Classical music
graham.rickson
Bach: Keyboard Music Nils Anders Mortensen (piano) (Lawo Classics)There's so much to love about this Bach keyboard disc: namely attractive artwork, glowing sound and an intelligent programme clearly chosen by the artist. And there's the pianist himself, Nils Anders Mortensen, who I'd only previously registered as a skilled, sensitive accompanist. It's rare to find an artist with such a peripheral presence on social media. Mortensen doesn’t have a website, and the sole photo in Lawo’s booklet shows an appealingly dishevelled figure distantly clambering over some rocks. Mortensen’s Bach Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini's and Abbé Prévost's glitter-seduced Manon Lescaut might have been inclined to linger longer in the salon of dirty old man Geronte if he'd served her up not his own madrigals but Bach's music for various harpsichords and ensemble. Five such concertos gave us a morning of pure pleasure in the light-filled, packed-to-the-rafters surroundings of the wonderful Queen's Hall (★★★★), a sober though appreciative audience sitting and standing around the artists in the converted church like a Lutheran congregation, yet were all but eclipsed by the seductive force of Puccini's first great love Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Let us never tire of singing the praises of the Proms, nor ever take them for granted. For two months concerts, many of which would be the highlight of any ‘normal’ week, keep coming night after night. And for all that it is a critic’s job to comment in detail and find fault where necessary, it is also helpful sometimes to step back and say: the Proms is an astonishing festival which we should be grateful to have. The thought is prompted by last night’s concert, which saw the Proms at its best: a neglected favourite of previous generations, a popular concerto played by a rising young star, a Read more ...
David Nice
So the Proms ignored the Berlioz anniversary challenge to perform his Requiem and serve up four brass bands at the points of the Albert Hall compass. Yet at least last night in works of the 1920s and 1930s we got one offstage in the crazed baggy-monster original version of Varèse's Amériques and two in blazing antiphons on the platform, fanfaring both luxury and the celebrants of its overthrow in Walton's Belshazzar's Feast. With Simon Rattle in command of vast forces, it was mostly loud and brilliant, but it could have been even more focused in its ferocity.With two London orchestras showing Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Time was, not long ago, when the very word “premiere” was enough to ensure a sizeable smattering of red plush holes in the Royal Albert Hall audience. It seemed people did not want to risk attending new works for fear they would sound ghastly. Any artform depends for its lifeblood on strong new creations and an audience for them; so it is excellent that this concert was the second in a matter of days in which the place was packed out for a Prom including brand-new pieces. In a time of welcome diversity of styles and approaches, are music-lovers finally becoming curious, even eager, to hear Read more ...
David Nice
It was a Disney theme-park of Russian music, and in an entirely good way: none of the usual rides, but plenty of heroes and villains, sad spirits and whistling witches, orientalia from the fringes of empire, pagan processionals and apocalyptic Orthodox chants. Soundwise, it would seem that Vladimir Jurowski had worked as carefully with the difficult Albert Hall acoustics as Stokowski had on an early form of stereo for Disney's Fantasia, for no orchestra has ever sounded better here than the London Philharmonic for this packed Saturday night Prom.Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada has come to us Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
To celebrate the 60th birthday of Sir James MacMillan, the Edinburgh International Festival has programmed his music over five concerts, including the Nash Ensemble with Fourteen Little Pictures, the National Youth Choir of Scotland with All the Hills and Vales Along, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Festival Chorus with the cantata Quickening. But the festival’s most unequivocal endorsement of Scotland’s leading composer came on Saturday evening in the Usher Hall, with four large-scale works, including a major world premiere, performed over two concerts in the late afternoon Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
There could be no greater gift to any festival director than Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Where the exploration of his life, times and contemporaries is concerned, this composer is a veritable Spaghetti Junction for different strands of genre, development and fates. One of the most remarkable child prodigy composers in history, Korngold (pictured below in 1916, c AKG-Images/Bard) was the son of the Viennese music critic Julius Korngold. He studied with Zemlinsky (on Mahler’s advice) and enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame; his opera Die tote Stadt, premiered when he was 20, was a smash hit Read more ...
David Nice
There it gleamed, the pearl in the massive oyster of Albert's colosseum: the gilded, decorated piano supplied to his Queen by Érard in 1856. Pearly in sound it was not, though often harp-like; the programme was of mostly silver works, with a gold scherzo and some wooden songs. It was the task of Proms favourite Stephen Hough, the very glowing sound of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and a febrile grand master, Ádám Fischer, to bring them all to life in this lavish concert marking 200 years since Victoria's birth.Which they did with bags of character, though not much could be done Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Performing as part of Edinburgh International Festival’s Queen’s Hall series, American tenor Lawrence Brownlee, with Scottish pianist Iain Burnside, performed collections of songs by Schumann, Liszt, Poulenc and Ginastera. Opening with Schumann’s Dichterliebe – 16 songs set to the poetry of German poet Heinrich Heine – Brownlee at once had the audience rapt with his rich, full voice. He wonderfully conveyed the many moods of Schubert’s music and Heine’s words. Though the poetry was written with a heavy dose of irony, the music is for the most part deeply lyrical and romantic, and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gounod: Symphonies 1 and 2 Iceland Symphony Orchestra/Yan Pascal Tortelier (Chandos)Roger Nichols’ lucid sleeve note underlines the point that Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique singularly failed to kick off a 19th century French symphonic tradition. Édouard Lalo complained that critics assumed that you only wrote symphonies if you weren't up to the challenge of composing operas. Saint-Saëns’ 3rd is the only French romantic symphony we get to hear nowadays, Franck’s sublime example having slipped through the cracks. Exactly when Gounod's two symphonies were written isn't clear, though it's Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
A clever programme, a vivid premiere, a Proms debut for an exciting young conductor and the first appearance there by Catriona Morison since she won the 2017 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World: all this provided grist to the mill for a sold-out Prom that was more than the sum of its impressive parts. Elim Chan, who won the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition (the first woman to do so) in 2014, was on the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s podium for pieces themed around the sea and pictures. The 33-year-old conductor from Hong Kong is a tiny, pleasingly charismatic figure – offering ideas Read more ...