Classical music
Boyd Tonkin
In the beginning, Sir Antonio Pappano created a little chaos of his own. At the outset of this Prom that saw musical shape and form emerge out of primeval aural disorder or ruinous destruction, the conductor chose to elide the opener – the representation of “Chaos” from Haydn’s Creation – with centenary birthday-boy Leonard Bernstein’s First Symphony. You could see his point, in a programme that climaxed with Mahler’s First to offer a trio of trail-blazing pieces that hammer something out of nothing, beauty from the void.Yet this pause-less slide from Haydn’s astonishing reinvention of the Read more ...
David Kettle
It was Simon Rattle’s first visit to the Edinburgh International Festival for – well, really quite a few years. And the first of his two concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra drew, perhaps predictably, a capacity crowd in the Usher Hall, for what was in fact quite an odd, uncompromising programme – if one that ultimately delivered magnificently.The fizzing chemistry that Rattle and the LSO players have clearly built up over their first season together was blazingly evident – not least in the concert’s gargantuan opener, Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety. Rattle was Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berio: Rendering, Schubert: Symphony No 9 Soloistes Européens, Luxembourg/Christoph König (Rubicon)Schubert's unfinished Symphony No 10 has been completed by various hands. I took part in a performance of Brian Newbould’s realisation several decades ago and had totally forgotten about the piece: how its chirpy first subject sounds like a G&S overture, and how modern-sounding the trombone passage near the close of the first movement is. This is vintage, exploratory Schubert. Luciano Berio's Rendering takes a different tack, treating Schubert's sketches as a three-movement fresco to Read more ...
David Benedict
It was all about the acoustic. Well, almost. Disregarding the awe-inspiring grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, there’s a school of thought that believes the Proms is the world’s greatest concert series in the world’s worst hall. Why? Because its problematic acoustic is so ungovernable. It certainly wreaked havoc in Sunday’s Prom of the Brandenburg Concertos – I’ve never heard professional orchestral playing so lacking in ensemble – and in this intriguing Anglo-American BBC Philharmonic concert, the cavernous space proved as much a hindrance as a help.Initially, it was all gain. Juanjo Mena Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The heart of Prom 33 was Brahms’s massive German Requiem, a piece that eschews Christian dogma and Day-of-Judgment terrors for a humanism focusing on consolation of the bereaved. It feels very much like a requiem for our times as much as the composer’s, and last night’s performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Richard Farnes, although very traditional in style, had a striking immediacy.But first came Thea Musgrave’s Phoenix Rising, the Proms premiere of a 20-year-old piece. In the year the Proms committed to increasing its representation of women composers it is also marking Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Prom 31 featured an American orchestra playing an all-American programme – until the final encore dived thrillingly into a completely different musical tradition. But one of the principal features of American music – its joyous risk-taking – was undermined by conductor Osmo Vänskä’s cautious tempos, and the orchestral playing only periodically caught fire.This started with a somewhat routine performance of Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant Candide overture. In recent times it has been heard more at the Proms as an encore than a curtain-raiser, and perhaps does work better as a glorious sign-off, Read more ...
David Benedict
“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry. With their own “vibrations”, great poems rarely warrant musical interference; bad poetry, meanwhile, can resist even the finest scoring. Choosing poetry that can be richly enhanced by music is not always a trick composers have pulled off, so it’s to Sarah Connolly's and pianist Joseph Middleton’s enormous credit that they created such an eloquent Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A complex Swedish product to unpack, this one. Someone in the BBC must have worked out that it could do with a detailed instruction manual to help people with the task: the programme booklet duly ran to a full 50 pages.There were two sets of components: firstly, all six of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, performed by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and soloists. Plus, alongside each concerto, a newly commissioned companion piece by a prominent composer. The 12 works, six by Bach plus the six new pieces, were spread over two Proms on Sunday. Time required for complete assembly of the finished Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Anyone who came to the National Youth Orchestra’s annual Prom in the hope of hearing some roof-raising feelgood blockbuster might have slunk out disappointed into the tropical night of Kensington. What an ambitious, high-concept menu Sir George Benjamin slated for the teenaged regiment – over 160 of them at full strength – and how confidently they served (almost) all of it. If this was big-band music, then it took the form of a suite of pieces that often demanded that the orchestra march – or perhaps, swim – in several directions at once. From Mussorgsky (as arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov) in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Louis Couperin: Dances from the Bauyn Manuscript Pavel Kolesnikov (Hyperion)We’ll get the entertaining trivia out of the way first, namely that the musical Couperin dynasty came from Chaumes-en-Brie. I’m struggling to think of another example of cheese/classical music crossover – please leave feedback if you’ve any examples. Plus, 17th century French musicians referred to F sharp minor as the “key of the goat”. No explanation for this is given here. Pianist Pavel Kolesnikov’s sumptuously recorded disc focuses on dances by Louis Couperin (1626-1661), the short-lived uncle of the better- Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes the more modestly scaled Proms work best in the Albert Hall. Not that there was anything but vast ambition and electrifying communication from soprano Anna Prohaska and the 17-piece Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini, making that 18 when he chose to take up various pipes (★★★★★). By contrast the big BBC commission from Joby Talbot to write a work for much-touted guitarist Miloš Karadaglić and orchestra in the evening's first Prom left very little impression. Praise be, then, to Glinka and Tchaikovsky for showing what glittering substance is all about, and to Alexander Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert was inspired by the huge scale of the Albert Hall. The three works all evoke spacious vistas, through their expansive textures, echo effects and horn calls. Mozart, Haas and Strauss made for a diverse programme though, the three works all written in different centuries, and each on a grander scale than the last.The Mozart Notturno in D Major is one of his many serenades written for the Salzburg aristocracy. The twist is that the ensemble is divided into four groups, each a string orchestra with a pair of horns added, and the four groups are set at a distance, the musical ideas Read more ...