Classical music
Simon Thompson
When you stop to think about it, Schwanengesang is a pretty ridiculous thing. Schubert’s final song cycle was famously put together by his publishers after his death, and so it’s barely a cycle at all. Therefore, unlike Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, there’s no story and, even worse, the lurches in mood between the songs are so extreme that they can become absurd.I reflected on that several times while watching Ian Bostridge singing it during this EIF Queen’s Hall recital, because his identification with the songs and their meaning seemed so complete that he could drag the audience into Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This Prom by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Nil Venditti featured a first half of Welsh composers, including the belated Proms debut of Karl Jenkins at the age of 80. It’s a sign of how Proms programming has evolved over the last 30 years that either of them gets a look-in and, even if I had some mixed feelings about their pieces, it can only be a good thing that they are now being heard in this festival.The second half featured someone who has waited even longer than Jenkins for a first Proms outing – Louise Farrenc, who died in 1875 – alongside a guy called Ludwig van Beethoven, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra first performed at the Proms – to a rapturous welcome – in 2003. For two decades the visits, and the audience rapture, have continued, while the region of most WEDO players’ birth now looks, this hideous year above all, more steeped in blood and hate than ever. Said and Barenboim never intended the orchestra, with its core element of young Arab and Israeli musicians later augmented by players from neighbouring lands, as some kind of soppily high-minded peace project. Rather, they sought a way of creatively Read more ...
Simon Thompson
When you’re running a three-concert residency, you can afford to take a few repertoire risks, to programme a few things that might be close to your heart but which won’t pack in the punters.That must be the reason why the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra’s EIF residency included Hans Rott’s First Symphony in its first night and in this, its last, Dvořák’s Te Deum and Josef Suk’s Asrael symphony, works close to Chief Conductor Jakub Hrůša’s heart but which don’t resonate so much with British audiences.Predictably, therefore, the Usher Hall was only half full for both of those concerts (their middle Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s begin at the end. Can the Paris Olympics' closing ceremony offer anything as classy or joyous as 260 musicians aged 13 to 18 singing the French carol-plus-farandole finale of Bizet’s L'Arlésienne music?* This encore also made Proms history as a unique riposte to the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra’s instrument-twirling Bernstein “Mambo”. And what a sequel to a Mahler One brimming with energy, masterfully negotiated by conductor Alexandre Bloch.Range rather than cohesion was the name of this supremely high-spirited game. Wagner's Overture to The Flying Dutchman underlined the discipline: Read more ...
graham.rickson
Arthur Bliss: Works for Brass Band Black Dyke Band,/John Wilson (Chandos) I’ve really got into the music of Arthur Bliss over the last couple of years, aided by Paul Spicer’s authoritative 1923 biography. I had always had Bliss in my head as a stuffy old establishment buffer, but he was far from that, although he did end up as Master of the Queen’s Music. As a young man – having fought with distinction in WWI – he was quite the radical, and an early composer for film, most notably in the groundbreaking Things To Come. Above all, what emerged from the biography, was a grounded, contented Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This was my first Prom of the season – always an exciting moment, even in my fourth decade as an attendee. I was hearing the BBC Philharmonic under its newly appointed Principal Guest Conductor, the excellent Anja Bihlmaier, in a programme of two giants of the 19th century Romantic repertoire separated by warp & weft by the American composer Sarah Gibson.This was not the originally billed commission beyond the beyond, as Gibson died of cancer at the age of 38 on 14 July, with the new piece unfinished. It was replaced by warp & weft (2021), based, according to the programme note, on Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Queen’s Hall isn’t going to know what has hit it after the opening weekend of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. What’s usually the festival’s demure home of chamber music – string quartets, piano trios and so on – was still recovering from Jakub Józef Orliński’s theatrics from Saturday morning, when it encountered this scorching performance of choral music from the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela (★★★★★).The Schola Cantorum’s main reason for being in Edinburgh last weekend was to take part in Golijov's La Pasión según San Marcos in the Usher Hall on Saturday evening, but Read more ...
Simon Thompson
When I first started attending the Edinburgh International Festival in the 1990s, the Opening Concert (capitals intentional) was a grand Usher Hall affair on a Sunday evening; a central work of the western classical tradition to set the festival running. Not any more. They’ve steadily moved the opening of the festival forwards over the years (the first of 2024’s preview events took place last Thursday) and this year the opening concerts take place over not one but two nights.The theme that director Nicola Benedetti has chosen for this year’s festival is Rituals that unite us, and the opening Read more ...
David Nice
Not everyone knew what to expect from this fascinating programme. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, last of his orchestral masterpieces, is nothing like the more familiar aspects of his piano concertos. Nor is Busoni’s nominal attempt at the form, which seems more of a Symphony-Concerto than anything else, and style-wise impossible to pin down. Both works had the fullest care and focus last night.It felt counter-intuitive to have Rachmaninov's very personal swansong in the first half; if some of us couldn't quite tune in to the depths at first, that was no fault of the performance. Edward Read more ...
David Nice
The buildings, 13th-16th century, are earlier than the music (mostly Baroque). And what buildings. Non-Estonians like myself had heard that Haapsalu was a fine seaside town; but tourist publicity neglected the glory of the castle and cathedral, a central festival venue. If Livonians, Germans, Swedes and Russians all passed through, enriching and destroying, this most perfect of small festivals now welcomes international musicians to perform alongside world-class Estonians.Since musicologist, conductor and Artistic Director Toomas Siitan founded the festival in 1994, making it one of the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Does John Wilson ever stumble?The Sinfonia of London, the Gateshead-born conductor’s ad hoc all-star super-band, rode into a full-to-bursting Royal Albert Hall once again last night with an all-American Proms programme that promised not just crowd-pleasing Stateside favourites (Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in its centenary year, Barber’s Adagio for Strings) but the towering Yosemite peak of John Adams’s massive symphony-in-all-but name, Harmonielehre. There were a couple of moments, especially in a sometimes routine rendering of Copland’s Billy the Kid, when their famously blazing Read more ...