violin
David Nice
Nine out of 10 attempts to feed an audience's visual responses to abstract music are doomed to failure; a great communicator will always conjure stronger pictures in the listener's mind. And there's no doubt that young violinist Alina Ibragimova communicates at the highest level. But here she simply held her own to work in shadowplay with both the mysterious spaces of London's most atmospheric venue and the even more intangible visions of twins Timothy and Stephan Quay. Their film around Bartók's Solo Violin Sonata, though defying intellectual analysis and easy correspondence with the musical Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In case anybody had the bizarre notion that the Classical Brits was getting a trifle too classical, the 2011 version of the event was rebranded as the Classic Brit Awards. That would seem to open the door to almost anything - classic rock perhaps, or classic schmaltz (well, waltzmeister Andre Rieu did win Album of the Year). The night climaxed with Dame Shirley Bassey singing "Goldfinger", capping a tribute to the late John Barry, and sounding nowhere near as "classic" as she used to.Stage musicals comfortably make the cut, with Alfie Boe and the cast of Les Misérables taking the stage Read more ...
David Nice
Its advertised centre of gravity, a concerto specially commissioned from affable whiz-kid Nico Muhly, turned out weightless, and not in a good way. Yet the programming of the Aurora Orchestra's latest adventure showed us why the Arts Council were right to fund this young and dynamic constellation. OK, so I'd have been happiest with a whole evening of Hindemith Kammermusik rather than one movement. But for the new generation of pick-and-mix onliners, the seven eclectic works on the bill couldn't have been more enticing, thanks to the iron fist of velvet-glove live stream presenter-conductor Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we’ve offbeat violin and viola duets played by a renowned husband-and-wife duo, Scarlatti keyboard sonatas played on piano, and a very Italian take on Shakespeare from one of the 20th century’s fieriest conductors.Victor de Sabata: The Merchant of Venice Orquesta Filarmónica de Malága, Coro de Malága/Aldo Ceccato (La Bottega Discantica)
Italian conductor Victor de Sabata (1892-1967) is best remembered today for recording a classic account of Tosca with Maria Callas in 1953. He was also a composer and collaborated with the German director Max Reinhardt on a spectacular production Read more ...
theartsdesk
Two hundred years ago society ladies snipped theirs and gave it the poet Byron. Indigent women cropped theirs and sold it for wigs. But never in the history of human hair has a woman put her tresses to such a unique use. A woman, unnamed, has donated her hair to the violinist David Garrett, and he has used it to string his bow.Garrett doesn’t look like most male violinists. He looks a lot more like most female violinists, having a fairly lengthy rug of his own. But for some reason he has foresworn the chance to take a pair of scissors to his own cascade of highlighted locks. Bows are Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Yehudi Menuhin's influence continues to reach out a hand to young instrumentalists. His Menuhin Violin Competition for young players under 22 is internationally known; last weekend in the Waterloo Chamber of Windsor Castle - a staggeringly picturesque setting - some exceptional violinists, violists and cellists sought the laurels at the Windsor Festival International String Competition, Britain's major professional prize for string players set up in Menuhin's honour three years ago.In the event it was a prodigious student who beat a brilliant young professional to the top prize on Friday. Read more ...
David Nice
It's rare for demanding though not, I think, unduly cynical orchestral musicians to wax unanimously lyrical about a new conducting kid on the block. But that's what happened at the 2009 Besançon International Conducting Competition when BBC Symphony players in residence placed their bets on the obvious winner, 30-year-old Kazuki Yamada. He repaid their good faith last night in a real stunner of a London debut programme featuring two very different challenges to his long-phrasing vision and the most dramatic new violin concerto I've heard in the last two decades.That's saying something given Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In the later 19th century, violinist and composer Joseph Joachim was hailed as the most brilliant fiddler of his day, but today his name lives on via the great works that he helped to bring into the classical repertoire. Brahms dedicated his Violin Concerto to Joachim, while Bruch's First Violin Concerto was substantially revised by Joachim and became closely identified with him. Both the Schumann and Dvořák concertos were written for him, though Joachim never performed the latter."Every fiddle player who picks up the Brahms concerto sees Joachim's name inscribed on it as the dedicatee Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Bolshoi Ballet’s prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova gave birth in Moscow yesterday to a baby girl, the child of the celebrated violinist Vadim Repin. Weighing 3.1 kilograms, the baby is named Anna.Zakharova, 31, a former star at the Mariinsky Ballet, St Petersburg, before she moved to the Bolshoi, is in good health and planning to perform in London in May, her agent told the Russian news agency Novosti.
Last summer the willowy star, who is also a member of the Russian Parliament, pulled out of the Bolshoi’s Covent Garden tour at the last minute pleading a hip injury, though it became Read more ...
David Nice
No doubt about it, Leonidas Kavakos is one of the world's top 10 live-wire violinists. But here in London he seems to have sold himself a bit short recently with a less than great concerto repertoire (Korngold, Szymanowski's Second). Korngold furnished a springy intermezzo in last night's blockbuster recital, Szymanowski a ravishing second encore, but I went to hear two giddying masterpieces, Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata and Schubert's Fantasy in C. If unknown quantity Enrico Pace could manage to play Richter to Kavakos's David Oistrakh, it might turn out to be awe-inspiring. He did, so it Read more ...
David Nice
Which he filled, as it turned out, with mature aplomb - no tricks, no wild extremes, but plenty of colour, space and that rare knack of finding the right tempo at any point which is the instinctive gift of the born Mozart interpreter. The programme was a mixture of top and (by Mozart's standard) second-drawer works. The earliest, fifth of those perfectly decent violin concertos which loom perhaps too large in the orchestral repertoire, needs an authoritative Mercury among soloists to keep us riveted. Aurora leader Thomas Gould was perhaps a bit too sweet and nice for that. Was it my Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Perhaps it was the effect of the elaborately mosaicked and marbled stage of the Wigmore Hall, but when a black-clad Thomas Zehetmair stepped out last night to occupy this space with just his violin and Bach for company, the image was incongruous. Even devotees of the hall will surely acknowledge the fussiness of its aesthetic appeal, the lingering visual excesses of a bygone age making it as unlikely a setting for Zehetmair’s deconstructed style as for the sharp architectural edges of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. Yet host them it did, and in a characteristically uncompromising Read more ...