piano
The Kreutzer SonataTuesday, 09 March 2010
For scalpel-sharp dissection of the most vapid parts of Hollywood/LA life, told with low-budget digital flexibility that itself critiques studio indulgences, British director Bernard Rose is your man. He hit the note most viscerally in Ivansxtc a... Read more... |
Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa, VortexFriday, 05 March 2010
I was promised a night of free jazz. This was more a threat than a promise, having spent some of the worst nights of my life listening to the stuff - the strange thing about this most liberating sounding form is how everyone sounds more or less the... Read more... |
Maurizio Pollini, Royal Festival HallMonday, 01 March 2010
Was it Chopin’s birthday or wasn’t it? To be honest, no one at last night’s Royal Festival Hall concert probably gave a damn, so wrapped up were they in Maurizio Pollini’s playing. And what playing it was too. The man just sits down and gets on with... Read more... |
Krystian Zimerman, RFHTuesday, 23 February 2010
Beware of Zimermania - or, for that matter, of idolising any pianist as the Greatest Living Interpreter of Chopin. Our birthday boy, 200 years old last night (and not on 1 March), as a crucial baptismal register now seems to prove, is too big for... Read more... |
Staatskapelle Berlin, Barenboim, Royal Festival HallMonday, 01 February 2010
The returns queue gets longer and so does the wait – considerably longer than the 69 minutes of programmed music in this the second of the Daniel Barenboim Beethoven/Schoenberg series. But what a satisfying two–course meal it was: Schoenberg’s “... Read more... |
Staatskapelle Berlin, Barenboim, Royal Festival HallFriday, 29 January 2010
Anyone who can sell out four concerts of Beethoven and Schoenberg, even if it's only half-scary Schoenberg, surely looms large in the public imagination. Daniel Barenboim is a great humanitarian figure, and has been a thought-provoking... Read more... |
Julius Drake Birthday Gala, Wigmore HallWednesday, 23 December 2009
The term “accompanist” is no longer acceptable, no longer “politically correct” in musical circles, not least Lieder. It’s hard to imagine now that the relationship between a singer and his or her pianist was ever regarded as anything other than an... Read more... |
Joanna MacGregor, Howard Assembly Room, LeedsSunday, 20 December 2009
Joanna MacGregor walks on stage purposefully, clutching a manuscript of paving-slab dimensions, promptly sits down and starts to play, smiling. The opening measures of Messiaen’s Regard du Père steal in gently, and for the next 120 minutes we are... Read more... |
Ingrid Fliter, Wigmore HallWednesday, 16 December 2009
Will she? Won't she? Ooh? Ah? No to the Mazurka? Yes to the Barcarolle? We were an audience on tenterhooks last night as flu-ridden Ingrid Fliter coughed and spluttered her way through her Chopin recital at the Wigmore Hall, chopping and... Read more... |
Nikolai Demidenko, Wigmore HallMonday, 07 December 2009
Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's... Read more... |
Pictures Reframed: Leif Ove Andsnes & Robin Rhode, QEHFriday, 04 December 2009
We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical... Read more... |
Elisabeth Leonskaja, Wigmore HallMonday, 23 November 2009
Elisabeth Leonskaja, who turned 64 on Sunday, is one of the last links to a grand school of Russian pianism where technique meant the marshalling of piano possibilities into a positively orchestral array of expressive means. Often noted in harness... Read more... |
