Classical music
Peter Quantrill
Not all composers require the finger of mortality pointing at them to develop what becomes a late style. Charges of detachment and even indifference have been levelled at the B flat major Piano Concerto K595 which Mozart completed early in the year of his death, but Mitsuko Uchida’s playing of it on Saturday night was as refined, as weightless and translucent as her trademark silk tops.Recent analysis of the manuscript source has suggested that in fact Mozart completed most of the concerto three years earlier, around the time of the last three symphonies. Without introducing a note of false Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Stoller Hall, the modest-size auditorium inside Chetham’s School of Music, is really proving itself to be the venue Manchester has long needed this season. Two concerts on successive days, each the first of a series and both making something of a statement, proved that.On Thursday Psappha opened its Manchester season there (the remaining performances are at St Michael’s Ancoats) with three guest singers and a second half that was as much music theatre as concert. "Four iconic works from the 20th century" was the subtitle, but the initial focus was on two pianos and two pianists, as Paul Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jãnis Ivanovs: Symphony No. 5; Juris Karlsons: Music for Symphony Orchestra 1945 Latvian National Symphony Orchestra/Andris Poga (Skani)Jãnis Ivanovs’ promising conducting career was kyboshed by the outbreak of war and the Soviet invasion of Latvia. After Riga’s liberation in October 1944, it's believed that Ivanovs was responsible for broadcasting one of the five surviving records belonging to the reactivated state radio station, and his Symphony No. 5 was completed during the following spring. Asked about the symphony's meaning, Ivanovs replied that the music “contained everything Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s always been something of a buzz in the air at East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival. It’s the feeling that it’s somehow a special privilege to discover its performances – whether they’re from international names or emerging artists, challenging, provocative and illuminating by turns – across the region’s exquisite and little-known churchs, halls, theatres and other venues. Plus, of course, its timing: there’s no avoiding the fact that the Lammermuir Festival feels like a comforting come-down after the unbridled frenzy of its elder, far more gargantuan Edinburgh neighbour that takes over Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: Wonderful Town Danielle de Niese, Alysha Umphress, Nathan Gunn, London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (LSO Live)Wonderful Town’s one problem is that it isn't On the Town or West Side Story. If you didn’t already know those scores, you'd consider it a belter, a brilliant sequence of very witty, tuneful songs. That the words are great isn't a surprise, Bernstein teaming up again with Betty Comden and Adolf Green, the trio holed up in a cramped New York apartment in 1953 and finishing the piece in around five weeks. Based on a popular 1940 play, Wonderful Town follows two Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The LSO and Sir Simon Rattle have been launching their new season with a mini-festival, if not so-called, mixing and matching some delectable repertoire. This was their third concert in four days – and its programme was wonderfully shaped, bringing together three works written within 11 years of each other, each from a composer with a unique voice that spoke for his whole nation in one way or another.Janáček’s Sinfonietta, which the same team also featured recently at the Edinburgh Festival, makes a near-perfect concert opener, with its grand fanfares and tough-hewn, close-harmony blocks of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Winterreise brings out the best from Ian Bostridge, and the worst. His dedication to understanding and communicating its complex and harrowing text is everywhere apparent, and this was an emotionally draining evening. But his style of delivery has always been controversial – some say distinctive, others eccentric – and all of those characteristics were heightened here, inspired (or provoked) by Schubert’s psychological drama. Much of this performance was enjoyable, but it was punctuated by moments so exaggerated and ghoulish as to overwhelm the many moments of elegance and beauty.Bostridge Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A tradition seems to have been invented. First nights of the LSO’s seasons with Sir Simon Rattle as its Music Director start with a concert of music by British composers. The first one last year had Helen Grime, Thomas Adès, Birtwistle, Knussen and Elgar. This year’s selection was Birtwistle (again), Holst, Turnage and Britten. Rattle described the formula as a mixture of the brand new, the undiscovered and an "established masterpiece". As with most things going on in this fissile country at the moment, there were some very fine moments, but it left mixed feelings.The inclusion of Birtwistle Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“What is it about Mozart?” wondered the legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter, pointing out the composer's frightening demands of accuracy and lucidity. Even though many pianists today command technique to spare, a Mozart fear factor tends to keep his sonatas off recital programmes. Richter’s longtime protegée Elisabeth Leonskaja once made a disc with him of arrangements of late piano sonatas but she is now more associated with the epic romantic repertoire that she is playing around the world for most of this year, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and the great Schubert sonatas.So an evening of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Boris Blacher: Dance Suite, Hamlet, Poème, Concertante Music Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin/Johannes Kalitzke (Capriccio)Boris Blacher’s stock would presumably be higher had he opted to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power. He was an influential teacher whose later pupils included Aribert Reimann and Kalevi Aho, though his progressive musical sympathies meant that he was prevented from teaching during the war years. As heard on this disc, Blacher’s orchestral music is fluent, transparently scored and diverting while it lasts. His stylistic range was broad: traces of Poulenc, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
A shrewd orchestra maintains a strong subs bench. One of the major discoveries in Birmingham during the interregnum between Andris Nelsons’s premature departure and the appointment of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla was the young Israeli conductor Omer Meir Wellber, whose taut, ferociously intelligent 2015 account of Brahms’s First Symphony prompted mutterings both inside and outside the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra that he might be The One, or at least capable of running The One very close indeed.Now, with Gražinytė-Tyla on maternity leave, he’s returned to cover one of her prime dates: Read more ...
theartsdesk
Discreetly poking his camera through one of the red curtains around the Albert Hall, chief Proms photographer Chris Christodoulou gets the action shots others would kill for. They're of orchestras, a mixed roster of soloists and what this year remains the mostly male world of conducting; of the five women conductors originally scheduled, the most electrifying to date, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, had to take maternity leave.Many more are coming up through the ranks at last, though, and meanwhile there was much to celebrate in a more conspicuous show of Read more ...