Classical music
David Nice
Don’t blame the players: they did their considerable best. But what could they hope to achieve with a programme in which six of the seven pieces were on a hiding to nowhere, or too short to have much of an impact? A sequence, what's more, in which platform rearrangements took longer than two of the pieces in the first half?Worse, the end sank the whole. Milhaud’s La création du monde, the penultimate offering, might have sent us out smiling. Instead the world premiere of Simon Bainbridge’s Counterpoints, for the indisputable jazz king of the double bass Eddie Gomez, was a throwback to the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“The first section, following a short introduction, places a rhythmic sequence on its retrograde. The two layers are transposed independently (one going up, the other down) as the music progresses, and points of symmetry are highlighted when they occur”. No, me neither. Apparently Patrick Brennan’s Polly Roe also features a brief rhythmic quotation from Birtwistle’s Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum. More erudite ears may have been able to detect it.What anyone could hear, however, was that this fantastic little moto perpetuo is something special, beginning in shadowy half-tones to the Read more ...
David Nice
Missionary angel or twelve-tone devil? Musical figures like Poulenc, perhaps too much attached to the diabolical element in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, were inclined to see the incursion of Robert Craft into Stravinsky’s Hollywood life in 1948 in demonic terms. The persistent 24-year-old New Yorker was, it’s true, an advocate for the serial works of Webern and Schoenberg, whom he was to get to know during the last year of the composer’s life – Schoenberg, after all, lived just down the road from Stravinsky in Los Angeles – and for many other musicians that system was indeed the very Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas 8, 21 and 32 Boris Giltburg (Naxos)These three piano sonatas neatly sum up Beethoven’s early, middle and late style. Each one is in the key of C, and they’re dispatched with some intelligence by the young Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg. Beethoven in growly mood can all too easily sound muddy and inarticulate. Giltburg has the necessary weight, but the faster passages have a dazzling clarity. There are superb things in the first movement of his Pathétique – every chromatic run is immaculate, and the very vocal banter between left and right hands a few minutes in is as Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
Four years ago, Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic embarked on a two-year project to play all the Mahler symphonic works over a couple of seasons. It was an ambitious project but it was one which, then, had hall staff dusting down the House Full signs and the queues for returns forming well before the first note was due to played.There was an air of that at the most recent performance – a shattering interpretation of the Sixth Symphony – where a full house was clearly moved: the long silence at the pitiful ending after so much chaotic emotional wrangling said it all. The Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Christian Gerhaher is a classy recitalist. His stage manner is debonair, his tailoring immaculate (although his hair can be unruly). His artistry focuses on key vocal virtues: directness of expression and beauty of tone. In this evening’s recital, an adventurous programme that switched between the Classical era and the Modern, that proved as valuable a combination in Schoenberg as it did in Beethoven.There is a husky quality to Gerhaher’s voice, an attractive burr that appears around mezzo-forte and defines all of the louder music that he sings. It is less apparent in quiet music, but even Read more ...
David Nice
Not many people write conspicuously brilliant tweets, but Elizabeth Watts is someone who does. Working on the most demanding aria on her stunning new CD of operatic numbers and cantatas by the lesser-known of the two Scarlattis, father Alessandro rather than son Domenico, she tweeted: “Good news – I can sing 88 notes without a breath. Bad news – Scarlatti wrote 89.”The sheer hard work behind that achievement, which Watts discusses below, reminds one that the best singing isn’t something that’s just a gift. And when she went to the Royal College of Music as a postgrad student at the age Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
It was rather like a trip home to see long-lost relatives. Ton Koopman took to the stage at the Liverpool Philharmonic with a broad smile. That smile both greeted the audience and, from what the audience could see, told the orchestra that they were on form. Or, on the other hand, it might have been encouraging them to try harder.The latter was hardly necessary. There have been times when the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra reduced its ranks to become a Baroque ensemble and, in so doing, failed to realise that it needed to leave behind the 19th century bluster and become that bit more Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A full house for a premiere performance: Wynton Marsalis bucks the trend in contemporary music. He’s an established name, more for his jazz than his classical work. But in recent years he has produced a substantial body of orchestral music, so the flocking crowds know what to expect. His new Violin Concerto continues the trend. Popular American idioms – mainly jazz and blues – are integrated into a classically oriented orchestral style with an impressive craftsmanship that hides all the joins. Despite the generally conservative style, it is an ambitious work, its sheer length tending towards Read more ...
graham.rickson
Alessandro Scarlatti: Con eco d'amore – Arias from operas and cantatas Elizabeth Watts (soprano), The English Concert/Laurence Cummings (director and continuo) (Harmonia Mundi)Scarlatti? He of keyboard sonata fame? That's actually Domenico; this recital disc collects soprano arias by his father Alessandro (1660-1725), whose star has been eclipsed by his son. Scarlatti senior didn't write much instrumental music, but was amazingly prolific in other areas. He composed 600 cantatas, 30 oratorios, and claimed to have written over 100 operas during a 40-year career. So you worry that his music Read more ...
Richard Bratby
If Omer Meir Wellber is making a bid for Andris Nelsons’s old music directorship in Birmingham, he could hardly have signalled his intentions more audaciously. This concert began with Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude and ended with Brahms’s First Symphony – basically a surgical strike into the heartlands of Nelsons’s repertoire. And as soloist, he had the Latvian violinist Baiba Skride – an artist who was introduced to Birmingham by Nelsons and who appeared with the CBSO on disc and in concert throughout Nelsons’s tenure.Skride was there to play Schumann’s late Violin Concerto, and she found an Read more ...
David Nice
London foists hard choices on concertgoers. Over at St John's Smith Square last night Nikolai Demidenko was giving a high-profile recital of Brahms and Prokofiev. But since the Prokofiev CD which has had the most impact in recent years has been Freddy Kempf’s, of the Second and Third Piano Concertos with the Bergen Philharmonic and Andrew Litton, a half-full Cadogan Hall seemed like the right place to be, even without Prokofiev on the programme.Kempf, the British-born boy wonder of the 1990s, has been slightly overshadowed lately by the next sensation, Benjamin Grosvenor, but he’s a different Read more ...