Royal Albert Hall
Prom 75: Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, GilbertSaturday, 13 September 2014
The silliness of the Last Night is really just a postscript to the penultimate night of the Proms, traditionally given over to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was a tradition restored yesterday evening when Alan Gilbert and the... Read more... |
Prom 74: Wainwright, Voigt, Britten Sinfonia, DebusFriday, 12 September 2014
Swathes of this year’s final Late Night Prom were so invertebrate, amateurish even, that I was tempted to go home and throw out my Want One and Want Two CDs. I won’t, of course: Canadian American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has written some... Read more... |
Prom 72: Berthaud, BBCSO, LittonThursday, 11 September 2014
A Prom billed as “English Music” sounds like a restful sort of affair – probably pastoral, definitely tuneful and potentially restorative after a day in the office. In practice however this concert from Andrew Litton and the BBC Symphony Orchestra... Read more... |
Prom 69: Cleveland Orchestra, Welser-MöstTuesday, 09 September 2014
Is there something about the start of a new cultural season, or indeed the Proms, that make classical music’s conductors rush to jump ship? Consider this. Last Friday, two days before his pair of Prom concerts with his American outfit, the Cleveland... Read more... |
Prom 66: St Matthew Passion, Berlin Philharmonic, RattleSunday, 07 September 2014
Peter Sellars’ work used to be about making a statement. He would dislocate texts from contexts, subvert musical suggestion and ignore written statement for the sheer joy of the artistic friction it would generate. The beauty of his St Matthew... Read more... |
Prom 64: Berlin Philharmonic, RattleSaturday, 06 September 2014
After Monday’s Respighi extravaganza at the Proms, it was back on the rainbow express for more wonders of orchestral colour last night. In the young Stravinsky’s large-scale signing-in and poor depressed old Rachmaninov’s signing-off, you could... Read more... |
Prom 63: McAllister, BBCSO, AlsopFriday, 05 September 2014
Conductor Marin Alsop was welcomed like Britannia herself at last night’s concert, an astute partnership of John Adams’ vivacious hybridism and Gustav Mahler’s colourful patchwork quilt of a symphony. Alsop won the Prommers’ hearts with her... Read more... |
Proms Chamber Music 7: Benjamin Grosvenor/Prom 60: Driver, RPO, DutoitTuesday, 02 September 2014
After the enervating excesses of Salome and Elektra at the weekend, the abundance of notes at the Proms continued in a piano recital and an orchestral showstopper, but this time with built-in air conditioning. After all, both 22-year-old Benjamin... Read more... |
Prom 59: Elektra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BychkovMonday, 01 September 2014
How much familial dysfunction and lust - whether for sexual gratification or revenge - can one take in a single weekend? Salome and Elektra back-to back may on paper seem like a feast of divine decadence but no sooner had one become accustomed to... Read more... |
Prom 58: Salome, Deutsche Oper Berlin, RunniclesSunday, 31 August 2014
So here’s where I join the ranks of Old Opera Bores by declaring this Salome, Nina Stemme, the best I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens in 1978, and this Salome as in Richard Strauss’s Wilde opera from Donald Runnicles and his Deutsche Oper Berlin... Read more... |
Prom 53: Brahms Symphonies, Budapest Festival Orchestra, FischerWednesday, 27 August 2014
About 10 minutes into the Brahms Third Symphony I wanted to check a name in the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s programme. I dared to turn a page. Bad idea. Such preternatural stillness had settled over the sold-out Royal Albert Hall that the gesture... Read more... |
Prom 52: Budapest Festival Orchestra, FischerTuesday, 26 August 2014
The first of this year's two Proms by the Budapest Festival Orchestra had looked like a rather strange confection, on paper at least. With eleven scheduled contributions, and only two of them destined to make it into double figures, its timings had... Read more... |
