Classical Reviews
Prom 6: Hough, BBC Philharmonic, Mark Wigglesworth review - poetry and powerWednesday, 19 July 2023
This Prom by the BBC Philharmonic was billed as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Royal Northern College of Music, in distant Manchester. Read more... |
Prom 4: Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Kuusisto review - Pekka Kuusisto's charisma shrinks the Royal Albert HallMonday, 17 July 2023
Pekka Kuusisto, making his Proms debut as conductor in the first half of this concert, and then as violinist/conductor/ringmaster/energiser in the second, brought lightness, playfulness, and a Finnish sense for the absurd to the Albert Hall. He is an absolutely live-wire performer and has a hugely charismatic musical presence. He radiates joy in his craft and also unfailingly communicates his appreciation for those around him. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Ravenna Festival - invisible cities and possible dreamsMonday, 17 July 2023
Came for the music, returned for the theatre. I oversimplify: Riccardo Muti’s Roads of Friendship events, meetings of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra with players from other places – since 1997, they have included Sarajevo, Lebanon, Kenya, Iran and this year Jordan – will always be the big cornerstones of the Ravenna Festival. Read more... |
First Night of the Proms, BBCSO, Stasevska review - fire and elan mark an evening celebrating freedomSaturday, 15 July 2023
Even before the Just Stop Oil protesters hit the stage after the interval, this was destined to be one of the most politically charged Proms the Royal Albert Hall has witnessed for a while. The rousing cheer that greeted the BBC Singers was hopefully all the beleaguered BBC bosses needed to realise – after the ill-advised attempt to abolish them in March – what a key part of our music culture they remain today. Read more... |
Ligeti Day; Kolesnikov/Tsoy, Aldeburgh Festival review - 14 musicians, 16 premieres and 100 metronomesMonday, 26 June 2023
To give the first performance of a dazzling fantasia in the context of a rangy sunny-evening-to-night concert, as pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy did in glorious Blythburgh Church, merits a gold medal in piano-duo enterprise. To premiere 15 new works in a single programme and adapt perfectly to the various styles, the Ligeti Quartet’s crowning glory of three events celebrating their namesake’s centenary, is simply superhuman. Read more... |
Hahn, Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, Wigmore Hall review - Americana old and newWednesday, 21 June 2023
Artist-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall Hilary Hahn brought her residency to an end with a collaboration with the exciting Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, a notably youthful and ethnically diverse group, who brought with them a notably more youthful and ethnically diverse crowd than the hall usually entertains. Read more... |
Sinfonia of London, Wilson; Kolesnikov/Tsoy; Bozzini Quartet; Phantasm, Aldeburgh Festival review - new sounds for oldTuesday, 20 June 2023
You don’t expect to visit the Britten-Pears shrine in Suffolk and come back raving about Edward Elgar. Yes, Elgar. On Sunday evening, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London brought the composer’s Second Symphony to Snape Maltings: that marshland temple to every anti-Elgarian current in post-war British music. Read more... |
Osborne, BBC Philharmonic, Glassberg, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - energy and virtuosityMonday, 19 June 2023
The BBC Philharmonic ended its 2022-23 season in Manchester with a programme that might have been chosen as a showpiece for virtuosity. Read more... |
Turangalîla-Symphonie, LSO, Rattle, Barbican review - a farewell night to rememberThursday, 15 June 2023
Simon Rattle’s farewell season as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra has inscribed a sort of artistic memoir as he moves from one of his beloved blockbusters to another. Last night, he closed his account at the Barbican (though he will regularly return as “Conductor Emeritus”) with Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-Symphonie. Read more... |
Bocheng Wang, Wigmore Hall review - extraordinary agility and technical fluidityThursday, 15 June 2023
Rachmaninov had his doubts about his Variations on a Theme of Corelli. He confided to Medtner that when he performed them, “I was guided by the coughing of the audience. Whenever the coughing increased, I would skip the next variation. Whenever there was no coughing, I would play them in proper order.” Read more... |
Pages
inside classical music
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Currie, Hallé, Wong, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - s...
Kahchun Wong’s final concert of 2024 in the Hallé Manchester season was something of a surprise. At first sight, the sparkle in the programme...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 87: Roots Manuva, Bogdan Raczynski, Son...
VINYL OF THE MONTH
Blood Incantation Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)
...
Blu-ray: Juggernaut
That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the...
Rigoletto, Irish National Opera / Murrihy, Collins, NCH Dubl...
How many Rigolettos have regular operagoers among you sat through where there wasn’t some major defect, in either the production or the...
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Ta...
Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial...
Album: Panelia - Nothing and All At Once
Nothing and All at Once is the debut album from New Delhi...
Music Reissues Weekly: John Cale - The Academy in Peril, Par...
The return to shops of a consecutive sequence of five of John Cale's Seventies albums through different labels is undoubtedly coincidental. All...
Blu-ray: Black Tuesday
The universal fear of dying is the theme of Black Tuesday, a terse, bleak 1954 thriller that is belatedly being recognized as a major...
The Importance of Being Earnest, National Theatre review - n...
If Harold Pinter’s work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then...