The breadth of Hrůša's interpretation – the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Concert programmes that set out to tell us a story can prove a mixed blessing. Yes, it’s valuable and stimulating to find ideas, and narratives, embodied in the musical flow. But great pieces, well-performed, have a habit of cutting loose from the frame of concepts someone has devised for them. At the Royal Festival Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia gathered three singular, idiosyncratic works under the rubric of “Voices of 1945”. No ordinary year, of course: immediately, the title primed us to listen for after-echoes – direct or oblique – of the conflict that had lately shattered Read more ...
David Nice
Horns fanfared, coasted and chorused through yet another Philharmonia winner of a concert to match the impressive planning of its Weimar season last year and no doubt a plan close to the heart of principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, who started his musical life as a horn-player. Between the dark-woods harmonies of Weber's Overture to Der Freischütz and the scampery of Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, the orchestra's former first horn Richard Watkins perfected his way – or, to paraphrase the simile of horn-playing by another top exponent, Barry Tuckwell, drove his car sleekly on black ice – Read more ...
David Nice
You can't expect a full house when the only work approaching a repertoire staple on your programme is Berg's Lulu Suite. Yet Esa-Pekka Salonen was able to serve up what must count as one of the most enthralling Philharmonia programmes ever at the Southbank Centre simply by spotlighting four different styles surfacing in the anything-goes musical world of Weimar Germany. It's just a pity there weren't more people, indeed more young people, there to hear it, and that BBC Radio 3 wasn't on hand to broadcast it.You could even see it as part of a mini-festival within the series, that superb total Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The mid-1930s, when the Nazi government replaced the Weimar republic, was a bleak time for the composers featured in last night’s Philharmonia concert. Arnold Schoenberg was the first to leave for the US, followed by Paul Hindemith in 1938. Alban Berg avoided emigration only by the extreme measure of dying, suddenly, in 1935. But the music they were writing was not bleak, even when marking the death of a teenage "angel".The three composers shared something else apart from the disfavour of the Nazis: a veneration of J.S. Bach, and this was the thread that bound together the first half. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia kicked off their series of concerts devoted to the edgy culture of the Weimar Republic with a programme that featured three works (out of four) derived in some way from the musical stage. That included, as a rip-roaring finale, the conclusion to Shostakovich’s football-themed ballet from 1930, The Golden Age. Given the theatrical energy that drove the evening along at the Royal Festival Hall, it felt at the outset slightly disappointing that we would see no (non-musical) drama on stage. Until, that is, Salonen got into his skipping, gesticulating stride Read more ...
graham.rickson
Do You Believe in Heather? Chamber music by Ståle Kleiberg (2L)Ståle Kleiberg's String Quartet No 3 is a masterpiece, I think. Small but perfectly formed, it's unassumingly brilliant. Kleiberg’s use of “extended tonality” is fascinating: listen to this quartet blind and you'd have a hard time placing it chronologically. Structurally impressive and melodically rich, it grips like a benign vice. Especially in the closing seconds, a physically exhilarating tie-up of loose ends which culminates in a deliciously unexpected final chord. Honestly, it's seriously, seriously good, and Read more ...