Schubert
graham.rickson
Schubert: Piano Music Steven Osborne (Hyperion)This is marvellous, an unexpected treat from a versatile pianist more commonly associated with 20th-century repertoire. Though Steven Osborne does have form in Schubert, having made a superb Hyperion disc of the composer's piano duet music several years ago. He gives us gloriously clear-sighted, lyrical performances of two posthumously published works. The D935 Four Impromptus are described in Misha Donat's notes as a sonata in disguise. Play them in order and you've an expansive 37-minute-long sequence, the last movement in the same key as Read more ...
David Nice
It was a massive but never overbearing three-parter, a three-and-a-half hour celebration, a mini-festival of youth and experience. Wouldn’t we all want to mark a major birthday in the company of friends of all ages? Elisabeth Leonskaja, much-loved torchbearer for the comprehensive manner of mentor and duo-partner Sviatoslav Richter, played with them all – members of the Doric Quartet, genius composer and most vivacious of clarinettists Jörg Widmann, Vienna Phil double-bass doyen Alois Posch and, most bracingly of all, three of her own acolytes making their very distinguished ways in the world Read more ...
David Nice
Not many people write conspicuously brilliant tweets, but Elizabeth Watts is someone who does. Working on the most demanding aria on her stunning new CD of operatic numbers and cantatas by the lesser-known of the two Scarlattis, father Alessandro rather than son Domenico, she tweeted: “Good news – I can sing 88 notes without a breath. Bad news – Scarlatti wrote 89.”The sheer hard work behind that achievement, which Watts discusses below, reminds one that the best singing isn’t something that’s just a gift. And when she went to the Royal College of Music as a postgrad student at the age Read more ...
David Nice
“People think when a person becomes old, he has to become serene,” declared that great pianist Claudio Arrau in his mid-seventies. “That’s absurd. The expressive intensity is, I feel, much stronger, much more concentrated in my playing than years ago.” You could argue the same for Stephen Kovacevich at his 75th birthday concert, though in the case of Schubert’s final, B flat Piano Sonata, was it entirely intensity that had him racing through a work that, back in 1982, he took about 10 minutes longer over, albeit with repeats?Without the promised BBC Radio 3 broadcast, pulled on Sunday, giving Read more ...
David Nice
“Whatever happened to Stephen Bishop?” is not a question likely to be asked by followers of legendary pianism. Born in San Pedro, Los Angeles on 17 October 1940, the young talent took his stepfather’s name as his career was launched at the age of 11. Later he honoured his own father’s Croatian "Kovacevich", by appending it to the “Bishop”. Now it’s plain Kovacevich carved in the pantheon of similar yet unique sensibilities like those of Arrau, Pollini, Richter and Zimerman, alongside masterly exponents of mostly different repertoire like Martha Argerich.On 2 November, in the hottest ticket on Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
This Barbican concert began with a Mendelssohn overture and ended with a Haydn symphony. But on stage were the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. What did you expect in between, a Mozart piano concerto? Not likely. Instead they gave the first performance of No.48 (night studio) by Richard Ayres. English-born but resident in the Netherlands and working mostly on the Continent, Ayres has impeccable post-Minimalist credentials (studies with Louis Andriessen and Morton Feldman) which do no more than hint at how his music behaves – like a kid in a well-stocked acoustic sweet-shop. Or at a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Haydn: Symphonies 31, 70 and 101 Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Linn)Josef Haydn recalled his three decades spent working for the Esterházy court in the following terms: “I was cut off from the world, there was no one near me to torment me or make me doubt myself, so I had to become original.” And the three D major symphonies on this generously-filled disc do bubble with originality; No. 31, nicknamed the Hornsignal, opens with a four-horn blast which looks forward to Tchaikovsky's 4th. Haydn's ready access to a quartet of highly paid horn virtuosi in his court Read more ...
David Nice
It was a sad coincidence that this Monday Platform “showcasing talented young artists” took place only weeks after the death in a road accident of Roderick Lakin, Director of Arts for 31 years at the Royal Over-Seas League which was last night's backer. For no concert could have been more sensitively tuned to a personal farewell. Overt melancholy only surfaced in the slow-movement theme of Brahms’s Second Piano Trio. But wouldn’t you want Dowland, Bach and Schubert at your memorial concert? I know I would, and especially from these artists, all so inclined to mature introspection that they Read more ...
David Nice
It’s hardly surprising that at the grand old age of 86 Bernard Haitink can pack them in at the Albert Hall so that there’s no room left in the Arena and those still queueing 10 minutes before the concert have to go up to the Gallery. But he was also doing it back in 1978, when I went to hear my first Mahler “Resurrection” and found myself too late in the queue for the best standing-place in the hall, stuck in the rafters for the one and only time (never again). The Chamber Orchestra of Europe wasn’t even born then. For the decade after its foundation in 1981, it was a young orchestra; no more Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hugi Guðmundsson: Calm of the Deep The Hamrahlíd Choir/Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir, Nordic Affect/Guðni Franzson (Smekkleysa)Calm of the Deep introduces us to contemporary Icelandic composer Hugi Guðmundsson. Who sees his music as “a dialogue between old and new, past and present”. There are many magical things on this disc. Like To This My Thoughts Turn All My Days, based on an anonymous melody first notated in 1742. Guðmundsson's brilliant recasting treats the tune with utter respect. The harmonies are often disarmingly simple, though the best moments have the melody confidently floating above Read more ...
David Nice
It only takes one outstanding musician with links to an out-of-the-way place to gather his or her top-notch friends and give a mini-festival of international quality. They’re springing up all over the UK: guiding lights that come to mind are violinist Anthony Marwood in Peasmarsh and tenor Toby Spence at Wardsbrook Farm. Now another leading British tenor, Ben Johnson, has set up a Young Artists' Programme and a band of the brightest and best young string players in the village of Southrepps, less than two miles from the beautiful North Norfolk coast. What I heard in two of the seven concerts Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom, these corrugated ridges formed a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman.” Lushly green and densely planted, today the view out over Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia is unrecognisable as the blasted landscape first witnessed by author Iris Origo in 1923. From a barren wilderness, the valley was transformed by Origo and her husband into a thriving farm, crowned by one of Italy’s loveliest landscaped gardens, where now, some 80 years later, Origo’s children and grandchildren continue the family legacy. But while Iris and husband Antonio brought water, life Read more ...