Classical music
Kimon Daltas
The billing for this all-Schubert concert, "Spira Mirabilis and Kate Royal", was a little misleading, since they did not actually share the stage at any point, the two halves being clearly separate events. First came the hour-long Octet, played by members of Spira Mirabilis, followed by half an hour of songs with Kate Royal accompanied by Malcolm Martineau.Now, there are no laws against presenting a salon evening of music by Schubert. In fact, it’s been going on for nearly 200 years, and it’s called a Schubertiade. It might even have been a selling point. But then, shouldn’t the Octet, with Read more ...
David Nice
Now the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s second Conductor Laureate, Jiří Bělohlávek was always going to deserve a hero’s welcome for taking his players to the finishing line of their six-year cycle through Mahler’s symphonies. As more superficially brilliant Mahler series like Gergiev’s, squeezed into a single anniversary season, seem a distant memory, many of Bělohlávek’s slow burn, deep vein interpretations live on in the mind and soul. Last night’s Second Symphony, following an equally well prepared Schumann Piano Concerto with the scrupulous Francesco Piemontesi, shared many of those qualities. Read more ...
Louise Gray
“I am always fascinated by how much is in a voice, by their textures and qualities,” says composer Jocelyn Pook. “They’re like aural photographs of a person and you recognise them instantly.” We are in her studio in north London and Pook flicks through audio-files in her computer to prove the point. Some of the voices she was chosen for their inherent musicality – voices on answerphones rise upwards as questions are asked and intervals are sounded for multi-syllabic words. Pook, an award-winning musician who often uses voices and vocal rhythms – real, sampled and digitally pitchshifted – in Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Arditti String Quartet, Wigmore Hall, 31 October ****November is always a good month for new music. This year saw the interest begin a day earlier. Whichever wag chose to hand over Halloween at the Wigmore Hall to two of the most uncompromising contemporary string quartets, however, was denied a fitting punchline. The young JACK Quartet were grounded in New York by Sandy, and the venerable Ardittis chose to programme works that weren't half as terrifying as hoped.Mauro Lanza's new octet was to see the upstart quartet perform with the old pros. Without the JACK's, however, we got Wolfgang Rihm Read more ...
graham.rickson
Oliver Knussen: Violin Concerto etc Various artists/Oliver Knussen (NMC)Collecting music written between the early 1970s and 2010, this NMC disc is an enthralling tribute to one of the greatest of contemporary composers. Oliver Knussen has never been prolific. And, in Colin Matthews’s words: “One of the reasons that Knussen’s output is relatively small… is that he takes such pleasure in discovering new things when instead he should be composing… every bar that he writes is measured against all the music he knows and loves.” Unsurprisingly, as a conductor he's an inspirational Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Any young composer who finds himself at the opposite end of a programme from Walton’s First Symphony had better be good. Edward Nesbit - whose piece Parallels was commissioned by the LSO Panufnik Young Composer’s Scheme - is certainly that. Indeed the aggressive brass punctuations and nerve-wracking silences that helped point up the symmetry of his very accomplished diptych might have been designed to complement the Walton - or indeed Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto - where silence is not just golden but potent, too.The real meat of Nesbit’s Parallels is communicated in keenly imagined and Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Leonidas Kavakos was originally meant to be premiering a concerto by Argentinian composer Oswaldo Golijov, which had also been scheduled for Berlin in 2011 and subsequently for Los Angeles in May this year. The composer missed both those deadlines and the work apparently remains uncompleted – it was replaced on the programme by the Berg concerto.This was the first concert in Kavakos’ residency with the LSO under the UBS Soundscapes Artist Portrait banner, a series which also see him perform concertos by Sibelius and Szymanowski. The Greek violinist, shoulder-length hair pushed behind his ears Read more ...
David Nice
There are always risks involved in the uncompromising side of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s family-friendly concerts. Succulent slices of fox-meat in the form of a suite from Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen gave the kids a nourishing start, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was always going to seduce them with her effervescent narrative, especially given Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša’s youthful instincts to paint big, bold pictures. But would they sit still through the thrashes and mystic meditations of the latest BBC commission, composer-pianist Rolf Hind’s The Tiniest House of Time?Fellow Read more ...
graham.rickson
Rachmaninov’s choral symphony The Bells always feels like a valedictory late work, a composer’s eloquent, melancholy adieu both to pre-revolutionary Russia and to the fulsome late-romantic style which had served him so well. Happily, Rachmaninov’s career didn’t finish in 1913, and his last few decades in exile resulted, sporadically, in some stunning pieces – the Paganini Rhapsody and the Symphonic Dances among them.I’d not previously realised the extent to which Edgar Allan Poe’s original poem had been reshaped in Konstantin Balmont’s translation. Poe’s first section concludes with the lines Read more ...
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Works for Violin Janine Jansen, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski, Boris Brovtsyn (violin) and Itamar Golan (piano) (Decca)Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto no 2 was completed just before the composer’s return to Russia in the mid-1930s. It’s a more elusive, evasive work than its magical predecessor; fairytale enchantment replaced by a greyer, dourer countenance. Prokofiev in conventional symphonic mode never behaves as you’d expect him to. Smooth transitions become abrupt stops and starts, as the composer's imagination wanders off in unexpected directions. Read more ...
David Nice
Benjamin Britten would have been 99 on the day of this concert. He died aged 62, nearly six months after the premiere of a masterpiece, the 15-minute "dramatic cantata" Phaedra, ruthlessly sifting key speeches from Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine. The compression of inspired, marble-hewn ideas, the like of which few contemporary composers come anywhere near in operas of two hours’ length or more, places Phaedra on a pedestal. Many of us would be happy to admire it in isolation, especially in the company of Alice Coote, a mezzo as equal to its stature as the original interpreter, Janet Read more ...
David Nice
Mozart and Wagner were the opposite compass points of Richard Strauss’s classical-romantic adventuring, and Amadeus has often made an airy companion to the rangy orchestral tone poems in the concert hall. By choosing Haydn instead as the clean limbed first-halfer in two London Philharmonic programmes, Yannick Nézet-Séguin came armed with period instrument experience of the master’s symphonies in his dazzling debut concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Last night’s feast also offered the wondrous spectacle of cellist Truls Mørk making light of the difficulties in Haydn’s Read more ...