piano
David Nice
It’s a given that no finer Rachmaninov interpreter exists than Nikolai Lugansky – a few others may see the works differently, not better – and that Vasily Petrenko has an uncanny affinity with both the swagger and the introspection of Elgar. But just how clearly and deeply both made their understanding felt seemed like an harmonious miracle in the most famous of all Second Piano Concertos and a parallel journey of revitalisation from Petrenko in Elgar’s world-embracing First Symphony.So the theme of this season, “Icons Rediscovered”, was for once supremely apt. Petrenko, after an engaging Read more ...
David Nice
To master even one of Brahms’s three early sonatas is a colossal task for any pianist. To play them all with towering authority in a single concert takes a phenomenon. Elisabeth Leonskaja seems just that more than ever in her late 70s; not only is there no loss of the epic stops she can pull out in the most tumultuous music, but for all her poise, she’s also still willing to embrace the craziness and iconoclasm of the 20-year-old composer as if the works were written yesterday.All this, too, from memory, like another septuagenarian pianist, Idil Biret, when I last saw her. Leonskaja's first Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This Prom by the BBC Philharmonic was billed as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Royal Northern College of Music, in distant Manchester.By design or lucky accident, the RNCM was well represented, with a new work by recent graduate Grace-Evangeline Mason, and a concerto performed by slightly less recent graduate Sir Stephen Hough (he was ennobled last week). Conductor Mark Wigglesworth (pictured below, image Mark Allan) has no obvious connection with the college or the orchestra, though he did study at Manchester University. He is always an asset on the podium, and each of the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In 1917, in the face of the Bolshevik revolution closing in on his country estate, Rachmaninoff fled Russia, never to return. He was 44, at his peak as composer, pianist and conductor, but spent the rest of his life in exile in the US and Switzerland, amassing a fortune and worldwide reputation as the biggest draw in classical music – but never reconciling himself to being separated from his homeland. As he lay dying, he insisted on a Russian nurse, his wife reading Pushkin to him.The story of Rachmaninoff’s quarter century of exile is well told by Fiona Maddocks in Goodbye Russia, which Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Barb Jungr has made a speciality – some might even say her own art form – out of taking well-known songs, and discovering far more subtlety and meaning in them than people ever knew they had. As she explains in the notes accompanying My Marquee: “ I love well-constructed songs with lyrics that, however apparently simple, can yield other levels of interpretation and subtlety.” One writer has called what she finds in these songs “confessional depth”.That is certainly a part of the story. She has interpreted Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Sting, The Beatles, Appalachian folk songs... One thing I Read more ...
Kozhukhin, BBCSSO, Menezes, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - shimmering Saariaho and moody Mendelssohn
Miranda Heggie
How apt that on her first visit to Scotland, Italian-Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes would lead the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Mendelssohn's Third Symphony, the “Scottish”. Though there may not be many particularly "Scottish" sounding melodies in this piece, its overall sound conjures up the brooding moods of the Scottish landscape.One scene which was particularly evident here was of an angry Atlantic, the body of water Mendelssohn would have crossed to reach the Hebrides, the group of western islands which inspired his famous overture, written at the same time Read more ...
David Nice
Shortly before his death, Rachmaninov proposed recording the two-piano version of his swansong Symphonic Dances with Vladimir Horowitz. A curse on that RCA executive who turned the offer down. What amazes is how much pianistic magic can make up for the orchestral wizardry of the more familiar incarnation. The Kolesnikov-Tsoy duo is the one to redisover it now, and they did the same for Mikhail Pletnev’s recreative genius in music from Prokofiev’s Cinderella.The pairing makes perfect sense, as in irrational non-sense, where everything unpredictable flies and soars. There’s contrast in these Read more ...
David Nice
Who’d have thought Florence Price, Rachmaninov, Gershwin and Brahms would all fit the (unspoken) theme of 1930s America? Brahms made the bill by virtue of Schoenberg’s 1937 arrangement of the C minor Piano Quartet, so outlandish and camp that you’d be tempted to credit Stokowski as the orchestrator. Like Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on the Theme of Paganini, it needs vertiginous audacity: that came in spades from conductor Joshua Weilerstein and pianist Martin James Bartlett.Weilerstein and an orchestra sounding especially lustrous in the string section made the best possible case for currently Read more ...
Robert Beale
Maybe he thought it was a relaxing way to celebrate his recent 75th birthday – maybe he just fancied a trip to Manchester to play with the BBC Philharmonic – either way there was something very special to hear in Garrick Ohlsson’s Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto on Saturday.It's often considered one of the greatest challenges for any virtuoso pianist, not least because it’s a 40-minute score in which the soloist is hardly ever silent. There are constant torrents, cascades and armfuls of notes, so that it’s simply a marathon before any question of interpretation or approach arises. But Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
24 years since their last album, it’s pleasing to have Everything But The Girl back. That voice! They were conceived amidst post-post-punk “new pop” conceptualism, consistently made hit albums for 15 years, and only quit because they’d become bored of the naff entertainment industry circus. Happily, as only happens with a few bands who reappear after decades, Fuse does not disappoint.Also happily, it’s not the sound of a once-successful unit settling on their laurels. In the period since they were last Everything But The Girl, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn have written compulsive books and Read more ...
Robert Beale
It was very much the formula as before, as Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Gábor Takács-Nagy moved their edition of the Mozart piano concertos a step closer to completion with Nos. 11, 12 and 13.That formula has served them well in the past: it’s not “authentic” – Bavouzet plays a Yamaha grand, after all, and the musicians of Manchester Camerata play on modern instruments – but it’s certainly historically informed, as well as a delight to listen to.Their Chandos recordings of this “Mozart, made in Manchester” set are popping out steadily and earning high praise, and on this occasion, tackling the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Compared to her peers, Lana del Rey is mightily prolific. This is her eighth album since her breakthough 11 years ago (her ninth in total). Her last album appeared 15 months ago. There’s still much she wants us to hear. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is an hour-and-a-quarter long. It sprawls. It could do with an edit, but as so often when talented musicians sprawl, there are also gems.The mood of the album is mostly built around stunningly deft piano, presumably from her usual keys person Byron Thomas. Many of the tracks are becalmed, delicate things. There’s a section of Read more ...