Classical music
David Nice
I’ve just spent five weeks in the company of a very austere and sometimes frightening masterpiece, Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, hearing a great many recordings of it for Building a Library, the abiding gem of Radio 3’s CD Review in which the critic takes the listener through the piece and chooses a front runner. Now that I’ve reached the finishing post, having scripted the three-quarters-of-an-hour slot with all the snippets from the best and worst of the various recordings - the middle-grounders rather lose out - people are inclined to ask, “ain’t you sick of it?”. Far from it. The Read more ...
geoff brown
Through symphony, opera and orchestral fireworks, Julian Anderson’s music can usually be guaranteed to bring his audiences plenty of meaty listening. But the British composer’s golden aura faded somewhat during the London Philharmonic’s world premiere last night of In lieblicher Bläue, a quasi-concerto (“poem” is Anderson’s preferred term) for violin and orchestra. Some of its troubles might lie in the composer's source of inspiration, a crazy-quilt German Romantic text, hovering between poetry and prose, written in the early part of Friedrich Hölderlin’s long mental decline.The text has Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
When the curtain came down on Liverpool’s year in the limelight as European Capital of Culture, back in 2008, there may have been some who thought that the party was over. Things in the city’s arts world were never going to the same, however, and much has changed since 2008, mostly for the better. But there is one institution which, though it’s been through some major changes in its lifetime, is a constant on the Liverpool scene.The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic is celebrating its 175th birthday. Philharmonic Hall has been refurbished and building work continues to provide a new performance Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Serenades Gewandhausorchester/Riccardo Chailly (Decca)This delectable supplement to Chailly's Leipzig Brahms symphony cycle is predictably good. Brahms's early D minor piano concerto sounds like an attempt to compose on an explicitly symphonic scale, a study in snarling, haughty grandeur, but the two serenades are breezy, transparent and extrovert. All musical elements which play a crucial part in mature Brahms, and ones which Chailly so successfully highlights in the symphonies. Haydn and early Beethoven are audible influences, but these pieces already sound entirely individual Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Morton Feldman and Robert Schumann don’t often appear in the same sentence, but in his brief platform introduction Alexander Melnikov perceptively located common ground: they are two of the greatest writers on music, both for their polemical intent and their vivid imagery. It can be hard to avoid analogy and metaphor when discussing Feldman’s music, but why bother trying? The composer himself wrote of Triadic Memories (1981) that “Chords are heard without any discernible pattern. In this regularity there is a suggestion that what we hear is functional and directional, but we soon realize Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Michael Tilson Thomas is in town to celebrate his 70th birthday. And he's with old friends – he’s been working with the London Symphony since 1970, including six years as principal conductor. There is still plenty of chemistry here, and the orchestra’s strengths perfectly complement his, the clarity and boldness of his interpretations given voice in the orchestra’s precise ensemble and rich sonorities. The concert was a gala event with a retrospective feel, and each piece was well chosen to highlight an aspect of the long and fruitful relationship.Colin Matthews’ Hidden Variables ticks many Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Andrew Manze chose an all-English programme for his debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Clarity of texture and disciplined, propulsive tempos are the hallmarks of his conducting, the results of many years as a violinist and ensemble leader in the period instrument movement. They may not seem ideal qualities for the early 20th century romanticism of Elgar, Ireland and Walton, but all of the works responded well to Manze’s treatment, each in its own way.While he clearly has an ear for detail, Manze is never inclined to constrain his players or to limit expansive orchestral textures. Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There is everything of the quiet achiever about Dobrinka Tabakova. The softly-spoken Bulgarian-British composer was born in 1980 into a music-loving family of doctors, scientists and academics in the town of Plovdiv in Bulgaria and moved to England in 1991. She has garnered composition prizes from Amsterdam, London, New York, Neuchâtel, Vienna and Warsaw. She has been featured composer or composer-in-residence in Utrecht, Sigulda (Latvia), Lockenhaus (Austria), Dubrovnik, Berlin, Hong Kong and Oxford, and will have a major focus on her work this year at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival and at Read more ...
graham.rickson
Wim Henderickx: Disappearing in Light HERMESensemble/Wim Henderickx (HERMESensemble) Flemish composer Wim Henderickx's music is a bewildering mixture of influences – of Stravinsky, Bartók, Messiaen, Xenakis and Ligeti. All of which are combined with a refreshingly un-woolly injection of Eastern philosophy. In Henderickx's words, “For me, non-Western cultures are more than a source of inspiration... I think about how I can integrate other cultures in a pure and really sincere manner.” And he succeeds; this disc rarely feels like Western art music, and Henderickx manages to juggle his Read more ...
David Nice
Shock and Shakespeare were the two forces that powered a typically thoughtful programme from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. I said as much in a pre-performance talk where the links weren’t hard to find: that also means coming clean at the start about my involvement. But the world needs to know about this one. With no intention to write about the event, I found myself too astonished to keep quiet by the brilliant work of Brazilian Carlos Miguel Prieto, a conductor I haven’t encountered before, and struck afresh by the top-notch invention in James MacMillan’s The Berserking, now 25 years Read more ...
David Nice
Having manoeuvred to get a new concert hall for London earmarked in principle, Sir Simon Rattle has finally agreed, as we thought he would, to take charge of the London Symphony Orchestra in 2017. By then, he'll by 62 (though I thought the big idea was to leave Berlin at 64, an appropriate benchmark for a Liverpudlian).Yes, it’s a good move in many ways, even if I can’t be as unreservedly ecstatic as the press at large, which has at least done the classical world the service of giving it a recognition outside the arts pages thanks to Rattle’s recent visit with the Berlin Philharmonic. Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The BBC Radio 3 announcer came on stage to introduce the concert and promised us "the 100 minutes" of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony in the second half. Some of us smiled and assumed he (or his scriptwriter) had made a howler. Last time the Eighth was done in London, Jukka-Pekka Saraste led a vigorous account, not unduly rushed, taking under 75 minutes. The announcer, did we but know it, was giving us fair warning. Three hours later, boos and cheers mingled as the Brahmsian figure of Leif Segerstam shuffled off stage, wreathed in unBrahmsian smiles. London audiences boo at horrid German purveyors Read more ...