Stravinsky
Stravinsky: Myths & Rituals, Philharmonia, Salonen, St John’s Smith SquareFriday, 03 June 2016
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... Read more... |
Stravinsky: Myths & Rituals, Philharmonia, Salonen, RFHMonday, 16 May 2016
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... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Maurice Greene, Mahler, StravinskySaturday, 14 May 2016
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-... Read more... |
Hoopes, National Youth Orchestra, Järvi, RFHSaturday, 09 April 2016
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... Read more... |
Capuçon, RPO, Dutoit, Royal Festival HallWednesday, 30 March 2016
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,... Read more... |
Davies, BBCSO, Knussen, BarbicanSaturday, 19 March 2016
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... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Bach, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Diana AmbacheSaturday, 12 March 2016
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... Read more... |
Kelemen, BBCSO, Wigglesworth, BarbicanThursday, 03 March 2016
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... Read more... |
Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, Dudamel, RFHFriday, 15 January 2016
So much black and red ink has been spilled about the infamous 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring that it’s easy to underestimate how radical the orchestration, at least, of its predecessor Petrushka must have sounded. It still usually comes up as... Read more... |
Gomez, Osborne, Britten Sinfonia, Järvi, Milton CourtThursday, 19 November 2015
Don’t blame the players: they did their considerable best. But what could they hope to achieve with a programme in which six of the seven pieces were on a hiding to nowhere, or too short to have much of an impact? A sequence, what's more, in which... Read more... |
BCMG, Knussen, CBSO Centre BirminghamMonday, 16 November 2015
“The first section, following a short introduction, places a rhythmic sequence on its retrograde. The two layers are transposed independently (one going up, the other down) as the music progresses, and points of symmetry are highlighted when they... Read more... |
Farewell to Stravinsky's right-hand manSunday, 15 November 2015
Missionary angel or twelve-tone devil? Musical figures like Poulenc, perhaps too much attached to the diabolical element in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, were inclined to see the incursion of Robert Craft into Stravinsky’s Hollywood life in 1948 in... Read more... |
