Classical music
graham.rickson
We go out of this column's comfort zone for this week’s releases which include orchestrated versions of songs by the Fab Four, and an Italian pianist’s imaginative response to jazz god Thelonious Monk. And there’s also some Led Zeppelin played by a string quartet.The Beatles for Orchestra: Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Davis (Carl Davis Collection)New York-born composer and conductor Carl Davis has been working in the UK since 1960. He’s best known for his film and television music – notably the BBC’s 1996 Pride and Prejudice, for which he provided a near-perfect pastiche classical Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Forget almost everything you thought you knew about classical music. Forget the regulations and the rigmarole, the politeness and the prissiness. Forget the preening institutions. Forget the vocal doom-sayers. Classical music is in the throes of an extremely welcome revolution. The entrepreneurial spirit that seized and transformed British art in the 1980s is finally animating and unshackling this most stubborn of art forms. Operas are springing up in warehouses, concerts in bars. Last weekend, I witnessed one of the great Rites of Spring in a Peckham car park.Ironic jumpers stood in for Read more ...
David Nice
Older pianomanes may lament the passing of the great Russian schooling that gave us the likes of Sofronitsky, Yudina and Richter. I'm not so sure. The younger generations may have dropped the mystic torch, but their more even-tempered approach can beguile. Yevgeny Sudbin forms the current holy trinity with Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Lugansky. His latest Wigmore recital was revelatory, not always in a good way; that broad beam needn't have swept every corner of the broad Russian church he so singularly constructed in the programme's second half. But anyone who can make Liszt sound as lucid Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
One of the weirdest things about the Proms's "weird concerto" theme is that the concertos so far haven't been all that weird. Piano. Violin. Cello and violin. Cello, piano and violin. Pretty familiar stuff. Finally last night we got something bona fide off the wall: a concerto for string quartet from French rebel Pascal Dusapin. Was it weird enough?To be honest, not really. But no matter. We were engaged. The work followed convention. The soloists never really departed from their showman role; the orchestra remained the backdrop. At one stage the two seem to switch places, the Ardittis taking Read more ...
David Nice
Nine out of 10 attempts to feed an audience's visual responses to abstract music are doomed to failure; a great communicator will always conjure stronger pictures in the listener's mind. And there's no doubt that young violinist Alina Ibragimova communicates at the highest level. But here she simply held her own to work in shadowplay with both the mysterious spaces of London's most atmospheric venue and the even more intangible visions of twins Timothy and Stephan Quay. Their film around Bartók's Solo Violin Sonata, though defying intellectual analysis and easy correspondence with the musical Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The world tour that the Proms offer this year touches down in no more fascinating musical country than Hungary, with three of its great composers, Liszt, Bartók and Kodály brought into the Albert Hall last night by the ever-stimulating Vladimir Jurowski with his hot gypsy band, the London Philharmonic Orchestra.This acoustic is not a happy place for the syncopations and sharp rhythms of Hungarians, who are never afraid of a silence or a missed heartbeat, never rush to end a note when they can increase the suspense by holding it. As a result, Kodaly’s Dances of Galánta had a rougher ride than Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Well, that's a first. With the final upbeat of the rustic second movement, Sir Roger Norrington Bugs Bunnied the audience. He turned to us with cheek in his eyes, a "That's-all-folks!" smile plastered on his face, brandishing his baton for a carrot, as if he and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra had (yet again) just outwitted Elmer Fudd. The thought that Norrington's Mahler Nine would make me laugh had crossed my mind before the concert. But I had no idea that I'd be chuckling in a good way.The intermittent stand-up (there was another attempt after the third movement that no one saw) was Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You can't say this about many works but Verdi's Requiem really is as snug as a bug in a rug in the Royal Albert Hall. In which other space could the three moon-like bass drums orbiting the back of the orchestra not look ridiculous? Last night's performance seemed to have all the hallmarks of a classic. Great cast. Three of Britain's great amateur choirs. One of the most talented conductors of his generation. All Bychkov needed to do was mix and stir. Right?Certainly if we went around individually, no fault would be found. The choir (which included the BBC Symphony Chorus, BBC National Chorus Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I’m standing with my feet on peaks and my head in clouds, looking down steep Alps at the tiny chocolate-brown chalets of little Verbier way below on the green slopes. It’s ravishing up here on the top of Fontanet, and I tarry, gloating over the botanical riches around me of milky-blue gentians, royal-blue harebells, glistening edelweiss, dark little orchids and garnet-bright sedum, watching the trickling water of a brook, and replaying last night’s music in my head. And if you move quick you can do this yourself before next Sunday.There’s an Easyjet to Geneva several times a day, a train ride Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
If much of the Austro-German repertoire is about hiking to a spiritual peak, the Franco-Spanish is about diving down to the orchestral depths. The music of Ravel, Debussy and Falla has beefy shoulders and powerful legs. But the vast watery expanse of the Royal Albert Hall is hard-going even for these expert paddlers. I've never seen anything by these composers that hasn't drowned in this space. So I came to last night's concert hoping that the BBC Philharmonic's new Spanish conductor, Juanjo Mena (he takes over officially next season), would show us all how to ride out these waters.He Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week's chronologically varied selection includes instrumental music written by one of the giants of Elizabethan music and a baffling, beguiling work composed by a 20th-century maverick, inspired by a visit to a Japanese garden. There's also a splendid new recording of an Italian opera which opens with one of the world's most famous tunes.William Byrd: Complete Consort Music Phantasm (Linn Records) This is a collection of music composed by William Byrd for viol consort, probably between 1560 and 1603. The viol is the ancestor of the cello, a fretted, bowed instrument with six strings. It Read more ...
David Nice
It was partly as penance for having missed the previous evening's Czech festival that I arena-prommed for last night's Moravian finale, to be happily strafed by the nine extra trumpets of Janáček's Sinfonietta. I hadn't quite expected to be so on the edge of my first-half seat in wonder at the little miracles of Sibelius's Op 66 Scènes historiques, genius personality more apparent in the first two chords than in all but the last minute or so of Havergal Brian's two-hour Gothic Symphony (but let's not go there again). In between, Sir Mark Elder's conducting didn't always keep his Mancunians on Read more ...