Classical music
Simon Thompson
Several years ago I got chatting to a young tenor who was training at the Royal Northern College of Music. He was enjoying his studies, but complained that, as a British tenor, he got offered a lot of Britten and Handel but not an awful lot else.There was Britten aplenty in this recital from Nick Pritchard, another young British tenor, but it was a shrewd move for him to begin his recital with French language repertoire because it showed up a side of his voice that I found as surprising as it was lovely.Put simply, there’s a gorgeous sweetness to Pritchard’s voice that knocked me for six. The Read more ...
Prom 50: Samson, Academy of Ancient Music review - a gradual build in musical and dramatic intensity
Rachel Halliburton
1743 was the year in which Handel presented both the Messiah and Samson to Londoners – and for most audience members the merits of one clearly eclipsed the other. Fascinatingly it was Samson that was seen to be the more successful – after breaking box office records, with eight performances between its opening on 18 February and the end of March, it remained highly in demand for nine subsequent seasons.In an evening that built in both dramatic and musical intensity, Laurence Cummings and the Academy of Ancient Music took on the challenges of Handel’s epic about the Old Testament’s most Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Every time I have heard Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, some wiseacre in the bar afterwards trots out the predictable joke that it’s a cheap concert as the pianist gets only half the fee. For all that this is obviously nonsense, most pianists go on to play a two-handed encore to set the record straight. Yuja Wang, in her Edinburgh Festival concert with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, chose to play a whole other piano concerto, in this case the same composer's G major.The two concertos required a change of costume for our flamboyant soloist, from shimmering purple to sunset yellow ( Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Have Proms audiences heard it all before? Not by the longest of chalks. Remarkably, last night saw the festival’s first outing for a major work by Robert Schumann.True, an extract from his secular oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri once reached the Queen’s Hall – in 1909. But now Sir Simon Rattle, with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, had the chance to unroll the entire, sumptuously-threaded Orientalist carpet that Schumann completed in 1843.Based on a tale from the Irish poet Thomas Moore’s 1817 romance Lalla Rookh, this 100-minute hybrid – its blend of narration, solos and choruses Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
A performance of Olivier Messiaen’s kaleidoscopic Turangalîla-Symphonie is always going to be a bit of an event. The Edinburgh International Festival set this one up nicely by making it not only the impressive culmination of a four-concert residency by the London Symphony Orchestra, but also the centrepiece of a group of Messiaen-themed performances.These included a separate concert, earlier in the evening, which juxtaposed Debussy’s La Mer and Milhaud’s La création du monde in a programme described as The Road to Turangalîla, and the previous day a performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This concert, the Edinburgh International Festival debut of the Castalian Quartet, almost didn’t happen due to the illness of their second violin, Daniel Roberts. Then, a couple of days ago, in stepped Yume Fujise, leader of the Kleio Quartet, to save the day, which is no mean feat considering that this programme featured both a world premiere and the knottiest of Beethoven’s late quartets.She did a terrific job, though (Fujise pictured below), as did the other three. In fact, they built the programme around that premiere, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Awake. Turnage’s inspiration came from Read more ...
graham.rickson
Antal Doráti: The Mercury Masters – The Mono Recordings (Decca Eloquence)The great Hungarian conductor Antal Doráti (1906-1988) enjoyed a long and prolific recording career, stretching from the mid-1940s to the early 1980s. This beautifully produced 30-CD package is one of two dedicated to Doráti’s 11-year stint in charge of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra (now known as the Minnesota Orchestra). Doráti’s predecessor was the charismatic, erratic Dimitri Mitropoulos. His penchant for new and challenging music wasn’t to all tastes, and in 1949 Doráti took charge of an ensemble whose Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh International Festival’s focus on Korea moves to the Queen’s Hall in the festival’s middle week, with performances from two Korean soloists playing alone.Yeol Eum Son has already made waves in Scotland, and she chose some meaty repertoire for her EIF debut, culminating in Beethoven’s mighty Hammerklavier Sonata (★★★★). For the first half of her Tuesday morning programme, however, she played Liszt’s Ninth Transcendental Étude alongside three set of variations by Bizet, Czerny and Alkan. Variations are a neat choice for an artist because the variety intrinsic to the form gives Read more ...
David Nice
Chopin’s piano concertos and Strauss “symphonic fantasia” Aus Italien are young men’s music, bursting with inspired ideas, but baggy at times, hard to steer. Elgar’s In the South is up there with the mature Strauss tone poems – even if it couldn’t have taken the shape it did without them – but here the steering itself was the problem: missing the exuberance, the Philharmonia’s Principal Conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali stretched it on the rack.It was an odd Prom to win a packed house. Many audience members were Korean, come to see and hear Seong-Jin Cho, winner of the 2015 International Chopin Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The National Youth Choir of Scotland have the most easily pronounceable acronym in Scottish music: everyone up here knows who you’re talking about when you mention NYCOS.They’ve been going from strength to strength under their Artistic Director, Christopher Bell, and their Edinburgh International Festival concert with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (★★★★★) showcased two very different sides of their considerable skills.The first thing you noticed in their performance of Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb was the clarity of their articulation of what is a very chewy text, but they turned Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The Budapest Festival Orchestra never stops proving what a great ensemble it is. In last night’s concert, the third Prom of its weekend residency, the miraculous ways in which the absurd humour of Ligeti, the deep soulfulness of Bartók and the implacable genius of Beethoven were brought to the surface were not just joyful and completely fulfilling, but also unfailingly drew in the attention of the whole audience in a completely full Royal Albert Hall.It takes quite some performance to overcome the seeming familiarity of Beethoven’s Eroica, and yet Iván Fischer and his Budapest orchestra Read more ...
David Nice
It would be worth travelling a long way to hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra giving such a lithe, athletic performance under its founder and Music Director Iván Fischer of Glina’s Ruslan and Lyudmila Overture. That was the Radio 3 and Proms Audience Choice from 19 overtures and preludes whittled down to three. What happened next, despite some equally lustrous playing, didn’t always work so well.What was I expecting? A banquet of the kind of pieces you don’t often get in a conventional concert – ballet music, operatic preludes and intermezzi, tone poems of up to 20 minutes in length. There Read more ...