Stravinsky
graham.rickson
A 20th-century Austrian symphony receives a memorable first recording, coupled with a witty, rarely played slice of Schubert. Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is heard in a powerful reading recorded in the Royal Festival Hall. And we’ve an intelligent, logical coupling of two ballets commissioned by Diaghilev.Mahler: Symphony No 2 Resurrection LPO and Choir/ Jurowski, with Adriana Kučerova (soprano) and Christianne Stotijn (mezzo soprano) (LPO)
The LPO’s own label have already released a staggering performance of this work under the late Klaus Tennstedt, so you do wonder nervously how this Read more ...
judith.flanders
Programming a mixed bill is a very delicate art, and what seems like an interesting mix to one person might appear to be an entirely random series of choices to another. The Royal’s new triple is the perfect example. The music – Stravinsky, Poulenc, Stravinsky – might suggest an air of 1920s Parisian je ne sais quoi in theory, but in practice, that’s not how things unfold, with an odd combination of Ashton at his spiky chic-est, followed by Glen Tetley’s quasi-religious memorial meditation, and topped by Macmillan at his – well, more of that anon.Scènes de Ballet is a formidable undertaking. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Were the great Diaghilev alive today, surely he’d be working in the imaginative possibilities of electronic technology - this was the opinion given me by the arts panjandrum, the late Sir John Drummond. And given the developments of 3D, who knows? Would it be this manipulation of our perceptions that fascinated him? 3D is certainly everywhere in dance now, though the challenge is to leap the judgment of it as merely a gimmick. I reckon while Wim Wenders’ film Pina 3D achieved that, the version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by Klaus Obermaier doesn’t.Part of the Southbank Centre’s Read more ...
peter.quinn
For the sheer multiplicity of event, the resplendently rich palette of sound and the incendiary aural thrill it detonates, Marius Neset's Golden Xplosion is aptly named. This second solo album from the 25-year-old Norwegian sax player and composer careens between the hyperventilated counterpoint of “City on Fire” and the glacial, slightly ECM-ish soundscape of “Epilogue”.Neset clearly has omniverous tastes and has listened widely. The ballad playing of Wayne Shorter; the Stravinskian, block-like intercutting of material; the combination of endlessly sustained melodic lines over big, wide open Read more ...
David Nice
Bear with me while, like supergroomed rising star Miloš Karadaglić retuning his guitar to a mellower vein, I adjust my concert-hall vocab and describe this as a no-gimmicks sell-out gig underground with young musicians from the London Philharmonic’s Foyle Future Firsts scheme presenting two varied sets and Karadaglić headlining. And now I’ll just revert to old habits and declare the meat to be a slice of Classicism chromatically spiced (Mozart) and a 20th-century maverick pushing Neo-Baroque into near-atonality (Stravinsky), our top guitarist serenading by way of late-night coda. All this to Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who feels, as I do, that the Aesthetic Movement's "cult of beauty" now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum can't compare with the fabulous Ballets Russes exhibition which went before it can dine again on a feast of Russian colour at the Coliseum. You'll eventually be rewarded, in this Kremlin Ballet-based company's first show, with the closest to the spirit of 1910 a recent London Firebird has ever come. Whether the choreography and the music for The Blue God have more than the loosest connection with Diaghilev is another matter.The argument goes that Le dieu bleu, as it was Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tansy Davies’s neon and inside out 2 can’t help but recall Stravinsky’s 1940s commission for Woody Herrmann’s orchestra, the Ebony Concerto. There’s an idiomatic use of rich, low-pitched sounds (plenty of bassoon and bass clarinet), and insidious, catchy dance rhythms bounce away in the bass. There’s a hint of Louis Andriessen-style Euro-Minimalism too; these are pieces which really move. But there’s a satisfying darkness to Davies’s imagination; for all the foot-tapping, this is music with unsettling power and immediacy.The main work on the disc is the recent song cycle Troubairitz - 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
Sir Simon Rattle's clever programming struck again last night, showing us that musical neoclassicism - for want of a better word, which would be something like neo-everything - didn't begin with Stravinsky, whose Apollo ballet is surely his most elevated set of gestures to the past. Tchaikovsky, the rococo twiddles of whose complete Nutcracker this team seems to have enjoyed so much on a recent recording, would probably take the palm, though Mahler, of all composers, will do, too. At least, his Fourth Symphony begins that way. And soon there was more music not of this world to match Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Everywhere I looked I saw children, some burying their heads in their mothers' chests, some doodling on programme notes. One was dancing to Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony. Ambitious. Last night's BBC Symphony Orchestra concert had been given over to family listening. My first thought was why? Stravinsky's fun but dry Dumbarton Oaks is hardly suitable. And Prokofiev's Sixth is psychologically X-rated when done right. Sandwiched between these two works, however, was, superficially, a perfect stocking filler: a new Oboe Concerto from accessible Spectralist Marc-André Dalbavie that sees the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Outstanding orchestral playing can be found outside London, Manchester and Birmingham. Unlike those cities, Leeds doesn’t have a purpose-built modern concert hall suitable for large-scale concerts, making do with the gaudy Victorian splendour of Cuthbert Brodrick’s town hall. Acoustically it’s not perfect, but the striking canopy hanging precariously over the concert platform has improved matters. Leeds does have a full-time orchestra; formerly known as the English Northern Philharmonia, the Orchestra of Opera North have a year-round joint role in the opera house and concert hall, giving Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
A hell of a lot of talent was on display last night at the Wigmore Hall, where pianist Leif Ove Andsnes's home festival of Risør was stationed for the weekend. The big draw was a performance of The Rite of Spring for two pianos. The work is violent enough in orchestral form but when jammed onto two keyboards it has the potential to degenerate into the most unimaginably demented hand-to-hand combat you'll ever see. Last night's performance - Andsnes facing off against a man that gets pianophiles like me pant-wettingly excited, Marc-André Hamelin - was little short of psychopathic.
Hamelin Read more ...