Classical music
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 Berliner Philharmoniker/Bernard Haitink (Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings)Bruckner symphonies rarely include fast tempi and never feature Stravinskian changes of metre, but they do need conductors with enough stamina and charisma to keep players and audiences interested for 70 to 80 minutes. Most of my favourite Bruckner recordings are from veterans: Skrowaczewski and Blomstedt rarely put a foot wrong, and Karajan’s last, Vienna Philharmonic version of No. 8 is one of the best things he ever did. Bernard Haitink, unusually, has always been a great Bruckner Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a year of absences and separations, here was another one we had to bear. Built around a programme of Baroque double concertos, last night’s Prom should have brought Nicola Benedetti and Alina Ibragimova together in a violin super-duo that promised marvels. In the event, a family bereavement kept Ibragimova away from the audience-free Royal Albert Hall. Yet, and again in the phoenix-from-the-ashes spirit of the arts in 2020, the improvised solution proved an uplifting delight. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which backed the soloists, has always sounded like a band of stars. Its Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In reviewing Sunday night’s LSO Prom I was impressed by the innovative and exciting programming and that was also a hallmark of Tuesday’s Prom, although this was more true to form for the London Sinfonietta. Since its inception the Sinfonietta has sampled both ends of the contemporary spectrum and everything in between, and that was the case here. The theme was “city life” but the music was also united, as the conductor Geoffrey Paterson said, by having pulse – and sometimes more than one at the same time.The most pulsing – if not pulsating – piece was Philip Glass’s Façades and actually the Read more ...
Doric Quartet, Bandstand Chamber Festival, Battersea Park review – radiance on a late summer evening
David Nice
Wonderful as the livestreamed Proms are for players working together again and for viewers/listeners who wouldn’t be able to get to the Royal Albert Hall even if they could be admitted, I’d sacrifice them all for one evening of live musical communication like this. There’s nothing like late Mozart in serene mode to make you feel connected to your surroundings, at one with a world in which everything seems completely right, especially on a sunny evening with the first hint of autumn in it; from the first bars of the Quartet in B flat, K589, led by Alex Redington's supremely cultured melodic Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Viennese operetta is like that other great Central European treat, goulash. It comes in many forms. In Vienna it’s coffeehouse comfort food; in Slovenia they add bacon for a smoky tang. And in the marketplaces of Transylvania it comes in bubbling iron cauldrons, practically fluorescent with paprika. But it’s all goulash. You know it when you taste it, and all that matters is that it tastes good. And when it’s really good, it tastes even better when warmed through and dished up second time around.Which is by way of saying that I can’t honestly get too worried about the authenticity or Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Sunday night’s Prom by the London Symphony Orchestra was Simon Rattle’s 75th and surely his strangest. But, in his best style, it was eclectically programmed, balancing novelty with tradition, responded imaginatively to the restrictions in place, and was very well played in the circumstances. These circumstances allowed for more inventive programming than would normally be entertained, but the biggest irony was that the spatial effects that would have sounded so amazing in the hall were only possible because the hall was empty.The required distancing between players became the basis of the Read more ...
David Nice
“Did you bring any Bach?” was not a question to ask of Jonathan Scott before he launched into his jaw-dropping Prom on the Royal Albert Hall's 1871 Henry Willis organ – the largest in the world at the time. augmented in its 2002-4 overhaul to 9,999 pipes. What Stokowski did for the Toccata and Fugue in D minor Moore achieved, in reverse as it were, for four orchestral classics in a feat of stamina live on Saturday evening.Circumstantial swings and roundabouts in this fairground turn were plentiful: what you lost from not being there to hear the hall shake and reverberate you gained from the Read more ...
David Nice
So the bubble of reactionary brouhaha over the Last Night of the Proms quickly burst: there can be no argument about singing “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Rule, Britannia!” when they’re to be presented in their original Proms forms (Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, where the tune preceded the words the composer so disliked, and Henry Wood’s 1905 Fantasia on British Sea Songs, all orchestral – only later did Malcolm Sargent rearrange the closing anthem to go with a solo voice). Apart from the death threats to conductor Dalia Stasevska and her family, what’s most lamentable is that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9 Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/William Steinberg (DG)Cologne-born Hans Wilhem Steinberg was a youthful Music Director of the Frankfurt Opera in the early 1930s. He was relieved of his role, mid-rehearsal, in 1933, owing to his Jewish background. After a spell with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra he arrived in New York, initially as Toscanini’s assistant at NBC. A naturalised US citizen from 1944, he anglicised his name to William and secured the directorship of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1952, remaining there until 1976. A few of Steinberg’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
As two weeks of livestreamed Proms begin tonight, we just want to be there in the Royal Albert Hall. The exuberance of our lead picture tells one story of a Prom which had to be witnessed live to be believed: the annual visit of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain last year, with brilliant Auerbach and Prokofiev under Mark Wigglesworth, and much-loved Nicola Benedetti uniting with them in Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.Chris Christodoulou is always in a unique position, usually putting his camera unnoticed through the velvet curtains at the top of various sets of stairs to the Albert Read more ...
theartsdesk
What a difference a year makes. Live Proms will be back from Friday, but the very essence of the world's biggest music festival will be missing: the audience, and especially the Prommers whose rapt attention while standing has taken so many visiting orchestras by surprise. No doubt the rapport between conductor and players will be electric at times, but the third point of what Britten called the "magic triangle" of composer, performers and audience will be notable by its absence.Even so, the peerless Chris Christodoulou will be there to capture the essence of performance in action. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach Sean Shibe (guitar) (Delphian)The lute was mostly used as a continuo instrument during Bach’s lifetime though he did compose a small number of solo lute works. They were written using two-stave keyboard notation rather than traditional lute tablature, prompting speculation that they were actually meant for the lute-harpsichord, its gut strings making for a softer, mellower sound. Sean Shibe opts for a six-string modern guitar on this disc, and it’s hard to imagine these pieces performed any other way. The Lute Suite in E minor is the earliest of Bach’s solo lute pieces, its six Read more ...