violin
David Nice
An entire evening of Schumann for two would usually cue singer and piano. Not that the majority of Lieder specialists, blessed as naughty Anna Russell once saw it "with tremendous artistry but no voice", could hold the spell for that long. Julia Fischer is one of the half-dozen violinists in the world with the greatest artistry, a golden "voice" and a habit of choosing partners like Martin Helmchen, very much on her level. The only trouble is that Schumann songs can capture a world in 90 minutes, while the three lateish sonatas run a more limited if quirky gamut.
Poor Schumann was already in Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Bellowhead are 21st-century genre-busters: punk music-hall madness born out of British folk, seasoned with a zeitgeist-friendly dose of multicultural spice. Sounds gimmicky? Well, not at all, as Bellowhead’s greatest quality, apart from being an outstandingly enjoyable live act, comes from the way they ride their eclecticism with brio and intelligence, inventing as they go a new folk music for our times.British folk has two distinct but interconnected strands, reflecting perhaps the (oft-forgotten) fact that we are an island people: a rootsy and sometimes purist obsession with homegrown tunes Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s not often that a serious musician goes into the recording studio to play requests. But as the closest that classical music strays to The X Factor (unless you count Paul Potts), Nicola Benedetti has a different kind of relationship with audiences. At the age of 23, several years into a professional career which began at 17 with a hugely popular victory in the BBC’s Young Musician of the Year competition, Nicola Benedetti has released a CD which lacks an agenda or a slant. There’s no new work, no transcriptions or retrieving unknown bits and pieces from dusty archives. Instead she recorded Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The flurry of fanfares at the start of Magnus Lindberg’s Al largo (UK premiere) sounded almost Waltonian. Or maybe that was because the prospect of Osmo Vänskä in Walton’s First Symphony was such an enticing one that premonitions of its highly distinctive sound-world were already being suggested in the somewhat predictable pyrotechnics of the Lindberg. Lindberg is a great showman and an accomplished technician, but against Walton’s startling originality (circa 1935) he sounded, well, old hat - like a man rapidly losing his edge.Al largo (meaning offshore) is, not surprisingly, oceanic in Read more ...
David Nice
It didn't help that the London Symphony Chorus sounded rough and hectoring rather than earthily ecstatic - and I'm not sure how well they had been coached in the Czech-language mass settings. Heroic tenor Simon O'Neill, Sir Colin's last-minute Otello in the LSO's 2009-10 season, slipped in a couple of bizarre "Svats", too, between the "Svets" of his colleagues, but his anguished trumpeting - strikingly complemented at one point by a shrill, muted equivalent in the orchestra - suited his role as urgent celebrant. There were angelic sounds from soprano Krassimira Stoyanova, and Catherine 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 ...
David Nice
Eleven years is a long time when you're launching young talent on the world. Since 1999, BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artists have gone forth and multiplied. All the "graduates" have outstanding careers, and among them some of the names which will be most familiar with music lovers include trumpeter Alison Balsom, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and three of the world's most successful string quartets (Belcea, Jerusalem and Pavel Haas).With a new intake of seven to the current 14 just announced, we had a chance to hear three of the group in action at the BBC Read more ...
edward.seckerson
"It is a curious tale. I have it written in faded ink, a woman's hand, governess to two children, long ago..." So begins Benjamin Britten's operatic re-imagining of Henry James's ghostly chiller The Turn of the Screw. Oscar Wilde called it "a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale" but how are we supposed to interpret it? In a remote country house, a governess fights to protect two children from menacing spirits. But are these spirits real or imagined?Are they figments of a fevered imagination? Did evil really occur at Bly before the governess's arrival and, if so, what? So many Read more ...
David Nice
What a quintessential Prom: a quartet of works by English composers which aspire to international status, and in three cases wholly succeed, performed by the BBC's Scottish orchestra at world-class level under its homegrown but deservedly globetrotting chief conductor Donald Runnicles. And doing what the Albert Hall, if handled properly, assists in doing best - not the noisy stuff, but the secret rapture of four increasingly sublime slow movements welcoming us in from the Victorian colosseum's vasts. Many in the packed hall had come, I suspect, for that Classic FM Hall of Fame evergreen, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Stockhausen's festive overture from 1977 opens the programme," declared the Proms website cheerily. Come again? Festive? Stockhausen? From my limited but largely enthusiastic knowledge of the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen - much of which is about as festive as Auschwitz - I assumed that this must either be a big misunderstanding or a lively, perhaps German, joke. It was both. There can have been few composers more ballistically, brilliantly obnoxious than loopy old Karlheinz Stockhausen. Most famously, he declared the attack on the Twin Towers "the greatest work of art Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Give any masterpiece of classical music a central role in a film - and everything else straightaway faces the highest standards of comparison. In Radu Mihaileanu’s The Concert, it's the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, and from the opening frames the music delivers everything it should – though whether it’s enough to hide other noises (clunking in the script department being only one of them) is another matter.First-half depictions of contemporary Russia work more assuredly on the comedy front, even if this concert’s brand of humour quickly slips considerably south of Moscow to lodge somewhere in Read more ...
david.cheal
Our story begins in the early 1970s, when a young fiddler from Louisiana named Michael Doucet was making rock music. Then one day he heard a song by Fairport Convention: “Cajun Woman” (from the band’s Unhalfbricking album). He was shocked and delighted that an English group should be taking an interest in a strand of music that seemed to be fading into obscurity. In a sort of Proustian moment, he inhaled the fragrance of “Cajun Woman”, his interest in the music of his native region was awakened, and Doucet began to immerse himself in the folk music of France and of his home state, where Read more ...