Ravel
theartsdesk at the Pärnu Music Festival 2018 - Pärt, Leonskaja and friends hard at playMonday, 13 August 2018
Unanticipated miracles happen every summer in the quiet paradise of Estonia's seaside capital. The first this year came as a total surprise. Having got off the afternoon coach from Riga last Monday and dumped bags at my villa base in Pärnu's garden... Read more... |
Prom 3, BBC Young Musician at 40 review - multi-layered birthday cakeMonday, 16 July 2018
How do you go about co-ordinating a spectacular like this, the first ever BBC Young Musicians' Prom? With 23 brilliant soloists from clarinettist Michael Collins, not even the winner of the first event 40 years ago, to 16-year-old Lauren Zhang, who... Read more... |
London Piano Festival, Kings Place review - feasts of fearless fingerworkTuesday, 10 October 2017
What has 12 hands, 18 legs, 176 keys and two page-turners? Party night at the London Piano Festival, of course. The six-pianist, two-piano marathon on Saturday evening was a high point of this delectable four-day event – though far from the only one... Read more... |
Pagliacci/L’enfant et les sortilèges, Opera North review - off and on with the motleyMonday, 18 September 2017
The first two one-acters in Opera North’s season called The Little Greats were unveiled on Saturday. There are six in all, scheduled on a mix-and-match basis so Leeds opera-goers can choose their own tapas menu: grab one show, choose from various... Read more... |
‘A massive party full of treats and surprises’: Annabel Arden on six mini masterpieces at Opera NorthThursday, 14 September 2017
The first day of rehearsals for The Little Greats was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure: the casts of six shows, the whole chorus, all the creative teams and management milling around and talking nineteen to the dozen in the big, reverberant... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Dutilleux, Dvořák, Ravel, TchaikovskySaturday, 26 August 2017
Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Sibelius: Finlandia Chineke! Orchestra/Kevin John Edusei (Signum)These live performances mark the recording debut of the Chineke! Orchestra, an ensemble created by bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku to provide opportunities for BME... Read more... |
Prom 24 review: Crebassa, Philharmonia, Salonen – thrilling performance of Adams masterpieceThursday, 03 August 2017
The title of John Adams’s Naive and Sentimental Music is a bit of a tease. Read literally it promises – or threatens – unsophisticated mawkishness, though that is the last thing it delivers. But maybe it was this title, alongside relatively... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Falla, Ravel, Antoine Tamestit, The American Brass QuintetSaturday, 24 June 2017
Falla: Nights in the Garden of Spain, Ravel: Piano Concertos Steven Osborne (piano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ludovic Morlot (Hyperion)Steven Osborne's solo Ravel anthology is among the best available, and it's good that he's now... Read more... |
Ensemble InterContemporain, Wigmore HallWednesday, 21 June 2017
The Paris-based Ensemble InterContemporain brought a wide-ranging programme to the Wigmore Hall. They are known as new music specialists – the group was founded by Pierre Boulez as the house band for the IRCAM electronic music studio – so Ravel and... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Eisler, Janáček, RavelSaturday, 13 May 2017
Eisler: Hangmen Also Die and other film scores Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin/Johannes Kalitzke (Capriccio)Holed up in Los Angeles, Schoenberg never wrote a Hollywood film score. Unlike his pupil and fellow exile Hanns Eisler, whose music for... Read more... |
Aimard, Philharmonia, Salonen, RFHTuesday, 21 February 2017
A new work by Igor Stravinsky is always going to be a major event, so Sunday evening’s UK premiere of his rediscovered Funeral Song was hotly anticipated. The score disappeared after its first performance and was thought lost in the Russian... Read more... |
Christine Rice, Julius Drake, Middle Temple HallTuesday, 24 January 2017
To catch the searing desolation of a lover scorned, you need to be the complete artist, with temperament and technique in perfect equilibrium. Mezzo Christine Rice has taken us from Berlioz's Marguerite and Mozart's Donna Elvira at English National... Read more... |
