Classical music
Ian Julier
With a predictable Sheku sell-out in the hall, the context of post-Eunice clean-up and current teetering on the brink with Russia lent a strangely unsettling and salutary resonance to the programme of Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto framed by Mussorgsky and Borodin.A palpable sense of coded autobiographical artistic angst, Nature, and festive celebration reflecting both truth and beauty from two different Russian centuries onto the much changed homeland and world view of present times seemed inescapable.In Mussorgsky’s unfinished opera of political and religious intrigue Khovanshchina, Read more ...
Jimmy López
No, not your aperitif – and certainly not your digestif; your bona fide main dish, the one your audience yearns for, dresses up for, and looks forward to.It’s 2022; time for arts leaders to show the way into the future and to not underestimate the public’s thirst for what is new. Stop living in the past. You have heard that phrase before. Composers have been uttering it for over a century, ever since some mysterious force made time freeze around the premiere of Turandot. The exact date is irrelevant; what matters is that most opera companies worldwide rely on their warhorses (while relegating Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There are moments when nothing can – or should – stand in the way of the sheer expressive and communicative power of music. Only a few days ago, Gidon Kremer had changed the programme for his 75th birthday concert at Wigmore Hall, to include a short section of pieces by two Ukrainian composers. “The whole world is focused on the dramatic events in Ukraine,” said Kremer.His performance of the first of the two pieces, a four-minute Requiem for solo violin by Igor Loboda, could not have been more deeply soulful. The piece is based on a folksong about the river Dnieper, was written in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It might seem odd to start with the encore, but I’ve never seen one like it. At the end of its two-night residency at the Festival Hall, having just romped through the rigours of The Rite of Spring, the players of the Budapest Festival Orchestra put their instruments down, shuffled to their feet and sang for us. Stravinsky’s humble, minute long Ave Maria made the perfect counterpoint to the violent paganism of the Rite, and the sound made by the untrained voices of these highly trained musicians added a vulnerability and sincerity to what had gone before.The two all-Stravinsky programmes that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Americascapes – music by Loeffler, Ruggles, Hanson and Cowell Basque National Orchestra/Robert Trevino (Ondine)This is great: a compilation of lesser-known American orchestral music played with panache by a Spanish orchestra teamed with an American conductor. Charles Loeffler was born in Berlin in 1861 and joined the Boston Symphony as a violinist in 1882. His A Pagan Poem was a repertoire work in the early 20th century; Stokowski’s recording is still available. La Mort de Tintagiles is worth hearing, an extravagant 1897 tone poem based on a dark Maeterlinck play. What’s being described Read more ...
Ian Julier
The Drama and Romance of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s promotional hook for this concert signalled a heady musical mix. Appropriate for the stark contrasts of mood central to Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, but potentially less so for Dvorák’s Symphony No. 8 that casts barely a cloud to compromise its predominantly sunny G major disposition shared with the outer movements of the Beethoven.In the event, resolution of the conflict between profane and sacred love in Tannhäuser’s ultimate salvation, together with the framing of the concerto’s central dark Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Two pianists; two concertos; two orchestras. It is not often that Edinburgh’s most venerable concert hall plays host, on consecutive nights, to two of our national orchestras offering strikingly similar programmes.While the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Maxim Emelyanychev had the young British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor playing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1, the following night saw the Royal Scottish National Orchestra tackle Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with the not-quite-so-young Steven Osborne as soloist. Both orchestras also included a Beethoven symphony in their programmes.On paper Read more ...
David Nice
Boléro and Scheherazade may be popular Sunday afternoon fare, but both are masterpieces and need the most sophisticated handling. High hopes that the new principal conductor the Philharmonia players seem to love so much, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, would do Ravel and Rimsky-Korsakov justice were exceeded in a dream of a concert.It's the first time I’ve seen a packed audience at the Royal Festival Hall since lockdown. Young people were very much in evidence: even if there were special or free offers, the fact is they came. And what was the overall lure? Those popular classics? Or perhaps the 2019 Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Path of Miracles is a serious, hefty 65-minute choral work about the traditional Catholic pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by – and there is a slight cognitive dissonance here – Joby Talbot, the composer of, among other things, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film. But although it sounds forbidding as a concept it is anything but in performance, where it is engrossing, textured, emotionally engaging and dramatic. Path of Miracles is a mighty sing, and an ambitious project for any choir to take on, but the Elysian Singers tackled it with commitment and skill.Path of Miracles was Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Despite its delightfully poetic feel, Hurricane Bells is a very literal title for this event - the first public outing post pandemic given by London based contemporary music outfit Filthy Lucre, whose blended approach of club night meets concert drew a strong crown to Shoreditch’s Rich Mix. It takes its name from a set of bells cast in 2018 by artist Peter Shenai, the shapes of which are modelled on the physical structure of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina ravaged much of the Gulf Coast of the United States in 2005, especially the city of New Orleans, and her fingerprint will be Read more ...
David Nice
“This symphony comprises 11 songs about death and lasts about one hour,” the conductor Mark Wigglesworth declared before a second New York performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth – people had left in droves during the first – only to see a swathe of his audience look anxiously at their watches.I doubt if anyone in an obviously more receptive and surprisingly youthful Barbican audience did that at any point during Gianandrea Noseda’s interpretation at the Barbican last night, which drew focus from start to finish. So did his Beethoven Seventh after the interval in a daring but triumphant Read more ...