Classical music
Peter Quantrill
With a trio of easy-on-the-ear 20th-century works, Thomas Søndergård marked his debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. A pleasingly full crowd took the opportunity to hear the work of a conductor rarely glimpsed in these parts outside the BBC Proms. His appearances there in charge of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales have given the impression of a contented, highly competent musician, at ease both with the players before him and the scores on the music stand.Whatever that summary leaves out was also missing on this occasion. However new, unfamiliar or classic the repertoire, a Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Bruckner’s Third Symphony doesn’t so much begin as become audible. A steady heartbeat in the bass, oscillating violas lit from within by clarinets, and in the middle, slowly pulling clear of the texture, the proud, sombre trumpet motif to which Wagner himself agreed to attach his name. Not the least of Alpesh Chauhan’s achievements in this performance with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was that he established all of this with his very first gesture – not just the subtle, unmistakably Brucknerian layering of the music’s textures but that whole vast, mysterious sense of the music Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Double Concerto, Piano Trio No. 1 (1854 version) Joshua Bell (violin and director), Steven Isserlis (cello), Jeremy Denk (piano), Academy of St Martin in the Fields (Sony)Brahms’s Double Concerto can be unfairly maligned as a dull, downbeat coda to a long compositional career, but it’s much better than that. Written partly as a peace offering to the violinist Joseph Joachim, this is a piece which takes time to work its magic. It gets a warmly affirmative reading from Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis. They’ve been playing together for years, so it’s little surprise that this performance Read more ...
David Nice
His transformational Brahms series with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra may have been truncated by slipped disc troubles - he was much missed at Glyndebourne too - but Robin Ticciati is back with renewed energy and purpose. To judge from the brilliant but focused party they seemed to be having with Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony last night, the players are as overjoyed as he is.There was much to celebrate just in the evening alone: the last symphony came as the cathartic third act of an opera for orchestra which had led us from the majestic 39th into the woods of the radical 40th and out into the Read more ...
David Nice
For a BBC Radio 3 lunchtime's hour of music, cellist Steven Isserlis's latest collaboration with that most individual of pianists Olli Mustonen went astonishingly deep. The surprises were equal in its two halves - the first a through-conceived programme of shortish late Schumann pieces plus a Schumann homage composed by Mustonen the composer for Isserlis and poetically embedded in the sequence; the second an interpretation of Prokofiev's late Sonata for Cello and Piano which scotched with high, focused drama the usual claims that this is a light and simple work.Mustonen has a penchant for Read more ...
Nico Muhly
Writing for two pianos is something that – until last year – I had not attempted. I was contacted by Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, two pianists who have performed as a duo for many years, asking me to compose a duet for them to perform at the inaugural London Piano Festival. I met Charles back in 2014 when he performed my pieces A Hudson Cycle and Fast Stuff in New York. Time constraints led me to restructure and rewrite an existing piece in my portfolio, Fast Cycles, which I wrote for the late John Scott. Writing for two pianos was easy, as I know a Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
We’re in Gdańsk for the launch of the I, Culture Orchestra (sounds like an Apple product, someone points out). The new outfit has Sir Neville Marriner as guest conductor, at 87, still on sparkling form. The orchestra has brought together young musicians from across Eastern Europe “to encourage better cultural understanding” between Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. New music specialist Pavel Kotla is the artistic director and co-conductor (pictured below, with Sir Neville) – he has championed works by the likes of Charlotte Bray and Ian Vine as part Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Rameau: Suite de Hippolyte et Aricie Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Harding (Harmonia Mundi)This is my new favourite Symphonie Fantastique on modern instruments, and it should be yours too. Daniel Harding doesn’t smooth over the music’s rougher edges. Bass trombone pedals blast out with refreshing inhibition, and the ball scene’s four harps are especially telling. Everything sounds superb (sample the church bell in the last movement), and Harding knits everything together with an impressive sureness of intent. A glance at the track timings shows that Read more ...
Helen Wallace
The Symphony of Psalms, which ended the Philharmonia’s Stravinsky series last night, is an indelible masterpiece, silencing the tired but persistent accusation that Stravinsky’s music is clever but cold. Abstract it may be, but suffused with an exile’s deep longing, spritual hope rising in harmonies of heart-stopping consolation until that final, revelatory C major chord. This performance (with three Swedish choirs) was of focused beauty and searing sincerity; I have never heard better. Its radical scoring sounded afresh, while spine-tingling intonation and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Read more ...
David Kettle
One of two Danish Thomases at the head of BBC bands (compatriot Thomas Søndergård is at the helm of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales), Thomas Dausgaard joins the Glasgow-based BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as chief conductor this season.Dausgaard follows in the rather illustrious footsteps of Donald Runnicles (who becomes the Orchestra's conductor emeritus), and joins a high-flying team of Ilan Volkov as principal guest and composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher as artist-in-association.Runnicles has left, as they say, big shoes to fill. But Dausgaard is out to make his mark with a Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
The new season at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is focusing on revolutionaries. Bach, Beethoven and Berlioz all feature strongly over the next few months, as will Stravinsky and – where else but Liverpool? – The Beatles.The RLPO has another reason to celebrate, too. It’s 10 years since Vasily Petrenko took up the baton as chief conductor of the orchestra and much has changed in that decade, not least the edgily confident way in which Petrenko and the RLPO explore the repertoire. The start of the 11th season with Petrenko at the helm presented audiences with something of a marathon: all Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This year, Valery Gergiev is marking the Prokofiev 125th anniversary with concerts and projects in no fewer than 17 countries. Yet much of last night’s concert, the first of a three-night stint in London, made this whole endeavour feel more like a duty than either an imperative – or a pleasure. The buzz that was around in London concerning the Mariinsky (then the Kirov) in the mid-Nineties, when they dazzled audiences in unfamiliar repertoire, has long gone. Gergiev himself is now very familiar indeed: he'll be popping back here within two months to conduct Prokofiev again, with the LSO Read more ...