Classical music
Ismene Brown
Why is music? A child’s question, a great question. One answered by Evgeny Kissin’s piano recital at London’s Barbican Centre last night, where you might want to engage analysis and come up later with answers but what happened was that you left the concert hall feeling more alive, emotions retooled, spirit lightened, range widened. Music is because. Why else would Beethoven compose 32 piano sonatas? What possible purpose of Haydn to write 62 of them? Because.Kissin is 41, which means he has left his child prodigy reputation far behind him and is now maybe midway through his career. I haven’t Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s something of a fashion at the moment for countertenors to break out of the baroque, to have a bit of a fling with classical and even romantic repertoire. David Daniels has experimented with Berlioz, Philippe Jaroussky has flirted as only a Frenchman can with the mélodies of Massenet and Hahn, and now Andreas Scholl is embracing his native lieder. A concert last night at the Wigmore Hall took his latest disc on the road, stripping the singer of the safety of the recording studio and letting his audience judge his latest, and in some ways most ambitious, programme for themselves.The Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Speaking about the Requiem he composed in 1990 in memory of the London Sinfonietta’s long-time artistic director Michael Vyner, Hans Werner Henze always talked as a believing atheist. “Paradise is here or ought to be,” he insisted, “not later, when nothing else happens;” and “In this world there is no hereafter, only presence: you can meet angels and devils in the street at any time.”So it was a surprise to find a lot more spiritual power radiating from the three movements of the Requiem that Christoph Poppen conducted in this concert by the Welsh National Opera Chorus and Orchestra than from Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: A Ceremony of Carols, Saint Nicolas Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, Holst Singers, City of London Sinfonia/Stephen Layton (Hyperion)2013 will be Britten’s centenary, so brace yourself for an onslaught of new and reissued recordings over the next 12 months. Saint Nicolas and A Ceremony of Carols remain two of the most beguiling, approachable works Britten ever composed. Hearing the opening of this performance of A Ceremony of Carols is initially a bit of a shock – Stephen Layton uses female voices instead of the usual boys’ choir. The sound is smoother, much less raw. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s hard to imagine that a composer’s death at the age of 103 could be a loss to music, in the sense of possible future work, as well as a personal loss, which of course death will always be. But Elliott Carter was a unique exception. Not only was he still writing music up to a few weeks before his death on 5 November, but the dozen or so works he had completed since his 100th birthday showed none of the negative traces of old age one would normally expect to find in the music of somebody even four-fifths his age.The nearest significant parallels I can think of in modern times are Verdi and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Piano Concertos 1 and 3 Leif Ove Andsnes/Mahler Chamber Orchestra (Sony)The best recent cycle of Beethoven piano concertos is Howard Shelley’s, recorded by Chandos with the Orchestra of Opera North. This first volume of Leif Ove Andsnes’s set might stack up to be a rival. It was taped in Prague’s Rudolfinum and acoustically it’s flawless – this is a recording where you suspect that the engineers have just set up a couple of microphones and sat back, letting the musicians get on with it. Ansdnes has come late to Beethoven, explaining that the project’s genesis came after Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s been a star-studded attack from leading figures in the arts on the decision by Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, to exclude the performing arts from the English Baccalaureate, the planned replacement for the GCSE examination. To the Coalition’s credit, they've also published a National Plan for Music Education, “part of the Government’s aim to ensure that all pupils have rich cultural opportunities alongside their academic and vocational studies”. But this only makes the decision regarding the Ebacc even more disappointing and ill-advised.I’ve been a primary teacher Read more ...
theartsdesk in Calgary: Innovation and Iconoclasm at the 2012 International Honens Piano Competition
alexandra.coghlan
Can you name the last three winners of the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition? The Van Cliburn? The Queen Elizabeth? Chopin? Probably not. There was a time when winning a piano competition was a ticket to success, a star-making, career-changing event. Now it’s lucky to land you an agent, let alone a record contract. Radu Lupu, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Martha Argerich and Maurizio Pollini all came to prominence in this way, and in one memorable year Mitsuko Uchida went up against both András Schiff and Myung-Whun Chung in a Leeds Piano Competition final. But in recent years, just as the competitions Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Baltic Youth Philharmonic (founded in 2008) is part of a much larger and bolder enterprise embracing the 10 nation states bordering the Baltic Sea. At a time of financial duress when governments are downgrading culture as a low priority the BYP is forging ahead with privately funded and ever more ambitious schemes whose aim is to celebrate the national identity and cultural diversity of its members as surely as it seeks to develop unity between them.The BYP’s director, Krystjan Järvi, speaks of creating “new vibes” in order to instill an open and lively approach to music and music-making Read more ...
graham.rickson
Xavier Montsalvatge: Orchestral works BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2002) was a Catalan composer who remained true to his regional roots, resisting any stereotypical notions of what Spanish music was supposed to sound like. He was attached to the habanera, but would have pointed out that the rhythm came from Cuba and was brought to Barcelona by Catalan emigrants returning home at the start of the 20th century. Just as certain chunks of Vaughan Williams will always evoke grey skies and boiled cabbage, Montsalvatge’s music at its best suggests a piquant Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Benjamin Grosvenor made his Southbank recital debut last night in a sold-out Queen Elizabeth Hall in another milestone in his unstoppable evolution from wunderkind to fully-fledged concert star. It has been a good year for the 20-year-old pianist, during which he added a Classic Brit and two Gramophone awards to a Critics’ Circle accolade, Decca recording contract and tenure on the Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme.Back in 2004, when he won the piano section of the Young Musician of the Year at the age of 12 (losing out to a 16-year-old Nicola Benedetti in the final), his preternatural Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Some symphonies are natural curtain-raisers: Sibelius’ Third is one. Music began with rhythm and in this piece the cellos are the distant drummers who bring us back to basics with their curt opening measures. Osmo Vänskä clipped the rhythms are kept them on a tight rein - because he knows how this piece goes, how Sibelius’ search for new found economy and textural leanness lends the music an uneasy tension.There’s an extraordinary passage of complete stasis at the point at which one might expect the development of the first movement to start. Vänskä took the dynamics down to Read more ...