Stravinsky
David Nice
If the BBC were to plan a Proms season exclusively devoted to youth orchestras and ensembles, many of us would be delighted. Standards are now at professional level right across the board. 20 years ago, the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (★★★★★) couldn't compare with its Great British counterpart; now, although the age ranges are slightly different and the (or should that be the) National Youth Orchestra (★★★★) has vast wind and brass sections, playing levels appeared equal. It was only the matter of a conductor's questionable interpretation in the first concert and a superlative Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Concert halls, as Gregg Wallace might observe if he ever went to one, don’t come much bigger than the Royal Albert Hall, nor violin concertos than the Tchaikovsky. Faced with this awesome combination, the temptation for a soloist is to play up to the occasion. Volume gets louder, vibrato faster, emotions are amped. But not for Pekka Kuusisto. This Finnish violinist has always gone his own way, as likely to be found playing jazz, electronica or folk music as a concerto, and his Tchaikovsky last night was no different.From the long opening melody to the Finale’s boot-stamping dance of a theme, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s impossible to get the measure of the Cheltenham Music Festival in just one day. Lasting more than a fortnight, this is the festival that made the running in postwar British music: that helped put Malcolm Arnold and Robert Simpson on the map and defined a genre - the “Cheltenham Symphony”. Times change and financial pressures increase, but under the artistic directorship of Meurig Bowen, Cheltenham is still a powerful (if undervalued) force in contemporary classical music. Of the 120-odd composers in the 2016 Festival, at least one third are alive. The programme boasts 15 world premieres Read more ...
David Nice
As the hand-held credits popped up on screen to pianist and musical director Manoj Kamps's superb quartet arrangement of Mozart's Magic Flute Overture, the European Union's Culture Programme logo brought a spontaneous burst of applause. Not the norm for Suffolk this week, I'm told, but this audience knew how international opera is, how we're all connected in Europe's musical world.A year and a half after its inception as a collaboration between the Aix-en-Provence Festival and the European Network of Opera Academies – I was there at the very first meeting but had not seen the show until last Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I had been looking forward to last night's concert since it was first announced over a year ago. For a Stravinsky nut the chance to hear pieces whose live performances are vanishingly rare was not one to be missed. And it turns out there are enough other fans of austere late Stravinsky to sell out St John’s Smith Square, which proved a very suitable venue for this programme.Although presumably only pressed into service because of the ongoing refurbishment of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a deconsecrated church was the ideal space, both acoustically and atmospherically, for this collection of Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Looking past the ballets for Diaghilev, there are still many superb scores by Stravinsky honoured more in scholarship than performance. In Myths and Rituals, the Philharmonia addresses that lack of wider appreciation with five concerts from May to September. The series got off to a promising start last night with the tiny fanfare for three trumpets – Monteverdi with attitude and wrong notes – from 1955, which was one of Stravinsky’s first thoughts for his last ballet, Agon.The Symphonies of Wind Instruments are often played and heard as a Cubist funeral rite, moving in discontinuous blocks of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Maurice Greene: Overtures Baroque Band/Garry Clarke (Cedille)Maurice Greene. Who? No worries: conductor Garry Clarke's notes fill in all the useful gaps. Greene was a prominent 18th century English composer, remembered by the well-educated for his choral music and for holding down several plum jobs, including Master of the King's Music and a professorship at Cambridge. As a young musician he was a close friend and admirer of Handel, the pair falling out over an unfortunate case of plagiarism on the part of one of Greene's colleagues. Greene didn't leave behind much instrumental Read more ...
David Nice
On the panel to judge a competition between 14 Dutch school orchestras in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw last month, I couldn't resist using my speech to compare their state-school provenance with our own divisive musical education. I was thinking of two figures I'd been given – that when the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain started, only five per cent of its young musicians were from private and public schools, whereas now it was 85 per cent.Last week I learned the latter figure was wrong: current CEO and Artistic Director Sarah Alexander has got it down to 50/50, working on the notion Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Charles Dutoit gets the best from the Royal Philharmonic. He conducts with broad, sweeping gestures, and the orchestra responds with dramatic immediacy and vivid colours. This concert’s programme was well chosen to play to their shared strengths, and the results were impressive: colourful Respighi, muscular Dvořák and taut, compelling Stravinsky.Respighi’s Fountains of Rome opens and closes with evocations of dawn and dusk. Dutoit has little interest in miniature, fragile textures, and never ventures into the quietest dynamics. But he and the orchestra compensate with luminous colours and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night’s concert at the Barbican focused on the theme of dreams and night-time, centred around the UK premiere of Dream of the Song by George Benjamin. But the one piece on the programme that did not fit with the theme stole the show. Stravinsky’s American-period masterpiece Symphony in Three Movements supplied the energy and rhythmic impetus lacking elsewhere.George Benjamin’s Dream of the Song combined arrestingly beautiful poems translated from medieval Spanish with fragments of Lorca, scored for solo countertenor (Iestyn Davies) accompanied by a small orchestra and women’s chorus (the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The French Suites Peter Hill (piano) (Delphian)Start trying to explain exactly why this latest instalment in Peter Hill’s Bach series is so good and it might seem as if you’re dismissing the very things which make it great. This is pianism completely devoid of ego and flash; Hill is a superb technician but never draws undue attention to himself. You forget he’s even there: what we’re hearing is Bach. In all his guises – the earlier, minor key French Suites typically open with introspective Allemandes before the mood lifts. Hill’s way with the opening of Suite No. 1 is typical: Bach’s Read more ...
geoff brown
In the deep recesses of my brain lies a distant memory of an early lesson in musical appreciation in primary school. Excerpts from Beethoven’s "Pastoral" Symphony were being played. The teacher asked us what images came to mind. The answers came fairly quickly, prodded by the music’s title: a babbling brook, a thunderstorm, twittering birds. I was on my way.That childhood scene suddenly popped up during this spotty BBC Symphony Orchestra concert. It featured the latest manifestation of a burgeoning trend to do the audience’s visual imagining for them by commissioning a film-maker and dangling Read more ...