Classical Reviews
Prom 46: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, BarenboimThursday, 21 August 2014
By the time we got to the end of this Prom, with four of the five encores – the whole of Bizet’s Carmen Suite – cannily crafted to bolster the short official programme, most of the rightly euphoric audience had forgotten the most unsatisfying first half so far this season. Perhaps I start from an ungenerous standpoint. Read more... |
Prom 43: Skride, BBCSO, GardnerTuesday, 19 August 2014
The Russians were coming - and the prospect of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, even without the added attraction of hearing it in Igor Buketoff’s questionable choral arrangement where the Tsarist hymn is taken at its word and does a Boris Godunov on us, had the promenade queue fast stretching towards South Kensington. Read more... |
I, CULTURE Orchestra, Karabits, Usher Hall, EdinburghMonday, 18 August 2014
It is easy to be blinded by the sensational history of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad”. We cannot forget the famous performance by a starving makeshift orchestra in August 1942, at the height of the siege of Leningrad, or the dramatic way in which the Soviet authorities spirited the microfilmed score out of Russia to America via Tehran. Read more... |
Lemper, SCO, Foster, Usher Hall, EdinburghSaturday, 16 August 2014
Twenty years ago Ute Lemper came to the Usher Hall to sing Kurt Weill. The young pretender to the Lotte Lenya throne performed then on a bare stage with little more than a piano as accompaniment. Last night, she swept onto a platform crammed with a massively augmented Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with saxophone, guitar, banjo, rhythm section, accordion, grand piano, and a squadron of percussion. Microphones, foldback, and towers of gently whirring loudspeakers filled any remaining space. Read more... |
Gerhardt, Osborne, Queen's Hall/Keyrouz, Ensemble de la Paix, Greyfriars Kirk, EdinburghThursday, 14 August 2014
“Ah now, I can’t promise you sun,” says a Scots lady-in-waiting of her native weather to a novice Englishwoman near the start of Rona Munro’s masterly James Plays. It’s the first of many references to make the audience laugh knowingly. Well, after four days of the worst weather Edinburgh Festivalgoers can remember, the sun came out yesterday morning. Read more... |
Prom 34: Piemontesi, BBCNOW, SøndergårdTuesday, 12 August 2014
Some things that spread like wildfire, like ebola and wildfire itself, are not good news at all. But performing Nielsen’s symphonies? That’s another matter entirely. In the next concert season, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia both begin Nielsen symphony programmes, while the LSO several years ago cycled through one of their own with Sir Colin Davis. Yesterday, the BBC National Symphony of Wales and their current Danish conductor – will it ever be someone Welsh? Read more... |
Quartet for the End of Time, Greyfriars Kirk, EdinburghTuesday, 12 August 2014
If you want an image that defines, for this writer at least, the essence of the Edinburgh Festival, it is the sight of Greyfriars Kirk full to capacity at 5.30 pm on a blustery Monday afternoon. At other times of year this sort of event might be hopefully billed as a “rush hour concert”, sparsely attended by commuters en route to the suburbs, but at festival time Edinburgh has a whole new demographic. Read more... |
Prom 33: Schwizgebel, National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, GardnerMonday, 11 August 2014
After the European Union Youth Orchestra hit unsurpassable heights last week, the Proms plateau of excellence remained available to another youth carnival of weird and wonderful 20th century monsters. Read more... |
Prom 31: Coote, Hallé, ElderSunday, 10 August 2014
The levels of refinement now exhibited by the Hallé, the stylishness and elegance of the playing, define the special relationship that they and Mark Elder have cemented over the last decade and a half. The opening bars of Berlioz’s Le corsaire came off the page like a manifesto for French sensibilities with rapier-like strings parrying airborne woodwinds like the most flexible of swashbuckling foils. The whole overture was so light on breath and string as to be positively balletic... Read more... |
Edinburgh International Festival Opening Concert, RSNO, Knussen, Usher HallSaturday, 09 August 2014
On paper this was an interesting programme. The Edinburgh Festival traditionally opens with a major choral work, but while the international audience would probably be happy with endlessly recycled requiems and masses, festival directors have often felt obliged to venture into more challenging territory. Read more... |
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