Classical music
theartsdesk
The concert photographer Chris Christodoulou has been taking pictures at the BBC Proms for 35 years. Even more than the musicians under their baton, he spends his time watching conductors like a hawk, observing their every gesture and grimace. Every year the wackier images, which convey less dignity but more truth, don’t make it into the public eye.Or they didn’t until we at The Arts Desk entered into collaboration with Christodoulou. This year we publish our seventh gallery of his action portraits. Normally we publish only one snap per conductor. This time round, to help the Proms along with Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I had never been to the Last Night of the Proms until last night, nor really paid much attention to it in recent years. To the extent I did, I have been resentful of the fact that to many people it represents the Proms as a whole, with its flag waving and fancy dress, although in fact it is utterly atypical. But I went in the spirit of trying anything once and I’m glad I did, although once is probably enough.In a way, critiquing the Last Night of the Proms makes as much sense as critiquing a children’s birthday party, and is as likely to end in tears. The Last Night does not function like a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Tradition – a choral spectacular for the penultimate night of the Proms – but with a twist – a youth choir and period instruments. Marin Alsop this evening led a spectacular Verdi Requiem, not least for the sheer scale of the chorus, the BBC Proms Youth Choir some 200 strong. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment provided chacterful accompaniment, though sometimes struggled to compete, and the four soloists all delivered, particularly Tamara Wilson, here confirming her reputation as one of today’s leading Verdi sopranos.The BBC Proms Youth Choir brings together four youth choruses from Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar: Symphony No. 1, In the South Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia/Antonio Pappano(ICA Classics)Antonio Pappano’s multi-national background might suggest that he’s the latest in a long line of foreign musicians to succeed with Elgar, though he’s actually British. He does a wonderful job with Elgar 1 in this live recording, though much of the credit rests with Rome’s Santa Cecilia orchestra – the strings’ heft and the weighty brass sonorities make most other performances sound distinctly anaemic. Not that Pappano goes crudely over the top; his unapologetically Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
You know what they say about men with big hands. Christian Thielemann has them, that’s for sure. Massive, meat-cleaving clappers, carving through the air. They give a pretty heavy upbeat too, and a generalissimo’s point and jab for a cue. If you’re a back-desk violinist in the Dresden Staatskapelle, you know when you’ve been Thielemanned.Those hands were also joined in a sweaty fanboy’s applause for Nikolaj Znaider at the end of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. The violinist returned the love by dedicating his Bach encore to the conductor and orchestra. Such a concerto does not play itself, he Read more ...
David Nice
Soft power in the shape of cultural ambassadors can go a long way. With a little help from its big guns in banking and industry, Germany has given this year's Proms no less than four of its major orchestras – from Leipzig, two from Berlin, and now from Dresden: all the more reason to wave those EU flags on a typically international Last Night in three days' time.There's even been co-ordination this week in the shape of Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies three nights running, first from Barenboim and now from Christian Thielemann. A failsafe interpreter of the Austro-German Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Daniel Barenboim is as distinctive as he is unpredictable. His considerable strengths – dynamism, passion, keen intellectual engagement – are balanced by some notable weaknesses – clunky tempo changes, lack of detail – but all configure differently in each performance. This Prom was a success largely for the fresh perspectives he brought to Mozart and Bruckner, both composers prone to stiffness and formality from less adventurous performers.If the Mozart was the less successful, it was because Barenboim seemed to take his ideas too far, always working just outside the bounds of classical Read more ...
David Nice
Istanbul six weeks before the failed coup, the south-west coast of Turkey six weeks after: what's the difference? None that I could see; once past the Turkish Airlines flights, with literature and screen full of the "People's Victory", there was no sign of it at the D-Marin Classical Music Festival on the Bodrum peninsula, centred around the marina in Turgutreis, a 45-minute drive along a very built-up coastline from once-quiet Bodrum. One of the Turkish musicians studying abroad whom I heard at both the Istanbul and Bodrum festivals told me that, having postponed a home visit at the time of Read more ...
David Nice
Gone, it seems, is the era of epic three-part Proms. Sunday afternoon's programme, partly billed as a children's hour, might have pleased pianist and pundit Stephen Hough, whose recent broadsheet plea for shorter concerts somewhat overdid the need (lunchtime events already cater to concertgoers in a hurry very well, and the Proms has its late-nighters too). But it left many of us wanting more, not just of Ravel in the second half but also of the distinctive Simón Bolívar earthiness, which was given free rein only in one spirited encore. Subtlety, for the most part, was the real name of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The BBC Proms is perhaps the only music festival in the world that would (or could) have programmed performances of Steve Reich in a Peckham car-park and Brahms by the Berlin Philharmonic within a few hours of each other. The audacity of it is glorious, the breadth exhilarating, and the fact that both sold out intensely heartening.But, as ever with Sir Simon Rattle, it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that. The main substance of the Berlin Philharmonic’s second concert might have been Brahms and Dvořák, but the opener – a work the orchestra have already performed multiple times in Europe Read more ...
David Nice
What do Boulez's Éclat, for 15 instruments, and Mahler's Seventh Symphony, for over 100, have in common? Most obviously, guitar and mandolin, symbols of a wider interest in unusual sonorities. But while Boulez aims, as often, for needle point precision, Mahler uses selective groups, at least up to his finale when he exuberantly exchanges night for day, to create peculiar and unsettling grades of chiaroscuro. No one has ever gone, or is ever likely to go, deeper in the creation of subtle perspectives than Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic.There's plenty of éclat, in the usual sense Read more ...
graham.rickson
Erkki Melartin: Traumgesicht, Marjatta, The Blue Pearl Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Hannu Lintu, with Soile Isokoski (soprano) (Ondine)Contrary to what you might read, there wasn’t just one composer active in early 20th century Finland. A recent study concluded that Sibelius accounts for 40% of all Finnish music performed worldwide. Sibelius is great, but there are other figures worth investigating. One is Erkki Melartin (1875-1937), active as a conductor and as an influential composition teacher at the Helsinki Conservatoire. On the basis of this appealing anthology, his music is more Read more ...