Classical music
Ismene Brown
Hans Werner Henze, the composer who died on Saturday aged 86, wrote the music for one of Margot Fonteyn's signature ballets, Ondine, a ballet about an inhuman spirit who longs to be joined to a man - but when she does, he must die. It might almost be a metaphor for the death of the thought the moment it is realised.A 1958 collaboration with Britain's major choreographer Frederick Ashton, Ondine was the first full-length ballet score to be commissioned by the emerging Royal Ballet, and it was, for the very young, and creatively fluctuating Henze, a process that confirmed his instinct that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nicola Benedetti: The Silver Violin (Decca)Cheesy packaging and photos aside, Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti’s latest album has lots to commend it. This anthology of cinema-related music grew through Benedetti’s love of Korngold’s Violin Concerto, which she first heard in Heifetz’s chromium-plated 1953 recording. Still dismissed by some as hokey schlock, it remains an endearing, compact piece, with Korngold’s impossibly anachronistic style hard to dislike. This is a noirish, overripe score which reeks of Hollywood, never more than in the swashbuckling finale. Me, I’m always bowled Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s a sadness to all lovers of the French horn that Mozart’s four horn concertos, the product of his longest friendship, make their appearance all too rarely in the concert hall. Though the building blocks of the repertoire, perhaps their apparent frivolity counts against them. But last night the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its principal horn Roger Montgomery brought out of mothballs the best-known concerto, K495, and planted it in the middle of a programme celebrating Mozart the entertainer.First up was Symphony no 36, K 425, dashed off on the way back from Salzburg in 1782, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. That's quite a mouthful. Bruckner's symphonies can be too. But this is one of the reasons why Skrowaczewski has acquired quite a cult following for his Bruckner performances; it's why I once drove all the way to Zurich to hear him conduct one. His Bruckner is never offered as an indigestible slab of meat. It's never hard or chewy. What you get from Skrowaczewski's Bruckner is tenderness and deliciousness. I know this not from my trip to the Tonhalle which was a bit of a failure - I got lost in the Black Forest and was turned away at the doors ten minutes late - Read more ...
David Nice
The prospect of adventuring from one unpredictable day to the next in the course of Michael Tippett’s Triple Concerto, and from dawn to twilight in just over an hour’s orchestral music from Wagner’s Ring, seemed very much weighted in the English composer’s favour. Frankly, had Mark Wigglesworth only conducted Siegfried’s Funeral March in this concert’s second half, he would have consolidated an already glowing reputation as a top-notch Wagnerian. That he and the BBC Symphony Orchestra burned their symphonic way through Dutch percussionist Henk de Vlieger’s audacious, unbroken “orchestral Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies nos 5 & 7 Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)John Eliot Gardiner’s set of period-instrument Beethoven symphonies was a bestseller in the early 1990s. Technically brilliant, immaculately played and lavishly packaged, the readings followed Beethoven’s contentious metronome markings and remain a seminal listening experience, despite the claims of more recent sets by Emmanuel Krivine and Jos Van Immerseel. Gardiner’s new pairing of nos 5 and 7 was recorded live in Carnegie Hall a year ago. The pace still feels driven, the tension high Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It is considerate of Manchester’s two professional symphony orchestras to have organised their opening Wagner celebration salvoes so that they dovetail so neatly. The BBC Philharmonic opened their season three weeks ago with the Wesendonck Lieder, famously inspired by the composer’s infatuation with Mathilde, the wife of his wealthy sponsor Otto Wesendonck, and featuring those two well-known studies for Tristan und Isolde, "Im Treibhaus" (In the Hothouse) and "Traume" (Dreams). Last night came the Hallé with the Prelude and Liebestod of that very opera.With principal guest conductor Markus Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The vibrant Elias String Quartet are 14 years young, well established, and well respected on the international scene. Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists and recipients of a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award in 2010, they are at that major crossroads in any quartet's life when they embark upon a complete cycle of the Beethoven Quartets. Unusually the quartet have decided to chronicle their preparation and progress through a revealing website.Further insights are offered with this audio podcast, in which Marie Bitlloch (cello) and Donald Grant (second violin) - one half of the quartet led by Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The quest for the spiritual in the musical has been the dominant preoccupation of Jonathan Harvey’s since his earliest works. Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy has been an acknowledged influence on the composer, who has made a career of exploring what Steiner described as “the special character of the individual note”, which “expands into a melody and harmony leading straight into the world of the spirit”. So when Swiss theologian Hans Küng and the Berlin Philharmonic were looking for a composer to set Küng’s massive new libretto as a full-length spiritual work for chorus and orchestra Harvey was Read more ...
theartsdesk
By day, Friar Alessandro Brustenghi lives and works in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi. In his spare time, he works as a carpenter. But he also has a new career as, in the words of his producer Mike Hedges, “the next Italian tenor”. The fruits of his entry into Abbey Road’s recording studio is Voice from Assisi. You can listen here on theartsdesk to the entire album, exclusively until midnight on Thursday.Voice from Assisi consists of traditional and modern sacred songs, from Schubert’s Ave Maria and “Sancta Maria” from Cavalleria Rusticana and a recently discovered Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s Beethoven all right, but not as you know him. The scowl is there, and the broad heroic shoulders too, but the iconic tousled hair is glowing a rather unexpected shade of orange. A purple cloak sweeps down to the floor, setting off a jaunty pair of Elton John-style glasses and a leopard-print waistcoat.Wherever you go in Bonn during the 2012 Beethovenfest lifesize models of the city’s favourite son greet you, brooding out from inside shop windows, or posing casually (as casually as a bright green hulk-inspired mannequin can) on a street corner. Photos from previous years reveal a waxwork Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Over the next four seasons the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes will be embarking upon a “Beethoven Journey” that will clock up 150 performances in 55 cities all over the world. At the heart of this expedition will sit the five Beethoven Concertos and Choral Fantasia all of which will be committed to disc by Sony Classical in recordings made in Prague and featuring the Mahler Chamber Orchestra directed from the keyboard by Andsnes.Andsnes has, of course, cherry-picked his way through Beethoven piano literature in the past but this intensive exploration has come as something of a calling at Read more ...