Classical music
graham.rickson
John Cage: Two4 Aisha Orazbayeva (violin), Naomi Sato (shō) (SN Variations)The shō is a Japanese wind instrument long associated with traditional court music. Looking like a bundle of sticks, its 17 pipes each plays a distinct pitch. Its sound is something else, the shō’s clusters of notes emerging and fading into silence along with the player’s breath. John Cage’s 1991 piece Two4 can be played by solo violin with piano or shō, their short-lived chords set against the violin’s ability to sustain individual notes for over a minute. Shō and violin blend well together in terms of sound; Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After all the talk and anticipation, at last some music. Simon Rattle took up the reins of the London Symphony Orchestra last night – as its first ever “Music Director” – with a programme dedicated to home-grown composers whose lives span the lifetime of the orchestra. It set out Rattle’s ambition for his leadership of the LSO, who duly responded with performances of intelligence, passion and power.Of the five composers featured, four are still alive and, as Rattle had maintained in an interview, “Elgar is so lively he’s basically a living composer”. Most have a connection to the LSO or to Read more ...
theartsdesk
What do conductors actually do? It's a question that concert-goers, as well as listeners and viewers of the BBC Proms, often ponder. Conductors may not make a sound, but what they certainly do is put on a performance, the minutiae of which are captured by photographer Chris Christodoulou. For the eighth year running, we celebrate the end of the Proms season with an exclusive gallery of his snaps. They capture conductors in their agonies and their ecstasies, at their most intimate and expansive, hair flying, arms flailing, eyes imploring. Click on the thumbnails below to enjoy a feast of Read more ...
Robert Beale
Every 21st birthday deserves a party, and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester celebrated the anniversary of its opening with a weekend of fun and "access" events, ending with a recital by four pianists on its four Steinway pianos – playing them all at once, in eight-hand arrangements.It was very different from the opening 21 years ago, when orchestras dominated the programmes. This time even Manchester Camerata, the chamber orchestra with which the hall co-promotes events, moved round the corner to play in the gallery at HOME, a newer arts centre. But one of the early discoveries about this Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Last Night of the Proms is always a beautifully choreographed event, and this year’s was no exception. The format changes little, but each year a new selection of works is chosen to fill the slots. The BBC Symphony Orchestra, always the backbone of the season, somehow manages to sound fresh for their final outing. And the audience was dependable as ever, listening attentively through the first half, but then taking control of the second, and by the end making events onstage more or less irrelevant.By recent tradition, the Last Night opens with a premiere. The commission presumably calls Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Vienna Philharmonic makes a beautiful sound, no question about that: the question is what to do with it. Michael Tilson Thomas has some ideas, but they are mostly low-key. He is currently touring with the orchestra, and seems to have been chosen as a safe pair of hands, offering elegant and lyrical interpretations, but without any extravagance. The result was a concert that was all about the orchestra, and although the players had a few rough patches, it fully justified their world-class standing.Even so, it was often hard to shake the feeling that Tilson Thomas was playing it safe. His Read more ...
graham.rickson
Henze: Neue Volkslieder und Hirtengesänge, Kammermusik 1958 Scharoun Ensemble Berlin/Daniel Harding, with Andrew Staples (tenor), Markus Weidmann (bassoon) and Jürgen Ruck (guitar) (Tudor)Hans Werner Henze worked regularly with the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin from 1983 onwards, and this enchanting collection includes works performed at a memorial concert given after Henze’s death in 2012. One of the best routes into Henze’s music must be through Oliver Knussen’s mesmerising DG set of Undine, surely one of the great 20th century ballet scores. Or via the two works collected here, which will floor Read more ...
David Nice
Outlines of a real face had begun to emerge in Daniel Harding’s conducting personality. His youthful rise to the top initially yielded neutral concerts with the LSO and a glassy, overpraised recording of Mahler’s Tenth in the Deryck Cooke completion with the Vienna Philharmonic. But then I heard a supple, intensely lyrical Brahms Third in the Concertgebouw and what came across on CD as a fine live interpretation of Mahler Six from Munich. With last night's Prom we were back to the enigma, best summed up in Otto Klemperer’s channeling of Brecht and Weill’s Jimmy Mahoney and his refrain “aber Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Amazingly, last night Sir András Schiff scored a Proms first with his performance of Book One of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Never before has even half of the sublime and seminal “48” taken the Royal Albert Hall stage in unmutilated form. The WTC could have found no better advocate. Schiff’s awesome ability as a pianist to deliver clarity without austerity, fidelity without pedantry, made us see how this first set of 24 preludes and fugues (completed in 1722; the second book dates from two decades later) encodes so much of the fundamental DNA of Western music.Not only across the Read more ...
David Nice
It can’t be too long before “women” no longer needs to prefix “conductors” to define what’s still a rare breed. Yet seven at the Proms is certainly an improvement, with many more coming up through the ranks. And American Karina Canellakis turned out to be very much the season’s final trump card. She seemed precise and watchful in a new work and in getting the BBC Symphony Orchestra to keep perfect tabs on live-wire Jeremy Dank in Bartók’s dizzying Second Piano Concerto (he watched, too, in return). But it was Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony which defined the Canellakis style – keenly-spring and Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Even tuning up, the multinational musicians of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra make a lovely sound, well-anchored by the tug of four period-instrument cellos and three basses, yet buoyant and stippled with upper-wind colours, flutes circling and dipping like a cliff-edge bird colony. Ideal, then, for the Hebrides Overture which opened this Mendelssohn matinee (★★★★).With the gentlest of rhythmic swells in the violins, just enough turbulence registered beneath the surface to give an early hint of what would become a subtly revisionist account, formed in the quietly authoritative hands of Pablo Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How do you get to heaven, especially if you need to reach the pearly gates by way of the earthbound acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall? With Chief Conductor Daniele Gatti as their spirit guide, the sumptuously arrayed pilgrim band of the Royal Concertbegouw Orchestra from Amsterdam sought different routes in the centrepieces of their pair of Proms. In Bruckner’s majestic, yet often intimidating, Ninth Symphony, unfinished on the composer’s death in 1896 and presented here without any of the fabricated finales that later hands have slapped on it, the way turned out to be blocked despite the Read more ...