Classical music
edward.seckerson
Theresienstadt was the Nazis’ most successful PR exercise. Described as a “Jewish settlement” for the preservation and propagation of the Arts, this Czech outpost turned concentration camp housed virtually the whole of the Jewish cultural elite. Inmates called it an anthill, a “Garden of Eden in the middle of Hell”. But the Nazis insisted that cultural freedom was encouraged, even cultivated, here. This was no concentration camp, rather a transit camp. Even the International Red Cross was taken in. Actually it was death’s waiting room. And while they waited, they wrote, they played, they sang Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Having brought John Dowland to the masses with his album Songs from the Labyrinth, Sting takes another shot at presenting classical music to a wider audience which has developed the infuriating habit of not taking any notice of it. In this live performance, Sting portrays the passionate and tragically short-lived Robert Schumann by reading from his letters, while his wife Trudie Styler enacts the role of Robert’s spouse Clara Schumann (formerly Wieck).In between, selections from the Schumanns' music are played by an ensemble comprising cellist Natalie Clein, pianists Iain Burnside and Natasha Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There’s nothing like a bit of communal booing to sharpen your critical faculties. And Christof Loy’s new production of Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Opera House last night received wave after wave after wave of it. An ocean of boos almost as deep and profound as the Wagner that had just washed over us moments before. One boo surge from above, one boo surge from below, rivulets of bass-boos and piccolo-boos from the flanks, all lapping at the half-grinning, half-freaked out German production team on stage. Fence-sitting was not possible in this maelstrom. Loy’s approach, however imperfect, Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
The great and the good came to Imogen Cooper’s 60th birthday concert. In fact, so thick with friends and fellow pianists was the Wigmore Hall, that at the end there seemed to be as many people going backstage to congratulate her as were leaving through the front doors. In that quietly embarrassing, I-hope-no-one-saw way, after some light-hearted Schumann, I thought for a moment she flashed a smile at me and – charmed – smiled back, but it turned out that I was sitting behind Brendel. It was that sort of audience.Perhaps it wasn’t such a difficult mistake to make. This was a genteel tea- Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Bruckner half of the programme appeared to have come early as Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony sternly, doggedly, processed through the introduction of Haydn’s Symphony No.101 ‘Clock’. It was a portent of things to come. The prognosis was not good. A case of terminal seriousness would eventually render the performance irreversibly moribund.Haydn thrives – no, depends – upon a light touch. Furthermore his wit is built upon an element of surprise. Neither was forthcoming as Haitink’s Chicagoans launched somewhat poker-faced into the main presto of the first movement. A steady tempo Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Strolling into the Royal Festival Hall's private function room on Level 5 last night, I naturally expected it to be crammed with freeloading hacks such as myself on the trail of free drinks, but the room was mostly populated by corporate types in suits. If you want to pull together a menu of prestigious international orchestras in these straitened times (particularly those elusive American ones), you can't hope to do better than enlist the support of a multinational oil company, and this was the opening night of the RFH's Shell Classic International season.
The occasion demanded a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Damnation of Faust is so chock-full of special effects that you half expect a list of technical advisors in place of the single name Hector Berlioz. But it is just he – wizard of his imaginings – who continues to surprise and even shock no matter how many times you hear the piece - and with Valery Gergiev heightening its neurotic nature all the way to pandemonium there wasn’t a whole lot more you could have asked of this performance, except a better, more complex and interesting Faust than Michael Schade gave us and a clearer beat from Gergiev.The issue of the beat affected the LSO Chorus Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
Andrew Parrott, director of the Taverner Consort, once told me of a time he was playing harpsichord at the back of a largish orchestra. Confident that nothing he played would stand the remotest chance of being heard above the general cacophony, he “rather went to town” in his realisation of the continuo part. Afterwards he was congratulated by numerous audience members sat at the back of the hall on his stylish, if unconventional, interpretation. The sound had gone up into the air and bounced straight to the back, giving everyone in the rear four rows a crystal-clear account of his lavish Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Valery Gergiev shimmying his way through Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe. There he was, London’s loosest-limbed maestro, back on the Barbican podium (just about) with the London Symphony Orchestra, after a summer flogging his chaotic Ring Cycle around the globe, returning to more favourable ground, an all-French programme of Debussy, Dutilleux and Ravel that had his dancing juices flowing and his legs a-leaping. Certainly, there’s no gainsaying his moves. The question is were they being put to good musical effect?Whenever the moment took him, the answer was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When you go to a Schubert recital, you’re plunged into a whirlpool of emotional ambivalence, heat and chill running together, music and lyrics not always playing the same tune. When Schubert seizes on a poem, it’s not because he’s interested in Mickey-Mousing that poet’s sentiments - on the contrary, he may see a purple passage of words and set it simply, as if deflating it, or he may take a plain statement of action (looking out of a window, say) and fill that phrase with complex music containing a world of dark feeling.When Matthias Goerne is the singer, this counterpoint gets a third layer Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
When I met the Nigerian rebel pop star Fela Kuti I asked him who was the greatest musician - he didn’t hesitate before replying George Frederic Handel. Kuti was wearing only a pair of red underpants at the time and smoking a massive spliff. His music has echoes of Handel, certainly in some keyboard lines, in all its solidity and moments of transcendence. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at Handel’s continuing reach across the centuries and continents. Beethoven and Mozart are among many to have re- arranged Handel. But how would a selection of contemporary composers (all of whom Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
Are you allowed to like both Andreas Scholl and David Daniels? I've always felt slightly guilty over this one - it feels somewhat indecent to listen ruthlessly to Scholl for some pieces, and drop him like a spurned lover for Daniels when the mood takes you. Tonight, though, was definitely a Daniels night: bits and bobs from Handel's operas and oratorios, and some modern takes on the great man. It was cabaret-goes-slightly-baroque, with Harry Christophers leading a sparkling Academy of St Martin in the Fields with plenty of zing, just a whiff of campery, and the odd cheeky smile Read more ...