Classical music
graham.rickson
Haydn: Piano Sonatas 32, 40, 49, 50 Paul Lewis (Harmonia Mundi)One of the many good things about Haydn's piano sonatas is their brevity. You can easily squeeze four or five on to a single disc, though the ones chosen by Paul Lewis for his debut Haydn disc all feel like deceptively big pieces. Lewis takes a commendably non-interventionist approach: rhythms are nicely sprung and his clear, crisp articulation is a joy. He doesn't over-accentuate the quirkiness: Haydn doesn't need any extra help. Take the opening to the Sonata in C, its fragmentary, staccato major triad quickly blossoming Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Marking his departure as the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Music Director after six years, Peter Oundjian definitely left on a high, conducting a gripping, visceral performance of Mahler’s last completed symphony. Its beginnings were glassy and clear, matched with a lyrical softness, before the orchestra erupted into powerful, passionate swells. Woodwind were crisp and piercing, cutting through the strings’ density, and con sordino horns were solemn and ominous.As the first movement progressed, through more pastoral passages with tender horn and clarinet playing, to the more dark and Read more ...
Franco Fagioli
I started singing when I was nine years old in my primary school choir. I sang plenty of solos there before moving on to another children’s choir; that was a formative experience for me. At this point, I was singing the soprano part and from here I was invited to sing in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. This was my first experience of opera, and one that gave me great joy and satisfaction.My first major performance was as Hansel in Humperdinck's fairy-tale opera at the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires. This was a special experience, on the one hand because it was one of my first leading roles and on the Read more ...
David Nice
Serendipity as well as luxury saw to it that the night after Simon Rattle gave his farewell Festival Hall performance as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, his imminent successor appeared over at the Barbican with another excellent German orchestra. We've only rarely encountered Kirill (not to be confused with honorary Liverpudlian Vasily) Petrenko in the UK up to now, so the contrast was instructive. While one shouldn't compare incomparables, it's tempting on this evidence to suggest that Rattle is more earth, Petrenko airier, with a shared fire when the Englishman's at his best. But Read more ...
graham.rickson
Messiaen: Catalogue d’Oiseaux Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Pentatone)The title Catalogue d’Oiseaux suggests a dusty ornithological textbook. And Messiaen implied that all he’d done to compose this ear-tickling sequence of piano pieces was to sit down somewhere quiet and scribble down the birdsong within earshot. But, as Nigel Simeone’s excellent booklet essay points out, “birds don't sing to a conventional twelve-note chromatic scale, nor do they sing within the range of a piano.” Messiaen's birdsong transcriptions are best heard as brilliant reimaginings. Though the 13 movements are Read more ...
Richard Bratby
How to judge a genius who died at 25? Gerald Larner, in his programme note for this concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, suggests that Lili Boulanger’s tragically early death was actually central to her achievement. She knew she probably wouldn’t see 30, and directed her energies accordingly. The result is unlike anything else that was being written during the First World War: music with all the invention, fire and vaulting ambition of youth, underpinned by an awareness of mortality that’s less like a creeping terror than some mighty, towering presence on the horizon – Read more ...
David Nice
Questions of interpretation apart, Simon Rattle has yet again proved the great connecter, this time in concerts separated by just over a month. Having set his seal on his new, galvanizing partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra by asserting, as he has since the late 1970s, that Mahler's Tenth Symphony in Deryck Cooke's performing version is the true end of that composer's quest, he returned to London on his farewell tour with the Berlin Philharmonic to test the waters of a completion from fragments, the finale of Bruckner's Ninth.Unless you buy into Robert Simpson's assertion that Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven Revisited: Symphonies 1-9 Taschenphilharmonie/Peter Stangel (Sony)The most enjoyable recent Beethoven symphony cycle I've heard is Yury Martynov’s set of the Liszt piano arrangements. Closely followed by this one. It’s also a left-fielder, arranged and conducted by Peter Stangel and performed by his versatile chamber-sized "pocket philharmonic orchestra". In his words, “all instruments play one-on-a-part, winds are reduced and some instruments are omitted completely, as if Beethoven had written for a large chamber ensemble.” As with this team's bewilderingly brilliant take on Read more ...
David Nice
Singing satirist Anna Russell placed the French chanson in her category of songs for singers "with no voice but tremendous artistry". Mezzo Karen Cargill has tremendous artistry but also a very great voice indeed, a mysterious gift which makes her one in a thousand, and also rather good French (put that down to Scotland's "Auld Alliance, perhaps). Whether her particular choice of the Gallic repertoire was ideal to sustain three-quarters of a Wigmore song recital which fell a bit short of the greatness she undoubtedly owns is another matter.You spend all your life not hearing a gem, Hahn’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: On the Waterfront Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Christian Lindberg (BIS)There's much to enjoy in this Bernstein compilation, the first recorded collaboration between trombonist Christian Lindberg and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. The playing is great, the recording sensational, one of those rare discs which sounds good played back at any volume (I'd suggest listening to it at a high level). The sleeve art is an endearing image of a geezerish Lindberg posing, er, on the waterfront. Fans will always cherish Bernstein's 1960s analogue recordings of his Read more ...
David Nice
Let's face it, Robert "Cabinet of Dr Caligari" Wiene's 1926 film loosely based on Strauss and Hofmannsthal's 1911 "comedy for music" is a mostly inartistic ramble. Historically, though, it proves fascinating. The composer mostly left it to Otto Singer and Carl Alwin to cut and paste large chunks of his opera, adding four old pieces and one new one - a major contribution to the art of through-composed scoring for silent film (Shostakovich's wholly original New Babylon music came three years later). Strauss's "house poet" saw the chance to shed new light on fascinating characters and to Read more ...