Classical music
graham.rickson
Mozart: Piano Concertos no 6, 8 and 9 Angela Hewitt (piano), Orchestra da Camera di Mantova (Hyperion)This first volume in Angela Hewitt’s projected Mozart concerto series deserves praise for featuring three early pieces, instead of starting with the better-known mature works. Which isn’t a slight on these three concertos, each of which sounds like fully-formed Mozart, particularly the Concerto no 9, written when the composer was 20. Rather than a work made up of solos interspersed with tutti passages, piano and orchestra feel inseparable here, the piano making a cheeky entrance within Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The poster boy for a generation of thinking, reading, researching soloists, tenor Ian Bostridge is a regular recitalist. But the programmes he has curated for the current Bostridge Project at the Wigmore Hall have given him the opportunity to show that there’s a lot more to his skills than just performance. Sharing the stage over a sequence of concerts with artists including Angelika Kirschlager, Nicholas Daniel, Sophie Daneman and The English Concert, Bostridge has constructed a mini-season of “Ancient and Modern” themed events that bridge the divides between early and twentieth century Read more ...
theartsdesk
Any day now most of us will be hunkering down and for the most part drawing a curtain about the world outside. Before that happens, we’d like to tell you about theartsdesk’s plans for Christmas and the New Year.As well as posting our usual range of reviews (coming up in the next couple of days, some terrific writing on theatre, film and television), we also have a selection of seasonal treats. On Christmas Day we are publishing a bumper arts quiz specifically tailored for readers of theartsdesk, who know their cultural onions. (Sample questions: "In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy what type of mint Read more ...
David Nice
Is it ever a good idea to programme two symphonies by one composer in a single concert? Maverick Valery Gergiev is likely to stand alone in applying the rule to Mahler. Yet curiously his Prom marathon of two big instalments made more sense as stages on a journey than yoking together the outwardly less time-consuming symphonic adventures of Sibelius. Jukka-Pekka Saraste's attempt last night to run the opposing approaches of the last two Sibelius symphonies head to head worked no better than usual.Maybe it partly felt that way because I have too fixed an idea of how much there is behind the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Just a few weeks ago, John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique delivered what was unquestionably one of the year’s finest concerts – performing Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies with more wit, swagger and verve than even the mighty Leipzig Gewandhaus could muster. Returning to Beethoven last night with the very different orchestral forces of the London Symphony Orchestra, the question was surely whether Gardiner could summon the same magic for a second time.The short answer is not quite. But when dealing with Gardiner’s meticulously detailed performances, it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Unlike audio recordings, classical DVDs can only be properly taken in if you're sitting down for 80 minutes, ideally in the same seat. So they have to be pretty special to warrant repeated viewings. So much depends on the production and direction; how to make interesting the sight of a middle-aged bloke waving a stick at a sea of other middle-aged blokes, many of them looking as if they'd rather be somewhere else. Here's a selection of things which have lodged in my conciousness over the past year, including a couple of seasonal discs.A Concert for New York: Mahler Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s typical: you wait ages for a Belshazzar’s Feast and then two come along at once. And judging by the performance delivered by Ed Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night, Andrew Nethsingha and his massed Cambridge choirs will have their work cut out to follow it next week at the Royal Festival Hall. Throbbing with dance, gaudy as an Eastern bazaar painted by a second-rate Victorian artist, Gardner’s Belshazzar was a wash of Technicolor extravagance among the twee reds and greens of Christmas classical programming.And speaking of gaudy – it was quite the curiosity that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Honegger: Une cantate de Noël, Pastorale d’été, Symphony No 4 London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, New London Childrens’ Choir/Jurowski (LPO)Arthur Honegger’s best-known work is his short, mechanistic portrayal of a steam engine, Pacific 231. It’s a brash, brilliant study of rhythm and tempo; the speed of the musical pulse actually slowing as the train gets faster. Alas, it’s not included on this LPO disc, but we do get the unexpectedly delightful Pastorale d’été, a seven-minute bluesy haze of a piece which suggests an unlikely meeting between Gershwin and Vaughan Williams. Honegger Read more ...
David Nice
Now that Margaret Price is no more and Kiri's well past her heyday, whose is the most limpid soprano of them all? "The beautiful voice" was a label slapped by PR on Renée Fleming, but that fitfully engaging diva is all curdled artifice alongside Anne Schwanewilms, the German soprano who shines in Strauss and should be an example to any singer for ease, charm and what to do with the hands in the exposed light of song recital. Here she duly took the palm for the two loveliest songs of all time, Mahler's, but worked her way towards them through a myriad of humorous, otherworldly and earthy Read more ...
David Nice
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Glasgow concert tonight has had to be cancelled because of what my Scots godson, in far less extreme conditions down in the Borders, once described as "horrifying wind and rain". The programme? The Suite from Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden, about a northern people in the grip of extended bad winter weather until the icy heroine should be melted by the rays of love, and the second act of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, where admittedly it's in the first that ballerina snowflakes eventually get tossed around in a storm and the heroine heads off with her Read more ...
David Nice
Before his slightly over-extended majesty drops behind a cloud at the end of this bicentenary year, and following Louis Lortie’s light-and-shade monodrama on Sunday, Franz Liszt has moved back to left-of-centre in two ambitious midweek concerts. In the second instalment of Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s rather drily named “Liszt Project” last night, the composer became a kind of black hole absorbing even adventurous successors; but I suspect his dance-of-death side would have disposed him even more favourably to the crazy ambition of Khatia Buniatishvili’s half-elegiac programming the night before. Read more ...
David Nice
It was Chopin time when I last heard Louis Lortie, and a typical London clash of scheduling allowed me to catch his effervescent Op 10 Études before pedalling like crazy north of the river for the second half of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s even bigger all-Chopin programme. Last night Lortie offered a comparably monumental homage to this year's bicentenary birthday boy Liszt in all his Italian-inspired variety, and there was no need to miss, or to wish to miss, a note. It still didn’t convert me to the idea that Liszt, like Chopin in 2010, has more to him than first meets the ear, but it was Read more ...