piano
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... |
Grosvenor, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Litton, Barbican HallSaturday, 12 January 2013
Elgar declared a “massive hope in the future” as the human programme behind his epic First Symphony’s final exultant sprint. That hope was sprinkled like gold dust around the featured artists of this all-English concert. There are good reasons to be... Read more... |
Loving Miss Hatto, BBC One/ Homeland, Series 2 Finale, Channel 4Sunday, 23 December 2012
Joyce Hatto achieved a rare kind of immortality for being the pianist at the centre of an audacious classical music fraud, in which her husband faked "Joyce Hatto" CDs from the work of other artists and, for a time, enjoyed considerable success with... Read more... |
CD: Nils Frahm - ScrewsSunday, 09 December 2012
Although he has been recording since 2005, it was his 2011 album, Felt, which set Nils Frahm apart from the ever-swelling tide of modern classical minimalists. It was so intimate, so subtle, it felt almost like it shouldn’t be shared. The follow up... Read more... |
Kate Royal, Spira Mirabilis, QEHThursday, 06 December 2012
The billing for this all-Schubert concert, "Spira Mirabilis and Kate Royal", was a little misleading, since they did not actually share the stage at any point, the two halves being clearly separate events. First came the hour-long Octet, played by... Read more... |
Piemontesi, Karnéus, Reiss, Guildhall Symphony Chorus, BBCSO, Bělohlávek, Barbican HallSunday, 02 December 2012
Now the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s second Conductor Laureate, Jiří Bělohlávek was always going to deserve a hero’s welcome for taking his players to the finishing line of their six-year cycle through Mahler’s symphonies. As more superficially... Read more... |
Kim, London Symphony Orchestra, Schuldt/Gardiner, Barbican HallFriday, 30 November 2012
Any young composer who finds himself at the opposite end of a programme from Walton’s First Symphony had better be good. Edward Nesbit - whose piece Parallels was commissioned by the LSO Panufnik Young Composer’s Scheme - is certainly that. Indeed... Read more... |
CD: Jools Holland & His Rhythm & Blues Orchestra – The Golden Age of SongMonday, 26 November 2012
Sometimes as a critic one cannot help pre-judging an album however hard one tries not to. I expected the worst of this all-star jamboree bag from TV's most haphazard interviewer, which mixes some Hootenanny turns with new recordings of old... Read more... |
CD: Alicia Keys - Girl On FireSaturday, 24 November 2012
14 Grammy Awards, over 30 million albums sold, immortalised in song by Bob Dylan. It's hard to believe that Girl On Fire is only Alicia Keys's fifth studio album, such is the extent of her success. The singer-songwriter's previous release, The... Read more... |
Evgeny Kissin, Barbican HallWednesday, 21 November 2012
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... |
AmourMonday, 12 November 2012
In the 1960s the Kiwi cartoonist Kim Casali started the comic strip Love is… which mawkishly defined love in a series of statements like, “Love is…being able to say you are sorry” - messages still printed on Valentine’s cards to this day. In... Read more... |
