Classical music
igor.toronyilalic
Last night was meant to be a celebration of Beethoven and Barenboim. But we had a gatecrasher. And at the opening concert of the first cycle of the Beethoven symphonies at the Proms for 60 years, the name on everyone's lips was neither Beethoven nor Daniel Barenboim, but that of Pierre Boulez. Though modest in its manner of musical expression, the near 50 minutes of continuous music that make up Boulez's chamber work Dérive 2 dwarfed the two Beethoven symphonies that stood either side of it and dominated the tone of evening. There was bafflement from some in the audience, wide-eyed Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach, Beethoven, Schubert Reiko Fujisawa (piano) (Quartz)Each of these three composers makes very specific, particular demands on a pianist’s technique. Playing Bach as sharply and as delicately as this doesn’t suggest that Reiko Fujisawa will be up to the mark when tackling the spongier, more amorphous world of Schubert’s Impromptus, but she’s able to inhabit both sound worlds with ease. Having a mixed programme on CD is such a rare pleasure; this is like listening to a carefully prepared live recital. The Schubert comes at the end of the disc. The major-minor shifts in the first Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Rio Ferdinand did four years' ballet training as a child, England manager Graham Taylor sent the national squad to dance classes, while the Royal Ballet once ran an active football team. Ballet and football have long been secret lovers backstage. But they have only been rarely seen out together in public.The tidy formations and rehearsed moves that please in dance theatre aren't compatible with the unpredictable spontaneity of football, and while kings of grace such as Ronaldinho, Zinedine Zidane or Dennis Bergkamp bring tears to the eyes with their individual flair, it's the overall arc of a Read more ...
geoff brown
One top student orchestra playing on its own can be exciting enough. Two playing together can produce a charge of dynamite that might not leave the building standing. That was so anyway in last night’s Prom, when players from New York City’s Juilliard School and London’s Royal Academy of Music, by now frequent collaborators, joined up to shake the earth with thunderous brass, swooning strings, diamond precision, a velvet bloom – every characteristic of a world-class orchestra except the honour of being conducted by Lorin Maazel.Instead the podium was occupied by America’s favourite composer, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
How silly an armchair looks in the Royal Albert Hall - like a rubber duck floating in the Pacific. Yet how right it was for those behind this excellent semi- staged Proms performance of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande to try to recreate a bit of fin-de-siècle intimacy for this most intensely intimate of operas. And how appropriate also for there to be a couch on stage in a work that is, and has always been, a psychoanalyst's dream.But it wasn't just the furniture that suggested that we were being given entry to an interior world. Everything about the way this symbolist drama played Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Let a woman in your life," roars Professor Henry Higgins, “and your serenity is through. She'll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome and then go on to the enthralling task of overhauling you.” It’s a scenario not unlike letting the winsome darling that is musical theatre loose among the club armchairs and smoking jackets of a classical music festival.The dome of the Royal Albert Hall may have been safe from a substantial redesign, but last night the lights glowed hot pink and the stage teemed with more action than a whole cycle of Beethoven symphonies. John Wilson and his Read more ...
geoff brown
Two weeks to go to the Olympics, of course, but the Proms Olympics – 84 concerts in 60 days – have already taken off, with Britain placed first, second, third and fourth. For last night’s First Night concert was one where everything except Canadian singer Gerald Finley was British: the composers, the conductors (all four of them), the orchestra, certainly the weather.There was also something distinctly British about the concert’s failure to be unquenchably festive. The best of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s playing, and some of the BBC Symphony Chorus’s most ravishing sounds, went into Delius’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
The greatest music festival of them is once more upon us. Throughout our extensive coverage of last year's BBC Proms, we featured the remarkable work of photographer Chris Christodoulou. We have asked Chris to select his favourite pictures of conductors at work, and we present them again for your entertainment and enlightenment as the world's greatest conductors again take to the podium for the summer to show exactly what it takes to do what they do.The portraits find the maestri of the podium displaying the full range of communicative emotions - commanding, pleading, imperious, plaintive. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: War Requiem Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Choir, Netherlands Children’s Choir/Jaap van Zweden and Reinbert de Leeuw (Challenge)One of classical music’s most unlikely popular successes, Britten’s War Requiem was premiered 50 years ago in Coventry Cathedral. The composer taped the work shortly afterwards and the resulting LP became an unexpected bestseller. For this not an easy work to enjoy, let alone love. The relentless greyness can quickly become oppressive, and there are times when you can feel like you’re receiving a lecture. Fortunately, this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It could have been a cow lowing in the distance, the sound drifting across a barren landscape. Its tone transformed after echoing through hillsides and ravines. Actually, it was Karl Seglem blowing into the horn of a goat. Suddenly, he stopped and began wordlessly chanting. The other two musicians on stage at St Luke's kept their heads down and continued providing the sonic wash knitting together this collaboration between the classical, jazz and uncategorisable.Seglem’s diversion into the animalistic was short, but it helped define last night. The union of Christian Wallumrød, Seglem and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a peculiarly boundless quality to Istanbul – a city where private domestic life sprawls publicly out across pavements and parks, the bustle of the city seeps out beyond land onto the commercial waterways of the Bosphorous, and cats stroll casually in and out of concert halls. Borders here are porous, a symptom of those greater national divisions that set Turkey in an ongoing tug of war between Europe and the Middle East – a frontier territory, one of political, religious and cultural dialogue but also of conflict.It’s a dance enacted nowhere more vividly than in Istanbul’s annual Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mozart: The Four Horn Concertos Marc Geujon, Orchestre Paul Kuentz/Paul Kuentz (Calliope)Mozart’s horn concertos remain cornerstones of the hornist's repertoire. No one has ever written horn music quite so idiomatic, tuneful and loveable. They were composed for the Viennese hand horn player Joseph Leutgeb, whose technical virtuosity by some accounts wasn’t matched by intellectual ability; Mozart wrote cheeky insults addressed to Leutgeb in the manuscript of K495. But these brief works brim with warmth and affection; each one perfectly proportioned, difficult to play well but never Read more ...