Classical music
graham.rickson
Boris Blacher: Dance Suite, Hamlet, Poème, Concertante Music Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin/Johannes Kalitzke (Capriccio)Boris Blacher’s stock would presumably be higher had he opted to leave Germany when the Nazis came to power. He was an influential teacher whose later pupils included Aribert Reimann and Kalevi Aho, though his progressive musical sympathies meant that he was prevented from teaching during the war years. As heard on this disc, Blacher’s orchestral music is fluent, transparently scored and diverting while it lasts. His stylistic range was broad: traces of Poulenc, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
A shrewd orchestra maintains a strong subs bench. One of the major discoveries in Birmingham during the interregnum between Andris Nelsons’s premature departure and the appointment of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla was the young Israeli conductor Omer Meir Wellber, whose taut, ferociously intelligent 2015 account of Brahms’s First Symphony prompted mutterings both inside and outside the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra that he might be The One, or at least capable of running The One very close indeed.Now, with Gražinytė-Tyla on maternity leave, he’s returned to cover one of her prime dates: Read more ...
theartsdesk
Discreetly poking his camera through one of the red curtains around the Albert Hall, chief Proms photographer Chris Christodoulou gets the action shots others would kill for. They're of orchestras, a mixed roster of soloists and what this year remains the mostly male world of conducting; of the five women conductors originally scheduled, the most electrifying to date, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, had to take maternity leave.Many more are coming up through the ranks at last, though, and meanwhile there was much to celebrate in a more conspicuous show of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Expectations ran high for this recital, Brahms from an all-star piano trio of Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos and Yo-Yo Ma. The group has recently recorded the three Brahms piano trios for Sony, and this concert was part of a promotional tour of the US and Europe. The high-profile event also served to open the Barbican season. The performance certainly lived up to its billing, with exemplary performances from all three, and fine ensemble between them.A group made up of three concert soloists begs the question of who will lead proceedings. The answer here was quite clearly Yo-Yo Ma. He is the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Outside the Royal Albert Hall blue-bereted devotees were handing out free EU flags. A great many people accepted them, while some with the Union Jack looked on askance and muttered. But inside, all differences were firmly put aside: every flag under the sun was there for the Last Night of the Proms party, along with the glitter poppers, an inflatable parrot and a model kangaroo. On the podium, a familiar figure: Sir Andrew Davis (pictured below), long-ago emeritus conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, owning the night again after some 18 years away, but as much at ease as if he’d Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This was the first complete performance of Theodora at the Proms, one of a series of Handel oratorios initiated with William Christie’s Israel in Egypt last year. Theodora is more often performed today as a staged opera, most famously in the Peter Sellars production at Glyndebourne in the 1990s. But this performance demonstrated that it is just as effective in its original guise, the narrative related in brief recitatives, the better to allow the arias and choruses to shine.Theodora is a moralistic tale of Christians persecuted and martyred in Roman Antioch. (Fun fact: the novel on which it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Stravinsky: Petrushka, Agon (arranged for piano duet and two pianos by the composer) Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo (Wergo)Stravinsky's long career is traversed in black and white here, with ballet scores early and late accompanying a pair of shorter works. Petrushka and Agon are both masterpieces of orchestral colour, but the composer's piano duo reductions are so skilfully wrought that you never feel short-changed. Helen Bugallo and Amy Williams give us Stravinsky's piano duet transcription of the fuller textured 1911 score. It's as tight a performance as you'd expect from two players Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A day after John Eliot Gardiner and wandering violist Antoine Tamestit had converted the Royal Albert Hall into a sonic map of Hector Berlioz’s Italy, conductor Peter Oundjian and his full-strength divisions transported us to the Western Front. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, premiered in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in May 1962, combines the Latin text of the requiem mass with the First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen to speak, now as then, of fragile human understanding and affection in the face of overwhelming terror and violence. Yet its plea for the still, small voices of truth and Read more ...
David Nice
How do you make your mark in a crucial last week after the Olympian spectaculars of Kirill Petrenko's Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic? Well, for a start, you stay true to recent principles by getting as many of your period-instrument Orchestre Révolutionaire et Romantique players as can manage it on their feet – Gardiner did it earlier this year in selected items on his mostly-Schumann programmes with the LSO – to dive headlong into the spume of Berlioz's Le Corsaire Overture. Throw in two charismatic soloists, plan special spatial effects that make dramatic sense, and have your orchestra Read more ...
David Nice
Crazy days are here again – many of us are lucky not to have been born when the last collectve insanity blitzed the world – and nothing in Shostakovich seems too outlandish for reality. On the other hand, there's a growing movement to liberate his symphonic arguments from rhetoric and context. It has a point in proving that these mighty structures, even when they seem as chaotic as that of the gargantuan Fourth Symphony, stand by themselves without necessary reference to the times in which they were composed. But in a performance like last night's from Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Did the earth move for us? You bet. Sunday’s two Proms brought fabled visitors to the Royal Albert Hall – first the Boston Symphony Orchestra, then the Berlin Philharmonic for their second concert – but our august guests dispensed with all polite formalities. A momentous day of orchestral drama began with the primeval growl and snarl of Boston’s horns and timpani at the outset of Mahler’s Third symphony. It closed, eight nerve-shredding hours later, as the Berliners stormed with jaw-dropping cyclonic force through the finale of Beethoven’s Seventh.My colleague David Nice invoked the legendary Read more ...
David Nice
If only Liszt had started at the end of his Byron-inspired opera Sardanapalo. The mass immolation of Assyrian concubines might have been something to compare with the end of Wagner's Götterdämmerung. Instead he only sketched out the first act, complete until nearly the end, and the inevitable comparisons with the Wagner of the late 1840s are not unfavourable by any means. This is no for-the-hell-of-it resurrection, but a unique, high-octane fusion of Italian opera – the forms of cavatina and cabaletta still traceable – with the through-composed dream of Wagner's music-of-the-future, from the Read more ...