Classical music
David Kettle
The Cottier Chamber Project is coming to feel increasingly like Glasgow’s answer to the Proms. If the Proms took place in a former church high on shabby-chic charm, that is. And if they ran for just three weeks. And only covered chamber music.Okay, the comparison might not bear much scrutiny. But from a viewpoint near the beginning of the Cottier festival, with its profusion of events – two, three or more a day – stretching off seemingly into the distant future, plus its all-encompassing ensembles, performers and repertoire (Baroque, contemporary, opera, jazz, folk, even film and dance), it’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hans Gál: Symphonies 1-4 Orchestra of the Swan/Kenneth Woods (Avie)Previously paired with those by Schumann, Hans Gál'sfour symphonies are now sensibly repackaged as a slimline two-cd set. Musicians are always trying to make the case for previously neglected composers, and it can be a crushing disappointment when you dive in but can't see what all the fuss is about. Havergal Brian's appeal still eludes me, but I've enjoyed getting to know Weinberg. I also "got" Gál; he's definitely one of the good ones. Conductor Kenneth Wood's accessible sleeve notes suggest that Gál's obscurity is partly Read more ...
David Nice
Vladimir Ashkenazy should be made an honorary Finn: not just for his constant championship of Sibelius’s orchestral works throughout his conducting life so far, but above all for the way he understands them. On the evidence of last night’s 150th anniversary concert, crowned by a superbly direct performance of the Second Symphony, his approach is now thoroughly Finnish at the deepest level in the way that it paces the sentiment, effortlessly negotiates the shifts of mood without histrionics and shears the music of romantic rhetoric. No Slavic or Teutonic plushness here.The first half, a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s an intimacy, an interiority, to music for viol consort that even the string quartet can’t match. The physical placement of the three members of Phantasm who opened this concert of music by Gibbons, Purcell, Locke and Lawes was telling. Occupying three sides of a square, facing one another directly, theirs was a private musical conversation the audience was permitted to overhear. Fortunately it was one full of eccentric, charming episodes, as well as some moments of glorious darkness.This was the first of two concerts built around Purcell’s viol consorts – anachronistic works that had Read more ...
David Nice
If this were only the usual international festival – and it’s still a big “only” where Bergen’s flagship fortnight of theatre, dance, art and music is concerned – it might not be easy to justify swanning off to one of the most beautifully situated cities in the world. What drew me in the programme, though, were two unique and probably unrepeatable concerts put together by local boy made more than good Leif Ove Andsnes. Norway's most feted pianist worldwide keeps being showered with international awards but who now, with three young children to think of, wants to concertise less, spend more Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: On The Town (2014 Broadway Production) (PS Classics)West Side Story is a masterpiece, but its earnestness can become a little overbearing, so I retain a sneaky preference for Leonard Bernstein's 1944 musical On The Town. You may think you know it from the 1949 film starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. But, crazily, the film's producers objected to Bernstein's music and ditched most of his songs, replacing them with bland substitutes. The stage show grew from Bernstein and Jerome Robbins's similarly-plotted short ballet Fancy Free. Robbins devised the show's choreography, and Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
One man and his piano can occasionally fulfil a role more satisfying than the finest orchestra in full sail. The last of Daniel Barenboim's four-recital traversal of Schubert's piano sonatas proved just such an occasion. Since the first concert last week, perhaps all the ingredients had settled in a five-way exchange, with artist, piano, audience, hall and music each coming to terms with all of the others and finding a new modus vivendi.And that is what's needed when a piano is so radically different from those to which we're accustomed... Yes, I know, we've dealt with the Barenboim own-brand Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
How to respond to Mahler? That was the challenge set by the London Symphony Orchestra to Edward Rushton when they commissioned him to write an opener for this programme. Rushton’s response was to take a story from a biography of Alma and spin it into an orchestral fantasy. The story goes that Alma, listening to Gustav compose the Fifth Symphony, complained about the excessive orchestration, which he then dutifully toned down.Even by Rushton’s own admission the tale is apocryphal to the point of outright fiction, but it provided a starting point for a more idiosyncratic exploration of Mahler’s Read more ...
David Nice
“You don’t love Schubert’s music?” Such, according to the greatest of living Schubert interpreters Elisabeth Leonskaja, was the response of her mentor Sviatoslav Richter to students who omitted the exposition repeats in the piano sonatas. Daniel Barenboim doesn’t observe them either, on the evidence of yesterday afternoon's concert, but four recitals and much in them ought to prove that he does love Schubert’s music, or rather has his own vision of how it ought to go. It’s not his fault if focus on the composer seems to have taken second place to the public's media-fed fascination with Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
To close its 2014-15 season the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose the choral masterpiece that Elgar preferred not to call an oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius. Performances in Scotland are rare, whether this is because of Presbyterian unease with Catholic sentiment, or the unfashionable nature of big-bottomed Anglican choral textures, it is difficult to say. North of the border we are more likely to turn to Brahms’ German Requiem for spiritual consolation. That said, the munificent Gerontius fits the Usher Hall like a glove; the hall was built 10 years after the premiere and with its Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Personality is essential for Schubert’s piano sonatas. Listen to two recordings of the same one and you could easily think they are different works, such is the performer's input. Daniel Barenboim would therefore seem ideal. He’s a huge personality – he even has his own name emblazoned in large gold letters on the lid of his piano: a personality verging on a cult. But it’s not quite right for this music.Barenboim always trades in big passions; Schubert does not – or only in late works, and even then not exclusively. To negotiate the more delicate music of the early B major Sonata, D575, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nielsen: Symphonies 2 and 6 Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo (BIS)Few composers' music can blow away the cobwebs quite like that of Carl Nielsen, and David Fanning's sleeve note to this BIS disc rightly describes him as “the greatest life-affirmer in the 20th-century symphonic tradition”. It's been a joy to watch Nielsen's stock rise in recent years, and John Storgårds' new cycle of the symphonies has just appeared in the wake of Alan Gilbert's blazing New York Philharmonic set. This disc of Symphonies 2 and 6 is the final instalment of Sakari Oramo's series, and I'm Read more ...