Shostakovich
David Nice
How ironic that English National Opera turned out possibly the two best productions of the year after the Arts Council had done its grant-cutting worst, punishing the company simply, it seemed, for not being the irrationally preferred Royal Opera. And while 2015 has been as good as it gets artistically speaking for ENO, 2016 may well see confirmation of the first steps towards its dismantling by a short-sighted management – for what is a great opera house without a big chorus or a full roster of productions, both elements under threat?Meanwhile, let’s celebrate the positive. Both the outgoing Read more ...
David Nice
This is difficult. An official obituary, such as the one I’ve just finished for The Guardian, has no problem in pointing out the achievements of Kurt Masur’s distinguished career. Whatever his party-line status in Honecker’s East Germany, which he used to get the Leipzig Gewandhaus rebuilt to his own satisfaction, Masur did play a crucial role as one of five spokesmen preventing a Tiananmen Square-style massacre before the Berlin Wall fell. In 2001 he responded swiftly with his New York Philharmonic to give a memorial performance of Brahms’s A German Requiem, motivated players to give free Read more ...
graham.rickson
Alessandro Scarlatti: Con eco d'amore – Arias from operas and cantatas Elizabeth Watts (soprano), The English Concert/Laurence Cummings (director and continuo) (Harmonia Mundi)Scarlatti? He of keyboard sonata fame? That's actually Domenico; this recital disc collects soprano arias by his father Alessandro (1660-1725), whose star has been eclipsed by his son. Scarlatti senior didn't write much instrumental music, but was amazingly prolific in other areas. He composed 600 cantatas, 30 oratorios, and claimed to have written over 100 operas during a 40-year career. So you worry that his music Read more ...
David Nice
“The music quacks, hoots, pants and gasps”: whichever of his Pravda scribes Stalin commandeered to demolish Shostakovich’s “tragedy-satire” in January 1936, two years into its wildly successful stage history, didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it defines one extreme of the ENO Orchestra’s stupendous playing under its new Music Director Mark Wigglesworth. On the other hand there are also heartbreaking tenderness, terrifying whispers and aching sensuousness. A fuller picture of Shostakovich’s murdering heroine as 20th - or even 21st - century Russian woman couldn’t be imagined; soprano Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
“A rich and eclectic sequence of works” was the promise made in this evening’s concert programme. It certainly was that, with the Last Night festivities taking in new and old, well-known and obscure, plus a handful of celebrity soloists for good measure. The audience was predictably ebullient, generating the kind of atmosphere you only get at the Last Night of the Proms. Musically, though, this wasn’t the high point of the season – everything was at least serviceable, and much was very good, but only occasionally did it meet the exceptional standards set in this hall over the last few weeks Read more ...
theartsdesk
September is upon us and it’s nearly time for the new season. English National Opera’s Artistic Director John Berry may have left the building but his enterprising legacy lives on in a 2015-16 season that looks on paper as good as any in the past 20 years; what happens after that is anyone's guess. Still, there shouldn’t be too much grief that ENO Music Director Edward Gardner has moved on, since his successor Mark Wigglesworth already has a fine track record with the company.Over at the Royal Opera, it’s business as usual with Antonio Pappano and at least one rarity to match Szymanowski’s Read more ...
David Nice
There were two reasons why I didn’t return to the Albert Hall late on Friday night to hear Andras Schiff play Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The first was that one epic, Mahler’s Sixth in the stunning performance by Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, needed properly digesting. The other was that at Easter I’d heard Jeremy Denk play the Goldbergs in Weimar, and I wanted that approach to resonate, too – dynamic, continuous, revelatory, in a very different way from how I know Schiff approaches Bach.Denk’s recitals are mandatory listening now, and the lunchtime recital yesterday at Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra have made the Shostakovich Tenth their calling card. Their recent recording of the work on Deutsche Grammophon has received universal acclaim, and now they're making their first European tour together, performing the symphony in London, Salzburg, Lucerne and Paris. It’s a great choice, a work that plays to all their strengths, conductor and orchestra alike. But this varied programme also demonstrated other facets of this versatile and increasingly distinctive partnership.How refreshing to hear Haydn performed by a symphony orchestra, bold and Read more ...
David Nice
Drawing an audience of five and a half thousand in to listen intently is harder than pushing out into the vasts of the Albert Hall. Yet it’s what seems to work best in this unpredictable space, and last night masterful veterans Elisabeth Leonskaja and Charles Dutoit knew exactly what to do. The results were romantic introspection in Mozart - an unfashionable but valid alternative to authentic sprightliness - and a Shostakovich Fifteenth Symphony that was more skull than skin, but a compellingly decorated skull for all that.The quietly commanding tone of the evening, in marked contrast to the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Schoenberg: Gurre-Lieder Gürzenich-Orchester Köln/Markus Stenz (Hyperion)Schoenberg's vast Gurre-Lieder began life in 1900 as a modest song cycle for soprano, tenor and piano, its texts drawn from Danish poetry. He suspended work on the piece in 1903, returning to it in 1910 – by which time his musical style had radically changed. As had the scale of the piece, which ideally needs between 300 and 400 performers, six vocal soloists and over 100 minutes. Not forgetting the ratchet and some iron chains. The extravagant forces are used with admirable restraint, and performances remain an Read more ...
David Nice
In 1989 Neeme Järvi, already rated one of the world’s top conductors and soon to be voted “Estonian of the Century” by his compatriots, returned with his Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra to the homeland he had left for America nearly a decade earlier. I went with them then, and to experience a free Estonia 26 years later was a bracing surprise.Under Soviet rule, there had been violence on the streets and Järvi had departed prematurely in secrecy, fearing detention. Now “the little country that could”, as a former Prime Minister has called it, is so relaxed, productive and happy that Putin’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Florilegium, dir. Ashley Solomon (Channel Classics)This is a predictably satisfying pair of discs, another outstanding set of period-instrument Brandenburgs from a crack British group. It did prompt me to sample naughtily inauthentic performances from the likes of Karajan and Klemperer, both indecently enjoyable but sounding so anachronistic that it's hard to believe that we ever learned to love these pieces played in such a manner. The joy of Bach is that he's almost indestructible, as long as the spirit and intention are right – as they are on an entertaining new Read more ...