Classical music
graham.rickson
Jacques-François Gallay: Chamber music for natural horn ensemble Les Chevaliers de Saint Hubert (Resonus)Shove a funnel in one end of a length of hose pipe, and explore the quirks and thrills of the natural horn. Namely that most of the low notes are missing or out of tune. The higher harmonics are closer together, making accurate pitching a bit like throwing a dart whilst wearing a blindfold. Getting round the instrument's limitations requires much jiggery-pokery of right hand and lip. A side-effect of the period performance boom is that modern brass and winds can end up seeming just a Read more ...
theartsdesk
Chris Christodoulou is the official Proms photographer, writes David Nice. From his uniquely privileged position behind a velvet curtain, he captures the white heat of performance. The official shots roll off the press a couple of hours after the concert, but for the past five years our man in the Albert Hall has supplied theartsdesk with unofficial contraband images of conductors in action.No doubt the presence of only two women in the roster will provoke comment. Blame the Proms for not doing more: the change is happening, but not fast enough. Some of these conductor portraits will make you Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
If only the Last Night of the Proms could just be about the music. If it were, then the story which I would want to tell would be about Janine Jansen. A crowd which mainly turns up to wave its vast array of flags, to bounce its beach-balls and generally to step free from the shackles of adulthood, was mesmerised into a concentrated hush by the magnetism of the Dutch violinist. She drew the huge audience right in to her playing. She made the cavernous Royal Albert Hall feel like an intimate space. She tamed the crowd and (almost, briefly) silenced the bronchially challenged.But the Last Night Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The silliness of the Last Night is really just a postscript to the penultimate night of the Proms, traditionally given over to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It was a tradition restored yesterday evening when Alan Gilbert and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra returned for their second concert of the season. For anyone whose stomach is liable to turn at extrovert jingoism and excess, this was the perfect antidote.Febrile and urgent under Chailly, the orchestra found rather different colours in Beethoven’s final symphony for Gilbert – cooler, quieter, more understated. I’ve never Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar: Symphony no 1, Cockaigne Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo (BIS)No one says there's anything unusual about an orchestra in Liverpool recording Shostakovich, or a Manchester band producing a new Sibelius cycle. So why do we make such a lot of self-congratulatory fuss when a non-British team performs Elgar? He's a major late-romantic figure, and at his best he's easily the equal of Mahler and Strauss. Elgar symphonies aren't uniquely English in appeal, and this disc makes that point handsomely. That it comes from a Finnish conductor and a Swedish orchestra is Read more ...
David Nice
Swathes of this year’s final Late Night Prom were so invertebrate, amateurish even, that I was tempted to go home and throw out my Want One and Want Two CDs. I won’t, of course: Canadian American singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has written some fabulous songs, and developed a unique vocal style to deliver them. But if the act of “hammering out a tune” is, as he puts it, "cosmic", as, very often, are the results, last night’s performance was aquatic, and not in a good way. Swimming around in front of an over-amplified orchestra – a much-expanded Britten Sinfonia conducted by Canadian Opera Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A Prom billed as “English Music” sounds like a restful sort of affair – probably pastoral, definitely tuneful and potentially restorative after a day in the office. In practice however this concert from Andrew Litton and the BBC Symphony Orchestra was – thankfully – altogether more bracing, pairing Vaughan Williams at his most combative with vintage Birtwistle.Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on Greensleeves felt like the sugar to help the musical medicine go down – a pacifying opener to reassure anyone nervous about the half hour of Birtwistle to come. Litton underplayed it exquisitely, coaxing a Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Aaron Copland was an unlikely musical portraitist of the American plains and prairies. Son of Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn and student of modernism with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he nonetheless created the quintessential American orchestral sound with a series of popular (“vernacular” was his phrase) works in 1930s and 1940s. Last night three of his most popular pieces were paired with two new pieces inspired by jazz, that other great American twentieth-century music. While the first half of last night’s concert, three Copland pieces, was charismatic if a little scrappy, the second, the UK Read more ...
geoff brown
Is there something about the start of a new cultural season, or indeed the Proms, that make classical music’s conductors rush to jump ship? Consider this. Last Friday, two days before his pair of Prom concerts with his American outfit, the Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst, so diffident on the outside, resigned from his important European post as the Vienna State Opera’s music director with immediate effect. Irreconcilable artistic differences were cited. Then on Monday morning, the day after fronting the patchily effective Proms debut of Qatar’s multi-national, peace-loving trophy Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Peter Sellars’ work used to be about making a statement. He would dislocate texts from contexts, subvert musical suggestion and ignore written statement for the sheer joy of the artistic friction it would generate. The beauty of his St Matthew Passion staging however, first seen in 2010, is that it does nothing of the sort.By the end of three hours of delicate, interpersonal drama and choric tableaux, Sellars has made no statement at all, and that refusal, that restraint, allows Bach’s music to speak louder than any amount of “konzept”. Of course Sellars is not alone in this. Jonathan Miller’ Read more ...
David Nice
“You feel like you’re walking into Fame, the movie,“ says one of three third-year drama students towards the beginning of this six-part documentary. That’s what we might have hoped of what, at least in the first episode, turns out to be a mere infomercial for New York’s prestigious academy of performing arts.The format ought to work: start of academic year in episode one - select, out of the lucky seven per cent chosen from auditions, a dancer, actors, violinist, jazz pianist, and follow their progress. I can only hope a singer will be in the offing, too; for now, there's a palpable imbalance Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
For the first night of its 114th season, the dear old Wiggy welcomed back its regulars after the summer break. A starry occasion like this recital by Joyce DiDonato and Sir Antonio Pappano gets booked out virtually exclusively by those patrons and members, so it was an evening with a lot of air-kissing and greeting across the familiar rows of red seats. The hall does have a special vibe when it's completely full, as does the knowledge that the audience is seeing an artist who can - and will - sell out venues several times its size. The two nights of this programme (the second is on Read more ...