Shostakovich
David Nice
Heavy-goods vehicles stacked with lamentations have been thundering through the Barbican Hall. Saturday's lugubrious Rachmaninov found a mid-20th-century counterpart last night in the tough elegies of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto - apt for a dedication to those affected by the Japanese earthquake. And the tottering juggernaut of not-quite-great-but-living Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin still clogs the LSO's current season, fortunately in this case only to head a procession ending in the carnival float of what should have been Tchaikovsky's springiest symphony.Well, the Gergiev Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Send in the clowns. Or at least that was Vladimir Jurowski’s musical thinking in bringing together the mighty foursome of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Haydn and Shostakovich and seeing just how far their capricious natures might take us. The allusions and parodies came thick and fast and just when you thought there was no more irony to tap, in came the most outrageous instance of misdirection in the history of 20th-century music: Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony. And that is no joke.Jurowski has fashioned some brilliant programmes in his time but I really cannot think of another where the ingenuity Read more ...
David Nice
This is the second Sunday in a month that I've sat in the Wigmore Hall and been plunged into an evening of ferocious concentration from the very first bars. Mid-January saw violinist Leonidas Kavakos and his phenomenal pianist Enrico Pace carving out the grim memorial that is Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata, ultimately softened by radiant Schubert. Last night Kavakos's peer Thomas Zehetmair accented the lead in late Beethoven, and since only Shostakovich's last quartet followed, this time there was to be no more human gilding of a very alien lily.It wasn't hard to see why the Zehetmair Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Valery Gergiev’s survey of the Tchaikovsky symphonies began here on a chilly January night with youthfully idealistic Winter Daydreams thrown into the sharpest relief against a disillusioned and angry Shostakovich whose own journey into the bleak mid-winter was, by the time he penned his Second Violin Concerto, very much a one-way ticket. Two revealing performances, one remarkable young violinist.Sergey Khachatryan is wise beyond his years, a slight, wiry, pent-up young man whose small, concentrated sound is so much the product of his inner voice that it feels almost intrusive listening. He Read more ...
David Nice
That in itself was enough to tell us that Petrenko isn’t just a supremely elegant conductor, an easy stylist able to make Stravinsky’s fiddly early Scherzo fantastique sound natural and to paper over the cracks of a tottering soloist, Oleg Marshev, in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, but already one with the wow factor, the ability to go beyond merely brilliant music-making to something altogether deeper and more unexpected.For the first three movements of Shostakovich’s hour-long narrative, I went along with all the sonic marvels but I can’t say I felt it in every bone of my body. This is Read more ...
David Nice
"Who?" many readers may be asking. You'll have to take it on trust - and a handful of outstanding recordings - that the Russian conductor, viola player and arranger, who died on 2 November aged 86, really was up there among the musical greats of his generation. He played with Rostropovich, Richter and David Oistrakh; he had as close a line to Shostakovich as any recreative artist. But he was no globetrotter following his emigration from the Soviet Union to Israel in 1976, and, as yet another of those "musicians' musicians", he rarely stepped into the limelight.A founder member of the great Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s releases include two contrasted crossover discs, one in tribute to Armenian Orthodox church music, the other by, er, Phil Collins-era Genesis. There’s an Elgar oratorio, and a disc of choral music inspired by the untimely death of a young royal. Orchestral fireworks can be found in a recording of a well-known British work and there’s some approachable Modernism from a modern Polish master. There’s a thrilling compilation of viola concertos, and a classic recent set of Rachmaninov piano concertos reappears at a lower price. Gershwin turns up on an interesting French disc Read more ...
David Nice
If you were one of the world's top soloists but with a limited concerto stock - as woodwind players' tend to be - wouldn't you find it more rewarding to work as a principal in the orchestral ranks? That's the ideal, surely, but few carry it out in practice. Nicholas Daniel, the beefiest-sounding oboist to appear on the scene since the great Maurice Bourgue, is one who does. Last night he not only shone in the bright ensemble of Beethoven's Second Symphony; he also scored a triumph with a tough new gift to him and the Britten Sinfonia, James MacMillan's latest teeming-with-life concerto.I'm Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
This season's LSO artist-in-focus, violinist Viktoria Mullova, is an incorrigible off-roader. The rougher the terrain the better. Early, modern, rock, folk: she'll absorb their shocks, vault their bumps, relish their pitfalls and come out without so much as a scratch. So Mullova's opening concert last night was intriguing. Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto isn't exactly smooth terrain, but its roughness is pretty suburban.Mullova's approach was typically counterintuitive. There was no attempt to rough things up. She played to the work's inner shyness and tenderness. When a game of hide-and- Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It can take almost as much courage for a ballet company to look backwards as forwards, and it’s one of the quirks of Birmingham Royal Ballet that you’ll find rare heritage ballets popping up in the mix. John Cranko’s The Lady and the Fool, a Fifties period piece, nestled capriciously like a matron en décolleté in the bosom of its season-opening bill fielding the semi-skimmed abstractness of Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto and Twyla Tharp’s stunning Eighties sneaker ballet, In the Upper Room.To see the Cranko is such a rare thing that it enhances the experience of it - but my joy, I fear, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
One usually has to wait until the fourth movement of a Bruckner symphony before one gets a decent, foot-tappin', knee-slappin' polka to dance to. But at last night's Prom Osmo Vänskä was jitterbugging - and, I think, even moonwalking - from the off, swinging his classy Minnesota Orchestra into the Fourth Symphony's opening fortissimo brass triplets like they were a seasoned jazz band, and making Bruckner boogie. Not the easiest of things to get this granitic old Austrian bumpkin to do.
Vänskä managed it by looking beyond the score. The slur that links the first two notes of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Meditative experiences are hard to come by in the Royal Albert Hall. The twitching, scratching, fidgeting ticks of over 5000 people conspire to break your focus, to draw attention from the musical middle-distance back to the here and now. Last night’s two Proms – whether through programming, performance or just a happy chance of circumstances – both glanced into this distant space, briefly achieving that sense of communion peculiar to Proms audiences. As a birthday tribute to composer-mystic Arvo Pärt, it was fitting indeed.As he has already proved at ENO, Ed Gardner is a master of Read more ...