Classical music
David Nice
You won't have seen much of magisterial Russian pianist Dmitri Alexeev recently, unless you happen to be a student at the Royal College of Music, where he is Professor of Advanced Piano Studies (they were out in force last night, cheering enough to elicit five encores). His guest appearances at various commemorative concerts, chiefly his towering interpretation of Prokofiev's Sixth Sonata, remain carved in the mind, but this is the first time I've heard him give a full recital. Predictably, although he celebrated his 70th birthday in August, there was no loss of the colossal and well-weighted Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata chose All Hallows’ Eve for a concert of (in some part) "holy" minimalism. Arvo Pärt’s Silouan’s Song began it, and his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten ended it. They headlined it "Spiritualism and Minimalism", but I think what they really had in mind was spirituality. No "one knock for yes" or anything like that, anyway.Manchester Cathedral - hallowed ground indeed - made an excellent visual setting, its versatile lighting rig used to picturesque effect, and after the buzz of conversation died down there was a ready-made atmosphere of quiet expectation before things Read more ...
David Nice
Such introspective subtlety might be mistaken for reticence. But from the rare instances when the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes lets rip - and they're never forced - you know he's wielding his palette with both skill and intuition, waiting for the big moment to make its proper mark. Flyaway passages in Chopin which in other hands bubble like pure champagne flow like pure spring water; the source is everything. And such is the concentration that the wider spaces of the Royal Festival Hall melted away and a sizeable audience was drawn, intensely silent, into the spell.The only aspects of Read more ...
David Nice
A legendary name and the chance to change the face of a cruel condition set the stakes high for what Prince Charles, in his programme preface for this Southbank spectacular, told us was called the Stop MS Jacqueline du Pré Tribute Concert. There she was on the screen (and in excellent sound) before any players appeared on stage, the vital cellist whose career was cut short, being celebrated by, among others, John Barbirolli for the splendid emotional excess of youth and by her husband Daniel Barenboim for the way she would hold a conversation in everything, the perfect chamber player. Those Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Perhaps Sibelius did the right thing, signing off Tapiola in 1926 and then all but closing his account, spending the next three decades sitting and drinking. Over in Paris, his near-contemporary Florent Schmitt carried on, beavering away not only as a composer but a critic, in which capacity he availed his readers with pearls of wisdom such as Beethoven’s Violin Concerto being "utterly devoid of musical interest".Dating from the year before his death in 1958, the Second Symphony is Schmitt’s last major work. It's cast like Sibelius’s Third in three movements, but there the resemblance ends. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 1725 a collection of some 50 songs was published by one William Thomson. You might not know his name, or even the names of the songs, but given the first bar of most I’m betting you could hum them from beginning to end. The work? Orpheus Caledonius – the first published collection of Scottish folk melodies and lyrics.This year’s Brighton Early Music Festival takes “Roots” as its theme, and this opening night concert looked back beyond baroque to the traditional tunes that lurk, just out of sight, behind so many of its great works, from Corelli to Purcell. This performance by period band L’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nimrod Borenstein: Violin Concerto, The Big Bang and Creation of the Universe, If You Will It, It Is No Dream Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Ashkenazy, with Irmina Trynkos (violin) (Chandos)Proof of modern music’s dizzying variety is found on this beguiling disc. And as much as I could sit for hours wallowing in Morton Feldman's collected works for solo piano, I'm far from immune to accessible contemporary music with personality. Nimrod Borenstein writes in this disc's booklet of his longing for listeners to recognise his distinct compositional voice. Without being Read more ...
David Nice
Forget the ersatz experience of Sergey Eisenstein's mighty silent films accompanied by slabs of Shostakovich symphonies composed years later. This collaboration between the London Symphony Orchestra and Kino Klassika is as close as we can ever come to hearing the massive score composed by Austrian-born Edmund Meisel for the greatest of the master's 1920s films. It was intended for large-scale screenings of October in Berlin and Moscow, which never took place in the expected format. Bernd Thewes' reconstruction plays its essential part in a giddying, baroque experience of Eisenstein's Read more ...
David Nice
Singing students from the Guildhall School should have been issued with a three-line whip to fill the inexplicably half-empty Milton Court concert hall for last night's charmer. After all, every musician, and not just sopranos, should know that this is how it ought to be done. True, an effervescent personality like Lucy Crowe's can't be simulated. But every other respect of her stunningly sung and varied Mozart can be aspired to: the relaxed, natural stance (and in this instance, knowing how to play a recalcitrant shoe heel for comedy), knowing what to do with the hands, how to execute Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Julian Anderson’s 50th birthday this year was the prompt for the latest of the BBC’s Total Immersion days, devoted to the work of a single contemporary composer. I have long been a fan of Anderson’s music since hearing the marvellous Khorovod in the 1995 Proms, but, after a couple of recent blips – I was not so keen on the opera Thebans or the recent Piano Concerto – I was ready to have my admiration re-awakened. And, in large measure, it was.The day consisted of three concerts of which I heard two: the BBC Singers surveying Anderson’s choral output and the BBC Symphony Orchestra his Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphony No 9 Park Avenue Chamber Symphony/David Bernard (Recursive Classics)My favourite recent Beethoven cycle is a largely unnoticed one from Copenhagen. This disc of No 9 is another outsider. It’s performed by a semi-professional New York chamber orchestra and has ghastly sleeve art. The recording is a little over-resonant, but I can live with that. As a performance, it’s a winner: dramatic, witty, eloquent and boasting some startling choral work in the last movement. Things start promisingly, the string tremolandi at the symphony’s outset clearly articulated, the brass and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
On paper this was a fairly austere piece of programming. No variety in composer, genre or style, just four Bach Partitas in a row, works of similar approach, length and technique. And yet in performance, in the hands of Angela Hewitt, there was sufficient variety, not to mention poetry, humanity and wit, to make for a completely satisfying recital.It is extraordinary that of over a thousand pieces written by J S Bach only about a dozen were published in his lifetime. The pieces he chose as his opus 1 – although published in 1731 when he was in his 40s and already a hugely experienced composer Read more ...