Classical music
David Nice
If individual greatness is to be found in the way an artist begins and ends a phrase, or finds magical transitions both within and between pieces, then Pavel Kolesnikov is already up there with the top pianists. Listeners tuning in midway through the peaks of his lunchtime Prom – the great Chopin Fantaisie or the Fourth Scherzo – might have thought they were listening to an old master, while what we saw was a modest 28-year-old who looks much younger, but who moves with total assurance and absence of flash. His performance of Tchaikovsky's massive Second Piano Concerto with the Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s a tricky thing to get right, musical comedy. For every Victoria Wood, Tim Minchin or Bill Bailey, there are others – plenty of them at the Edinburgh Fringe, in fact – who find it more of a challenge to meld together the two forms so that they complement each other rather than compete.Comedian and composer Vikki Stone – trained at London’s Royal Academy, and a respected purveyor of comedy songs (as well as presenter of the BBC Proms podcasts) – is nothing if not ambitious in her Concerto for Comedian and Orchestra, which was given a one-off Fringe performance with the crack young Read more ...
David Nice
There we had it, in one extraordinary Proms day: the brave new world of contemporary classical music for all in a repurposed Peckham car park followed by the consolidation of the old order in all-Czech programming of remarkable originality and daring in the evening. You can't ask much more of an art-form thato many are claming dead in the water or not worth wide media coverage than those two sides of the same coin.Jakub Hrůša’s variations on a Hussite chorale with substantial chorus-based interludes, managing to squeeze in the five leading Czech composers, was always going to be a Proms Read more ...
David Nice
Last night was one of those rare occasions when I'd rather have heard Respighi's gaudy-brilliant Roman Festivals than Brahms's Violin Concerto. It wasn't just that concerts like Charles Dutoit's 2014 Prom had shown us that the Italian's Roman trilogy can actually work as a sequence when Riccardo Chailly was offering us only two of the three. Leonidas Kavakos simply didn't have the consistency to thread the lyrical with the virtuosic aspects and say something new about the Brahms staple, and he was surprisingly subdued at times. But then so was the orchestra in the tone-poems, beautiful of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Sibelius: Finlandia Chineke! Orchestra/Kevin John Edusei (Signum)These live performances mark the recording debut of the Chineke! Orchestra, an ensemble created by bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku to provide opportunities for BME orchestral musicians in the UK and Europe. The only reservations have to concern the programme; releasing a disc of music by dead white Europeans is surely a missed opportunity. Still, Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 does make a lot of sense in this context, a product of the composer's years spent in New York as director of the now defunct National Conservatory Read more ...
David Kettle
“An affectionate look at different nationalities through their horses.” That was the memorably bizarre description by harpsichordist/conductor Richard Egarr of Telemann’s Les nations suite, with which he opened his second Queen’s Hall concert directing the Academy of Ancient Music at the Edinburgh International Festival.And indeed, there was a certain clippety-clop rhythm to much of Telemann’s writing, certainly brought out in Egarr’s wonderfully vivid, theatrical account, which made a convincing case for the piece referring to our equine friends.In fact, Egarr’s humorous introduction served Read more ...
David Nice
For the first time ever Paavo Järvi has been showing other nations why the Estonian Festival Orchestra is among the world's best – travelling to other Nordic countries after their annual gathering in Estonia’s summer capital of Pärnu, with the big bastions of Vienna and Berlin to come early next year. I caught their first ever trip abroad, a fleeting visit to Jūrmala just outside the Latvian capital Riga, two hours south of Pärnu passing nothing but forests, rivers, lakes and the occasional small settlement. And then it was back to base in the loveliest of seaside towns, and what remained of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Six weeks in and we’ve got to that sweet spot in the Proms season where thematic threads start to knit together, sequences begin to fill out, cycles to finish – when you hear not just the concert in front of you but the echoes of those already past. It’s this cumulative impact, this sense of narrative that gives the festival its particular character, lending weight to even the most workaday midweek concerts.“Cycle” may be too grand a term for Elgar’s two-and-a-bit completed symphonies, but the triptych is still an interesting one, especially when crowned with Anthony Payne’s thoughtful Read more ...
David Nice
Everything you may have read about Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla's wonder-working with her City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is true. Confined to a Turkish hospital bed when their first Prom together took place last August, I wondered from the radio broadcast if the extremes in Tchaikovsky weren't too much. In the live experience last night, the miracle of the detail and the justification for even the most startling decisions proved totally convincing. And what a stunner of a programme, too, with plenty of wit in Stravinsky and Gerald Barry (of course) and a lightness you don't often get in Read more ...
David Nice
Reformation Day, Luther 500 - in Proms terms it can only mean Bach, the alpha and omega of music, flourishing roughly two centuries after the Wittenberg Nightingale nailed his 95 theses to the church door. Those of us who headed home on Saturday night reeling from the C major sunburst at the end of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder were happy to hear an even greater blaze at Sunday lunchtime, albeit from only one regal instrument, the Albert Hall organ in the master's E flat major Prelude which the sometime neoBaroque Schoenberg revered and even arranged. But there were many other voices during the Read more ...
David Nice
From sunset to sunrise, across aeons of time, usually flashes by in Schoenberg's polystylistic epic. Not last night at the Proms: Simon Rattle is too much in love with the sounds he can get from the London Symphony Orchestra - here verging on a Berlin beauty - to think of moving forward the doomed love of Danish King Waldemar and the beautiful Tovelille. Still, occasional stickings in the gold-studded mud apart, the variety and vividness of the work, the Albert Hall coming into its own as it often does for big chorus-and-orchestra events and the steady addition of more ideal soloists than the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Krenek: Complete Piano Concertos, Volume 2 Mikhail Korzhev, Eric Huebner (pianos), Nurit Pacht (violin), Adrian Partington (organ), English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Toccata Classics)A cycle of piano concertos by Ernst Krenek won't be on many people's shopping lists, but Volume 1 in this series was unexpectedly absorbing. All hail its successor, which contains just one piano concerto in the conventional sense. That's the Concerto No 4, composed in 1950 and another example of Krenek’s gift for writing exuberant, approachable atonal music. The first movement's waltz rhythms are Read more ...