Classical music
edward.seckerson
When Schoenberg made his steroidal orchestration of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet he saw and heard what many don’t - that Brahms was more of a radical than the music world was ready to acknowledge, that he was not the conservative in the shadow of Wagner that commentators at the time felt the need to brand him. And yet at the heart of that orchestration, at the root of its motivation, was Schoenberg’s deep-felt reverence for the past, and who better to reveal that than an orchestra - the Vienna Philharmonic - so steeped in tradition that voices of approval from the likes of Brahms, and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If ever there was such a thing as a safe pair of pianistic hands then they would belong to Norway’s Leif Ove Andsnes. There’s a cool, patrician control to everything he does that speaks to thorough preparation, careful interpretative choices and immaculate technique. Thrill-seekers and risk-takers may want to look elsewhere, but for everyone else Andsnes offers the chance to hear cleanly through to the skeleton of a work. No histrionics or affectations muddy the silhouettes on show, and if occasionally one longs for a moment of abandon then it’s a desire easily satisfied by 10 minutes in the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“A book,” says the Boy-Illuminator in George Benjamin’s latest opera Written on Skin, “needs long days of light.” He speaks for Benjamin himself, a composer who, for all his fabulous musical mind and ear, has never found composition easy and has often struggled to produce work of any kind that satisfies his own meticulous standards.His one previous opera, Into the Little Hill, might be thought to exemplify this struggle, with its astonishing refinement of detail and almost studious denial of the facile or melodramatic. Written on skin it could well have been. It was intriguing to renew its Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The evolution of the solo percussionist has advanced dramatically over the last couple of decades and among the superstars of the hardware that can be struck and pounded or caressed and stroked is the flying Scotsman Colin Currie, whose profile has steadily grown since becoming the first percussionist ever to reach the finals of the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 1994.In 2005 he received a coveted Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award enabling him to both to extend his commissioning activities and to raise awareness of the percussive revolution in which he plays such a major role. Currie talks here Read more ...
graham.rickson
Goossens: Orchestral works vol.2 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos)British conductor and composer Sir Eugene Goossens achieved major fame leading the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in the 1950s. Previously he'd given the first British concert performance of Stravinky’s Rite in 1921 and had moved to the US shortly afterwards to take up a sequence of conducting posts. His Sydney tenure ended abruptly in bizarre circumstances, and he returned, disappointed to London, dying in 1962. Goossens’s expertise as an interpreter of contemporary music undoubtedly influenced his own Read more ...
David Nice
At first it all felt too much. In addition to the garish red arum lilies either side of the platform, an overwhelming scent of eau de Cologne from a neighbour and the always hard-to-fight Wigmore Hall torpor were our diva's pink and purple attire, her flashing jewels, and above all that opulent voice, which even in recitals is more accustomed to bigger spaces and still seemed at times to be channelling her demented Salome from The Rest is Noise festival's opening night.Yet she had a pianist in fellow Finn Ville Matvejeff well up to a certain sacred-monster monumentalism, and by the interval Read more ...
simon.broughton
"Multi-instrumentalist" is a catch-all phrase that usually means somebody who plays flute, clarinet, sax and perhaps a bit of guitar. When it comes to Stephan Micus, he’s a multi-instrumentalist of an altogether different calibre. He plays hundreds of instruments – he doesn’t know how many – which he’s collected and commissioned from all over the world.Micus, who has a rare London concert this month, has just released his 20th album on ECM, which puts him up there with Keith Jarrett as one of the label’s most prolific artists. But Micus’s art is of a totally different nature. While Jarrett Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Bach for breakfast, lunch and supper. That in essence was what yesterday's Bach Marathon was about. You can do that with Bach - have him flowing from the taps. Nothing new in this for those of us who experienced the Bach Christmas a few years back on Radio Three, when every note was piped over the airwaves for breakfast, lunch and supper for 10 days solid. Nothing very marathon-like about any of it, though, either. The day’s performances couldn’t have been further from a challenge to sit through or listen to. At the centre of this day of praise was the all-seeing, all-controling, all- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s only fitting that Sir John Eliot Gardiner should be celebrating his 70th birthday with a concert in the Royal Albert Hall. That it should be a nine-hour marathon of a concert is not only fitting, but entirely predictable for a musician who has always kept one eye on the next and biggest challenge.Not for this conductor the familiar or the conventional, a career spent in the safe, sequestered world of early music. Over almost 50 years Gardiner has balanced choral pilgrimages with opera productions, has conducted symphony orchestras and period ensembles, has founded his own record label Read more ...
David Nice
A Leipzig church is surely the place we’d most like to be for Bach on Good Friday. Never mind: the Barbican Hall is kinder to the best period instrument ensembles than it is to big symphony orchestras. Better still, having sat stunned and weepy for a good few minutes at the end of this performance, I’m happy to evangelise and proclaim that no better team could be assembled anywhere for the original 1724 version of this world-changing musical Passion.Richard Egarr (pictured below by Marco Borggreve), directing from the harpsichord, no doubt deserves the credit for the line that passed, without Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Billy Budd John Mark Ainsley, Jacques Imbraillo, Matthew Rose, Philip Ens, Glyndebourne Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Sir Mark Elder (Glyndebourne)I missed this staging of Britten’s Billy Budd, first performed in May 2010. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s the best of Britten’s operas, taut, well plotted and musically flawless. The brass-heavy score is a marvel, its battleship grey orchestral palette accompanying an all-male cast. It contains one of the greatest, yet simplest of Britten’s inspirations in the form of the stark sequence of orchestral chords heard in Read more ...
geoff brown
Any conductor who ends a concert with only one leg on the ground, as if engaged in the Highland fling, is either a little fanciful or has been utterly carried away. In Keith Lockhart’s case last night, it was probably a bit of both. No-one can take charge of Duke Ellington’s big band tone poem Harlem by impersonating a lamp-post, especially at its roaring end, the epitome of jubilation in sound. But the BBC Concert Orchestra’s transatlantic Principal Conductor is also a conscious showman. Sometimes his hands trace such sensuous curves that you feel he’s stroking a Ming vase.All his gifts for Read more ...