violin
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 ...
Adam Sweeting
Brilliant though it was to be shooting an Imagine film for BBC One, we did experience the occasional tremor of foreboding about making a programme with Nigel Kennedy. We (that's me and director Frank Hanly) had a bit of previous with Nigel - I'd done several print interviews with him, and we'd shot a couple of short films with him for EMI.The last one was at Rockfield studios in Monmouth for his recent jazz album, Shhh! We'd bowled up out of the pouring rain on a black November night to be greeted like long-lost family members, as Nige plied us with wine and insisted that we join him, his Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Rossini provided the lively curtain-raisers to both halves of this Chamber Orchestra of Europe concert, streamed live to Aberdeen where Shell, the sponsors, have something of a vested interest in keeping their employees entertained. The liquid gold on this occasion was of the legato variety and not one but two Fischers ensured that it flowed freely and purposefully. Ivan Fischer is quite simply one of the most perceptive and persuasive conductors on the planet; Julia Fischer (no relation) is the epitome of German cool and precision. She plays the violin rather well, too. But first, The Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month the selection varies from sackbutts to serialism, by way of condensed Wagner, Elgar conducted by the much-missed Vernon Handley and music from both Shostakovich and a disciple of his. Among contemporary music there is Osvaldo Golijov’s lively setting of the Passion story and the young German composer Thomas Larcher and the great Henri Dutilleux. There are also more delights from Swiss master Frank Martin. Violin pyrotechnics are supplied by Ysaÿe. But we begin with vintage Gershwin, and that famous looping clarinet.FEELGOOD CD of the MONTH
Gershwin by Grofé: Symphonic JazzHarmonie Read more ...
David Nice
"There is not one idea," wrote that intemperate critic Eduard Hanslick about Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, "that does not get its neck broken by the speed with which the next lands on its head." Rather a compliment, I've always thought, and certainly so as applied to James MacMillan's new Violin Concerto. As soloist Vadim Repin and conductor Valery Gergiev whirled us tumultuously through its hyperactive songs and dances, there was so much I wanted to savour, to hear again. That won't be a problem. So long as there are violinists of Repin's calibre able to play it, the work is here to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Chamber music is a highly motivational experience - here is a group of instruments of quite different qualities parading, fighting, ganging up, inviting each other’s new ideas, dialoguing, and all this variety heightening the build-up to the moment when all instruments proclaim unanimity in a grand finish, or (even better) huddle up in mutual creative conspiracy and conjure a mysterious little spell that makes the outsider long to be part of it. All of which was present last night in both the performance and the music of Robert Schumann’s third Piano Trio, played by the Tetzlaff siblings, Read more ...