Classical music
David Nice
From Sakari Oramo’s riveting Nielsen symphonies at the Barbican to Thomas Dausgaard kicking off the Proms’ Sibelius cycle, the two Nordic immortals are well served in their 150th birthday year. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, whose reins Dausgaard takes over from the great Donald Runnicles in 2016, may not have the sheer heft of the Berlin Philharmonic strings we heard earlier this year in Rattle’s Sibelius. But the Glasgow-based players get much deeper under the skin, and prove so much lighter on their feet when the Danish conductor takes flight. Sibelius’s hard-to-handle treasury of Read more ...
David Kettle
On paper it looked like it would be very much a concert of two halves. James MacMillan’s energetic, glittering Second Percussion Concerto was unveiled last year and received its first UK performance in London last December, and it was getting its premiere in the composer’s homeland at this Edinburgh International Festival concert from its dedicatee, percussionist Colin Currie, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. And in the second half, something entirely different: Sibelius’s rarely performed, hugely expansive choral symphony Kullervo.What brought the two contrasting works together – Read more ...
graham.rickson
Schoenberg: Gurre-Lieder Gürzenich-Orchester Köln/Markus Stenz (Hyperion)Schoenberg's vast Gurre-Lieder began life in 1900 as a modest song cycle for soprano, tenor and piano, its texts drawn from Danish poetry. He suspended work on the piece in 1903, returning to it in 1910 – by which time his musical style had radically changed. As had the scale of the piece, which ideally needs between 300 and 400 performers, six vocal soloists and over 100 minutes. Not forgetting the ratchet and some iron chains. The extravagant forces are used with admirable restraint, and performances remain an Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Pairing Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony with John Foulds’ Three Mantras was a smart piece of programming: established modern classic and obscure novelty sharing an inspiration from Indian music and philosophy, and both perfectly designed for showing off a very fine orchestra to its best advantage.Before this concert I knew little of John Foulds (1880-1939) other than as a composer of light music in a blandly appealing style. The Three Mantras proved him to be a far more interesting and arresting composer. Originally preludes to the acts of a Sanskrit opera Avatara, which the composer later Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The pulling power of the BBC Proms was in action last night, as a virtually full Royal Albert Hall settled down at 6.30pm, and braced itself for 22 testing minutes of restless, angular, unforgiving 1960s Boulez.The audience had been lured in by the gentler fare that was to come in the second half, but Boulez's Figures - Doubles - Prismes, under the taut control of its pulse by François-Xavier Roth, definitely left its mark.This work, receiving its Proms premiere, and constituting the entire first half of the concert, had been the composer's measured and controlled response to Stockhausen's Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Sir John Eliot Gardiner has made great play for years with the idea that Beethoven’s Fifth is a revolutionary symphony in not only musical but political terms. Accordingly the first bars were a call to arms, taking no heed of a restless Proms audience, or the Albert Hall’s generous acoustic, ploughing into and then through the argument with the joyful fury of a class war demo breaking police lines.Niceties of intonation and ensemble counted for less in such a febrile atmosphere, but a week on from the Aurora Orchestra’s Beethoven "Pastoral", I wonder if there’s a trend re-emerging for playing Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The England cricket team recently went through seven Test matches alternating winning and losing, the longest such sequence in the history of the game. Eric Whitacre managed a similar, and similarly frustrating, series of hits and misses in his Sunday matinee Prom of American music with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.Whitacre featured as both composer (of four of the pieces) and conductor, the programming showing the strengths but also the limitations of both of these aspects of his work. As a presenter, though, he is excellent, speaking to the audience between items with assurance and Read more ...
David Nice
Yet another full Proms house sat down, and of course stood, for a rather strange six course meal which turned out not quite what the menu had led us to anticipate. While it was obvious that the rare and expensive bird dishes were going to be quickly over, the hors d’oeuvres in the shape of Mozart ballet music proved piquant but too many, and the real meat which we might have expected in Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements appeared instead in a work too often mislabelled a soufflé, Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto, through the alchemy of masterchef soloist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who also Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nielsen: Complete Symphonies BBC Philharmonic/John Storgårds (Chandos)Recently completed Nielsen cycles by Alan Gilbert and Sakari Oramo have been released on separate discs. Chandos have issued John Storgårds’ new cycle in a single mid-price package. So it’s possible to spend a satisfying few hours working chronologically through the sequence, noting the thematic links, the stylistic tics which make this composer’s music so compelling. Oscillating semiquavers in woodwinds are a recurring feature, and Nielsen’s knack of writing neat fugues was present from the start. As with Read more ...
David Nice
You never quite know whether a new work by James MacMillan is going to veer towards the masterly or the overblown. His magnificent chain of concertos has arguably yielded masterpieces, but the Third Symphony at the Proms in 2003 sounded like an unwieldy impersonation of the monumental. Twelve years have passed, and he’s shied off writing a Fourth until he felt he had something to say. And while this most worthwhile of the BBC commissions may have its moments of excessive rhetoric – so, too, does the second movement of Mahler’s Fifth, also on the programme – it measures up to its ambition, as Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A weekend of extremes at the Proms took us from stark solo Bach on Saturday to the massed forces of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the chorus of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, gathered under Donald Runnicles for Verdi’s Requiem. As a showcase for the kinds of repertoire the awkward Royal Albert Hall really does do well, it was pretty nigh perfect.It’s always good (and far too rare) to see Donald Runnicles in London. The chief conductor of the BBCSSO announced his arrival by immediately wrong-footing his audience. Refusing to fulfil the promise and expectation of his massed musical forces Read more ...
David Nice
It only takes one outstanding musician with links to an out-of-the-way place to gather his or her top-notch friends and give a mini-festival of international quality. They’re springing up all over the UK: guiding lights that come to mind are violinist Anthony Marwood in Peasmarsh and tenor Toby Spence at Wardsbrook Farm. Now another leading British tenor, Ben Johnson, has set up a Young Artists' Programme and a band of the brightest and best young string players in the village of Southrepps, less than two miles from the beautiful North Norfolk coast. What I heard in two of the seven concerts Read more ...