Classical music
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Piano Sonatas 2, 6 and 8 Alexander Melnikov (Harmonia Mundi)These three sonatas provide a neat overview of Prokofiev’s compositional career, 1912’s No 2 blending heady romanticism with smiling, percussive modernism. I’d not realised how much of the last movement sounds like Rachmaninov’s late Paganini Rhapsody. Alexander Melnikov’s lightness of touch is dazzling, and the same movement demonstrates exactly why he’s so impressive, the swift, furious opening followed by melting lyricism barely 90 seconds later. Melnikov handles both extremes with equal aplomb, and you’re left Read more ...
David Nice
It's official: if you want to be guaranteed an infallible musical adrenalin boost in London, you can always be sure to find it with Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo and his BBC Symphony Orchestra. And it's not just a question of splashy excitement: Oramo is a rigorous rehearser. Detlev Glanert's fiendish new tone poem Megaris would not have been half as vivid or pleasurable without extraordinary preparation. As for Nielsen and Sibelius, there is no conductor in the world I'd rather hear today in their music than Oramo.This was a concert of journeys, sea-girt in the first half, with plenty of Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata give relatively few old-fashioned concerts these days – I mean the sort that are done in purpose-built concert halls, with a conductor, soloist and conventional orchestra strength – because they’re busy crossing boundaries and attracting new audiences. But when they do return to the traditional path, they do it extremely well, and especially when music director Gábor Takács-Nagy is in charge.This time, at the Royal Northern College of Music, there was the additional distinction of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist in two Mozart piano concertos. He and they have recorded Nos Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Op.110 and Op.111, with music by András Szöllösy and Gyula Csapó Gábor Csalog (piano) (BMC)Two Beethoven sonatas coupled with shorter pieces by a pair of contemporary Hungarian composers makes for an engaging mixture. Gabór Csalog’s disc feels very much like a single live performance, though the individual items were taped at separate recitals. Beethoven’s momumental late sonatas draw on many influences, from naïve folksong to baroque counterpoint. András Szöllösy’s Paesaggio con morti also fuses multiple elements, a sober chorale theme restated between music of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Bruckner conductors improve with age: Haitink, Blomstedt, Gielen – octogenarians all. But Stanisław Skrowaczewski went further, conducting his favourite composer almost to his death, this week at the age of 93. And more than any of his contemporaries, he seemed to embody the Brucknerian qualities of wisdom, experience and patience. A glorious Indian summer brought his work to a new generation, as, apparently oblivious to physical frailty, he toured extensively, in his last years appearing with the world’s top orchestras.Skrowaczewski was born in Lwów, then in Poland, now Ukraine, in 1923. A Read more ...
David Nice
Treasure our young continental European musicians in London while you can. Only last week I learned that so many of the overseas students at London's Guildhall School had stories to tell about being questioned in public (usually "are you Polish?" with the negative ramifications that implied). Certainly that was true for the Estonians, two of whom celebrated their country's 99th birthday as a republic yesterday lunchtime - the big day is on Friday; expect much more in centenary year - with assistance from their London embassy and the City Music Society. Both sponsors must have been very proud Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Who says Mozart is not like Rossini?” remarked Juan Diego Flórez, about a quarter of an hour into his debut recital at Symphony Hall. “There are seven high Cs in this aria.” And with a flicker of notes from the pianist Vincenzo Scalera, he was off into "Vado incontro", from Mitridate by the 14-year old Mozart. He wasn’t joking, either. You could count each of those Cs as they burst – the ultimate sonic weapon in the arsenal of the superstar tenor.There was no question of them sounding unforced; perhaps, no possibility. Phrasing went by the board as one after another they flashed out. The Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A new work by Igor Stravinsky is always going to be a major event, so Sunday evening’s UK premiere of his rediscovered Funeral Song was hotly anticipated. The score disappeared after its first performance and was thought lost in the Russian Revolution, but the orchestral parts were rediscovered at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 2015, and, after a modern premiere at the Mariinsky in December last year, the work is now being performed around the world.Funeral Song is an early work, dating from 1908, but it’s not juvenilia. Written as a memorial to Stravinsky’s teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, the Read more ...
David Nice
Polish composer Szymanowski's Ovid triptych Mythes achieved something like cult status thanks to an iridescent recording. Everyone knew the pianist, the great Krystian Zimerman; the violinist, Kaja Danczowska, less so (where is she now?). A better-known duo of equals, Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov, could – if crazes reached so far in the classical world these days – make listeners no less obsessed with two relative unknowns in the second half of their spellbinding programme, the 71-year-old Fauré's quietly radical Second Violin Sonata and George Antheil's 1923 anti-sonata for violin, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ghedini: Orchestral Music Orchestra della Toscana/Daniele Rustione (Sony)Yet more music you’ve never heard by a composer who really should be better known. Giorgio Federico Ghedini (1892-1965) wrote an opera based on Melville’s Billy Budd several years before Britten, and revered Bartók, Hindemith and Stravinsky. He admired Schoenberg, though believed that, “through personal experience… it is possible to find and develop a series of 12 sounds that are purely tonal sounds, or with a sense of tonal affirmation.” Ghedini was fascinated by the music of the Italian Renaissance, transcribing Read more ...
theartsdesk
Love is in the air. Today, men and women and boys and girls will be pondering how to say it with roses and cards and candlelit dinners: those three words that contain multitudes. As the old strip cartoon never quite got round to saying, love is... the human condition, which is why a good quantity of the culture we review on this site has to do with it. To help you get into the mood for romancing, we have asked our writers to identify something - anything - in the arts that embodies the L word. There are some obvious choices, some obscure ones, and a whole lot of omissions. So, in the comment Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphonies 3 and 4 NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester/Thomas Hengelbrock (Sony)Brahms’s name is tucked away in disappointingly smallish print on this disc’s imposing cover. In case you’ve missed it, there’s a glitzy new concert hall in the composer’s home city of Hamburg, and this release gives us the first official recording made there. It inevitably sets one thinking about the pros and cons of new halls, and the benefits they bring versus the squillions they cost to build. Does London need a new one? No, it doesn’t – the same money would be surely be better spent on music education in Read more ...