Classical music
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphonies 1-4 Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Linn)Slimmed-down Brahms is more common than it used to be, and geeks will probably cherish a pioneering set recorded in the 1990s by Sir Charles Mackerras with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Robin Ticciati’s new cycle, taped in Edinburgh’s Usher Hall last May, is superb on its own terms, though his isn't the only way to play Brahms. Don't chuck out those Karajan LPs just yet. Who's to know exactly what these pieces sounded like when first performed, and how big a complement of strings Brahms preferred? The gains here Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Held annually every Holy Week, Kraków’s Misteria Paschalia is one of the continent’s most vibrant early music festivals. With an increasing focus on international collaborations, the 2018 edition welcomed Edinburgh’s Dunedin Consort as artists in residence, and their director, Professor John Butt, as Resident Artistic Director. With early British sacred music at the fore, other European exponents of the genre included Phantasm, the Marian Consort, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and last year’s artists in residence, Le Poème Harmonique.Visiting over the Easter weekend, the first Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone passionate about great conducting would jump at the chance to hear 89-year-old Bernard Haitink giving three days of masterclasses with eight young practitioners of the art, his eighth and possibly last series in Lucerne (though he's not ruling anything out). That was the hook to visit this year's Easter Festival. Concerts and a site-specific event may have looked like optional extras, but turned out to be also of the essence, including a profoundly well planned and executed programme masterminded by András Schiff and a rare staging of Schumann's Scenes from Faust as the Festival's very Read more ...
David Nice
Former Royal Philharmonic Orchestra principal conductor Charles Dutoit has been exposed, to little surprise from musicians, as something of a roué whose apparent refusal to take "no" for an answer has rubbed up against the new #MeToo world. So his place in last night's concert was taken by Venezuelan Rafael Payare, not yet 40. Unfortunately it seems certain Dutoit would have captured the élan vital of Richard Strauss's Don Juan better than Payare - an accomplished soundsmith, on this evidence, but fatally uninterested in the operatic drama of Strauss's tone poems, or for that matter the Read more ...
Robert Beale
John Wilson has built a reputation as a conductor which marks him out as a musicians’ musician. He doesn’t present himself with any pomposity, even wearing a neat black tie and lounge jacket on this occasion, while the male musicians around him were in white tie and tails. He doesn’t play to the gallery either: there’s a smile and a bow, but no flamboyance in his on-stage demeanour. He does deliver in performance, though – with a crystal-clear beat, lots of cues and anticipation, and calm and gentle reminders of points of expression and phrasing.His niche in the gallery of conductor Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s final season concert conducted by Robin Ticciati, who leaves his post as chief conductor of the SCO for the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, was bound to be an emotional occasion. Spanning a decade, the relationship between orchestra and conductor has been a very special one indeed, and has seen an abundance of success over the past 10 years. The fervour and intensity shown in the playing at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Thursday was almost palpable, a fitting finale to such a fruitful partnership.Opening with a small band of players, JS Bach’s Orchestral Read more ...
graham.rickson
Axel Borup-Jørgensen: Marin Danish National Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Sôndergård (OUR Recordings)The physical effort involved in composing Marin was a huge strain on the Danish composer Axel Borup-Jørgensen (1924-2012). This ear-stretching musical seascape was made possible by its creator winning a prize in the mid-1960s, the reward including a commission for a large orchestral piece to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in 1970. Borup-Jørgensen delivered, in spades: a shaggy monsterpiece with the orchestral strings divided into 55 parts, using something Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I left this concert a bit depressed, but not because of anything I heard: rather, by the conservatism of London concert-goers. As London orchestras focus on programming the usual wall-to-wall Brahms, Beethoven and Mahler, the LPO was rewarded for their excursion from the well-trodden path by the punters staying away in droves from this imaginative programme.As part of their Changing Faces: Stravinsky’s Journey year-long season, we heard two works from his 1920s output, paired with older pieces in the same vein of good humour and wit. Weber’s Konzertstück was a direct model for Stravinsky’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Visions of Prokofiev Lisa Batiashvili (violin), Chamber Orchestra of Europe/Yannick Nézet-Seguin (DG)Buried beneath the soft focus photos and waffly booklet are very decent performances of Prokofiev’s two Violin Concertos. Lisa Batiashvili enters the Concerto No. 1’s first movement imperceptibly, floating over a carpet of shimmering tutti strings. This is one of the great concerto openings, Batiashvili’s reticence melting away just before the two-minute mark. The quirkier middle section is a treat here, Yannick Nézet-Seguin’s responsive COE strings alert to every sharp accent. Read more ...
David Nice
When a great musician pulls out of a concerto appearance, you're usually lucky if a relative unknown creates a replacement sensation. In this case not one but two star pianists withdrew – Maria João Pires, scheduling early retirement, succeeded by an unwell Piotr Anderzewski – and instead we had that most musicianly and collaborative of violinists Isabelle Faust in Schumann, not the scheduled Mozart. Given the superlative credentials already laid down by John Eliot Gardiner in the first concert of his Schumann project with the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, the argument for the Violin Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Ruthless Jabiru is an all-Australian chamber orchestra based in London. It is the brainchild of conductor Kelly Lovelady, who in recent years has geared the ensemble towards political and environmental concerns. Previous projects have highlighted environmental damage in central Australia and the campaign to end sponsorship by oil companies in the arts sector. For Saturday's concert, Lovelady and her colleagues turned their attentions to the humanitarian crisis of refugees setting out for Australia by sea.It was very much a concept event, with five contemporary works, two of them Read more ...
David Nice
Violins, violas, wind and brass all standing for Schumann: gimmick or gain? As John Eliot Gardiner told the audience with his usual eloquence while chairs were being brought on for the Berlioz in the first half of last night's concert, Mendelssohn set the trend as conductor with Leipzig's Gewandhausorchester - though as I understand it, only the violins stood - and some chamber orchestras of comparable size have adopted the practice. But Gardiner didn't need to reason the need; we'd just heard it at work in Schumann's Genoveva Overture - a brighter, more vibrant sound than usual from the Read more ...