Classical music
David Nice
So much pressure is on for Lise Davidsen to be the next Kirsten Flagstad or Birgit Nilsson, but the question has to be asked: is this just The Voice - a big "just" when a dramatic Wagnerian soprano is at stake - or The Complete Artist? Intimations of the latter flashed through much of a well-planned programme - elements of it already featured in her Wigmore Hall debut recital - in partnership with consummate, calm pianism from James Baillieu, but settled in the divine shape of Sibelius's Luonnotar, nature-spirit and sea mother, haloing her in mysterious glory.Though this tone-poem for voice Read more ...
David Nice
"New Dawns" as a title smacked a bit of trying to shoehorn a fairly straightforward Aurora programme in to Kings Place's Nature Unwrapped series. Only Dobrinka Tabakova's short and sweet Dawn made the link, and that was old, not new (composed in 2007). Maybe the dawn intended in Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto, K491. was the way in which its opening theme embraces all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, while there is certainly some shock of the new in Beethoven's First Symphony (also being played over at the Royal Festival Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Jurowski, such are the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
It’s Beethoven with everything for 2020, the composer’s 250th anniversary year. But the London Philharmonic has devised an interesting approach for their Beethoven-themed programming. “2020 Vision” is a series of concerts which couple a work by Beethoven, or occasionally one of his contemporaries, with a piece written 100 years later and another written 200 years later. The result is a series of gloriously eclectic programmes, not least for the obscurity of the later works chosen. In this opening concert, Beethoven’s First Symphony (1801) was followed by Snatches of a Conversation (2001) by Read more ...
David Nice
Not even the unengaged or terminally weary could have dozed through this. Pianists have often commented how the Wigmore Steinway is too big for the hall, and most adjust accordingly. Not 27-year-old Italian Beatrice Rana, but not in the bad way of interpreters who simply bash (there was a young Ukrainian here recently who did just that). If she needs to convey sonority at full pitch, she won't compromise; and her soft playing is equally compelling. The certainty of means to ends is unwavering, the calm upright posture at the keyboard somehow at odds with the massiveness she can convey.Her Read more ...
graham.rickson
Heino Eller: Symphonic Poems – Night Calls, White Night, Twilight, Dawn Estonian National Symphony Orchestra/Olari Elts (Ondine)Heino Eller was described as the ‘Estonian Sibelius’ in the first decades of the last century. Predictably, the career of this versatile composer, musicologist and teacher didn't thrive during the early years of Soviet Estonia, poor Eller being labelled a formalist. Forced to apologise for his compositional misdemeanours on state radio, his reputation only recovered in the decade before his death in 1970. There's some wonderful music on this disc. Night Calls Read more ...
David Nice
Three concerts, three fascinating venues, seven world-class young(ish) players, an audience of all ages and a musical storytelling event for 200 schoolchildren: this is how to launch a festival with outwardly modest means. Artistic Director of Classical Vauxhall Fiachra Garvey already has form, as the founder of the West Wicklow Festival (of chamber music), in the part of Ireland where he accommodates his schedule "to help with the yearly lambing, dipping, shearing, harvesting and all the other elegant and refined activities of home" (he was delighted, he told us, to discover Vauxhall's City Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Visiting conductor Mark Wigglesworth is a good match for the Royal Philharmonic. The orchestra’s repertoire is usually at the popular end of the spectrum, so they know how to make the most of a good tune. Wigglesworth gives the players the space to phrase and shape the music, but his approach is more about drama and discipline. That’s a great musical virtue, but it’s hardly glamorous. Fortunately, pianist Khatia Buniatishvili was on hand to provide charisma and pizzazz in an electric performance of the Liszt Second Piano Concerto.To begin, Walton’s Portsmouth Point Overture. It’s a great Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Where to begin with the most appropriated musician in history? The Barbican’s Beethoven 250 celebrations got off to an auspicious start with a weekend of events, styled like a pop festival, which nonetheless put the composer back where he belonged – in Vienna, at the turn of the 18th century – and set fire to some tenacious myths.Struggle, transcendence and humour – music that laughs, often through gritted teeth – are the hallmarks of Beethoven’s work. Forget the Ninth’s appropriation as a crutch to prop up manifestos of every stripe: young and not-so-young listeners were entranced at the Read more ...
graham.rickson
French orchestras haven’t sounded distinctively Gallic for decades; François-Xavier Roth’s brilliant period band Les Siécles does use idiosyncratic French instruments but their polish and sheen is very modern. Still, close your eyes while Alexandre Bloch’s Orchestre National de Lille are playing Ravel and you’re struck by the polish, the elegance of the playing. Open them and marvel at how Bloch’s dance-like podium manner is matched by the musicians’ fluid movements. Even a castanet and tambourine exchange during Debussy’s Ibéria was a visual treat. The relationship between conductor and Read more ...
graham.rickson
William Mathias: Choral Music St John’s Voices, The Gentlemen of St John’s, Graham Walker (director) (Naxos)I've a soft spot for neglected instruments, so any CD which includes a credit for chime bars is all right with me. Here they're deployed by percussionist David Ellis in William Mathias’s sublime A May Magnificat, scored for double chorus. Mathias requested that the choirs be of equal size and placed apart, and this Naxos recording really lets the antiphonal effects register. Feeling a little deflated this morning? Buy or download this disc now; it's kept me smiling for weeks. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
"Let’s make an album” is an easy thing to say but an infinitely more difficult thing to actually make happen. But at some point in early 2016 conductor Tom Hammond said it to me (or I said it to him, we can’t remember which) and four years later Not Now, Bernard & Other Stories is about to be released: four years of hard work, setbacks, stress – but also days of wonderful creativity and a sense of achievement.Although things have worked out very much for the best, almost every detail of how things have panned out is different from how we provisionally mapped it in 2016 – not least in that Read more ...
David Nice
In Beethoven anniversary year, there will probably be many more "Moonlight"s, meaning the Sonata, than the real thing (though we've been lucky to see the crescent in close conjunction with Venus these past two nights). Not many pianists would dare to place it at the beginning of a programme. Denis Kozhukhin's paradoxically no-nonsense poetry meant that a constant sense of motion culminated in the whirlwind of the finale, a steady move towards implosion mirrored in the piano transcription of Ravel's La Valse at the end of the programme. In between came perfection in the form of pure song from Read more ...