Classical music
graham.rickson
Dohnányi: Variations on a Nursery Song, Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto no 1, Strauss: Burleske Valerie Tryon (piano), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Jac van Steen (Somm)This entertaining, well-filled disc collects three works which, if they were programmed more frequently, should fill concert halls. The pick of them is Dohnányi's inventive, unpretentious Variations on a Nursery Song – a piece which throws up fresh surprises with each listen. The best joke comes near the beginning, as a brooding, doom-filled opening slyly introduces the theme, Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman. Fourteen variations Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
When you’re visiting someone for the first time, it’s probably just as well that you make a good impression – or else you may not be asked back. If that’s what the Carducci String Quartet was trying to do on their début visit to Liverpool, then they did all the right things. They mesmerised the audience with their performance of the second of Beethoven’s "Razumovsky" quartets, so much so that they were forced to sit down and perform an encore, which turned out to be a little irreverent Shostakovich, in the shape of the Rondo Polka.If anything, this concert – part of the Royal Liverpool Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
If what you wanted to do was go out to the middle of the Mexican desert, invert the Cross and dip it in blood, screaming obscenities all the while, surrounded by a sunburnt band of fellow travellers all off their heads on mescalin, Tutuguri is definitely the music you’d want to do it to. Which is OK, because those are pretty much the images conjured up by Antonin Artaud’s poem-radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God, which prompted Wolfgang Rihm to make a two-hour instrumental setting of this "Rite of the Black Sun" for large orchestra, taped chorus, howling vocalist (Leigh Melrose) Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jürg Frey: pianist, alone R. Andrew Lee (piano) (Irritable Hedgehog Music)The Irritable Hedgehog label's signature release is a recording of Dennis Johnson's epic piano work November, an early minimalist work from the late 1950s. Lovingly reconstructed from a muffled C120 cassette tape by composer Kyle Gann, it's astonishing; five hours of cool, static wonder, compelling in spite of the glacial pace and lack of conventional musical narrative. November is performed by Denver-based pianist R. Andrew Lee, who's also the soloist in the label's double disc set of Swiss composer Jürg Frey's Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Ernst Krenek is probably best remembered nowadays as the composer of Jonny Spielt Auf – the quintessential Zeitoper of Weimar Germany and later the archetype of all that was designated “degenerate” in art by the Nazi regime. And perhaps also as – briefly – the husband of Anna Mahler, daughter of Gustav. But Krenek was far more than that. He was a magpie collector of styles and influences whose large corpus of work reflects almost every major 20th-century trend. From Romanticism to jazz, serialism, neo-Renaissance modality and even electronic works, Krenek’s history is the history of music Read more ...
geoff brown
Barbara Hannigan, we all know, is game for anything. This Canadian soprano with the pearliest tones and the dramatic instincts of a Sarah Bernhardt can find beauty and meaning in almost every contemporary composer’s barbed wire. Recently she’s been cavorting on stage as Alban Berg’s Lulu; earlier this month, for a sliver of Ligeti, she paraded herself on the Barbican platform as a gum-chewing schoolgirl in a naughty micro-skirt.There was nothing like that at Vladimir Jurowski’s London Philharmonic concert at the Festival Hall. Her dress code was conventional: a stylish but demure white dress Read more ...
graham.rickson
Henry Mancini: The Classic Soundtrack Collection (Sony)You get a good sense of any composer's strengths and limitations when you consume their music in box set-sized quantities. With the Juilliard-trained Henry Mancini, you marvel at the catchiness of the melodic material and the transparent orchestration. Sony Music's new box set collects 18 Mancini film scores, and a casual perusal will also highlight the great man's weak spots. He wasn't a master at developing his ideas, relying instead on canny use of ostinati and a clever overlaying of his catchy motifs. Which, if you're writing Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
James Dillon calls this major work, premered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival last November, a “Cubist Stabat Mater”. He sets the hymn, but adds in more recent words, texts on related themes by Picasso, Kristeva and Rilke, among others. The music, too, acknowledges the passage of historical time, with subtle references to musical styles from down the centuries. If this all sounds like a recipe for Postmodern intellectualism and detachment, the results are surprisingly direct – a heartfelt and emphatic response to the image of the grieving mother. Dillon is too much the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
At all of 22, the British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor has already become one of the best-loved solo pianists in the UK, with an international career that spans the globe. A remarkable child prodigy from Southend-on-Sea, he first shot to prominence when he won the piano section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, aged only 11, amazing audiences with the maturity and sensitivity of his musicianship.Now, having completed his studies at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he can boast a recording contract with Decca and a track record that includes – among many Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Latvia likes to be different. At least that’s the message they sent out with the cultural programme marking the start of the country’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. Pomp and circumstance were out, and instead we got a Cage-inspired happening, an audio/visual presentation that was many things: part video installation, part performance art. The only thing you couldn’t describe it as was a choral concert.Production values were high, reflecting perhaps the diplomatic motivations. Above the stage was positioned a frame incorporating four huge screens in a rectangular formation, Read more ...
geoff brown
The mixed grilled school of programme-making is not for the JACK Quartet. Contemporary, contemporary, and contemporary: that was the bill of fare last night at this challenging recital offered by the young American group, graduates of the Eastman School of Music, who derive their capitalised title from the initial letters of the members’ first names. Like the Arditti String Quartet, one of their mentors, you’d never find them playing Schubert. Even someone as gutsy and game-changing as Beethoven appears to be well off the menu. A pity, in a way. For the three knotty pieces Read more ...
David Nice
Was 1911 the best ever year for music? Works premiered or composed then include Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and the Tenth Symphony he’d completed in outline by the time of his death that May, Sibelius’s most austere masterpiece, the Fourth – for which the little oddity which opened last night’s concert, The Dryad, sounded like a sketch – and Nielsen’s Third, self-subtitled “Espansiva” but in this performance more like the “Inexhaustible” to blaze a path for the “Inextingishuable” Fourth. Even Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto of 1909, Read more ...