Classical music
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphony No. 2, Tragic Overture, Academic Festival Overture Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen/Paavo Järvi (RCA)Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie’s scintillating Beethoven cycle hasn't received the acclaim it deserves in the UK. Seek it out forthwith, and you'll feel compelled to invest in this first installment of their Brahms cycle. The orchestral sound is still pretty rich, the strings numbering over 30. Wind details emerge without effort, with principal flautist Bettina Wild a stand-out. Flexible tempi allow Järvi to really engage with Brahms's long opening Read more ...
David Nice
To demonstrate what makes chamber masterpieces tick and then to play them, brilliantly, is a sequence which ought to happen more often. Perhaps too many musicians think their eloquence is confined to their instruments. Not violinist Simon Blendis and pianist William Howard of the Schubert Ensemble. Both are models of naturalness, witty when occasion demands, fearless of chapter and verse when they can conjure up the sounds of what they're talking about, never needing to do the "we're passionate about this music" shtick when it's perfectly obvious, and will become more so in performance.In Read more ...
David Kettle
Collaboration and collegiality are becoming ever more important across the Scottish arts scene, it seems. Glasgow theatre company Vanishing Point teamed up with Scottish Opera earlier this year for a double-bill based around Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. String group the Scottish Ensemble has focused heavily on collaborative projects in recent years, joining visual artist Toby Paterson, composer Anna Meredith and (okay, admittedly not Caledonian) Swedish ensemble Andersson Dance in a string of projects.It was probably inevitable that Vanishing Point and the Scottish Ensemble would end up Read more ...
Roman Rabinovich
I was recently in the UK for some solo recitals and to make my debut with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. One of the highlights of the trip was playing a similar programme in two very different settings: first on some magnificent period instruments and then a week later on a modern Steinway piano at Wigmore Hall. Having never before performed publicly on historical instruments, my recital at the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands Park in Surrey felt like a complete experiment. The experience had an indelible influence on the way I approached the repertoire at Wigmore a week later, and has Read more ...
Maria Milstein
I remember very well the first time I read Swann’s Way, the first part of Marcel Proust’s monumental masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu). I was struck not only by the depth and beauty of the novel, but also the crucial role that music played in the narrative. For those who haven’t read the novel, here is a brief summary of the part that particularly fascinated me, "Swann’s Love".Swann, one of the main characters in the novel, is a rich young man living in Paris who is connected with the highest Parisian aristocracy. At a musical soirée one evening he hears a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Amen. The end – of a prayer, a service, even the Bible itself. But what, asks Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No 3, Kaddish, if “Amen” is the beginning and not the end, the start of a conversation that hears the divine word and doesn’t say “So be it” and accept, but instead answers back?The result is the composer’s least-performed symphony, a puzzling piece, torn between moods, even genres. As the centrepiece for the opening of the LSO’s Bernstein 100 celebrations it was problematic, but as the musical epilogue to a weekend marked by yet another American atrocity, to a year haunted by the same Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert was to have been conducted by Stanisław Skrowaczewski, who died in February. Though futile, it’s hard not to speculate about what could have been, especially given his spectacular Bruckner performances with the London Philharmonic in recent years. But life goes on, and in his place we heard Lawrence Renes, whose account of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was solid and dependable, even if it was more memorable for the quality of the orchestral playing than for his interpretive insights.Renes is a Dutch/Maltese conductor, well established in both of those countries and a regular visitor Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Betsy Jolas is a pioneer, the programme for this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert told us, and she’s certainly unique. Now 91, she has been following her own course for many decades, an associate of the 1960s French avant-garde, but never a subscriber to its doctrines. Her concerto for piano and trumpet, Histoires vraies (2015), here received its UK premiere. The style is restrained but eclectic, modernist only in its avoidance of tradition, but continually inventive and, above all, great fun.The title means "True stories", and Jolas links this idea with the expression of "sounds we try not to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Erik Chisholm: Violin Concerto, Dance Suite for orchestra and piano, From the True Edge of the Great World Matthew Driver (violin), Danny Driver (piano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Martyn Brabbins (Hyperion)Erik Chisholm’s improbable career took him from Glasgow to Cape Town, passing through India en route. John Purser’s sleeve note describes Chisholm's craggy idiom as encompassing Asian and Highland influences. It's a heady mixture, as uncompromising as you'd expect from a composer-pianist who worked with Bartók and Hindemith, and who gallantly tried to convert Glaswegian audiences to Read more ...
David Nice
You won't have seen much of magisterial Russian pianist Dmitri Alexeev recently, unless you happen to be a student at the Royal College of Music, where he is Professor of Advanced Piano Studies (they were out in force last night, cheering enough to elicit five encores). His guest appearances at various commemorative concerts, chiefly his towering interpretation of Prokofiev's Sixth Sonata, remain carved in the mind, but this is the first time I've heard him give a full recital. Predictably, although he celebrated his 70th birthday in August, there was no loss of the colossal and well-weighted Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata chose All Hallows’ Eve for a concert of (in some part) "holy" minimalism. Arvo Pärt’s Silouan’s Song began it, and his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten ended it. They headlined it "Spiritualism and Minimalism", but I think what they really had in mind was spirituality. No "one knock for yes" or anything like that, anyway.Manchester Cathedral - hallowed ground indeed - made an excellent visual setting, its versatile lighting rig used to picturesque effect, and after the buzz of conversation died down there was a ready-made atmosphere of quiet expectation before things Read more ...
David Nice
Such introspective subtlety might be mistaken for reticence. But from the rare instances when the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes lets rip - and they're never forced - you know he's wielding his palette with both skill and intuition, waiting for the big moment to make its proper mark. Flyaway passages in Chopin which in other hands bubble like pure champagne flow like pure spring water; the source is everything. And such is the concentration that the wider spaces of the Royal Festival Hall melted away and a sizeable audience was drawn, intensely silent, into the spell.The only aspects of Read more ...