Classical music
Christopher Lambton
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Edinburgh Festival debut was the most telling example yet of the 2014 festival’s disregard for conventional concert programming. A programme that began with Strauss’ Don Juan and Four Last Songs could easily have settled into a comfortable evening of large scale late romantics, but instead turned on its heel to dip into Schumann’s Cello Concerto before concluding with Percy Grainger’s riotous The Warriors. More enterprising than their Proms outing, this was a high octane collision of styles and soloists across continents and centuries that could well have Read more ...
David Nice
By the time we got to the end of this Prom, with four of the five encores – the whole of Bizet’s Carmen Suite – cannily crafted to bolster the short official programme, most of the rightly euphoric audience had forgotten the most unsatisfying first half so far this season. Perhaps I start from an ungenerous standpoint. Of course Barenboim’s orchestra of players from Israel and the Arab world is a beacon of light, communication and collaboration in the worst of times, and when I first heard it in 2004 the intensity was unrivalled; last night he seemed to be deliberately dampening it down at Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Russians were coming - and the prospect of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, even without the added attraction of hearing it in Igor Buketoff’s questionable choral arrangement where the Tsarist hymn is taken at its word and does a Boris Godunov on us, had the promenade queue fast stretching towards South Kensington. And if ever music replicated the excited buzz of something in the air Stravinsky’s Scherzo fantastique did, raising the curtain almost imperceptively through the scurrying of muted strings and surprised woodwind punctuations.Here is music that redefines the idea of airborne until, Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It is easy to be blinded by the sensational history of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad”. We cannot forget the famous performance by a starving makeshift orchestra in August 1942, at the height of the siege of Leningrad, or the dramatic way in which the Soviet authorities spirited the microfilmed score out of Russia to America via Tehran. Inscribed by the composer “To the City of Leningrad”, the symphony has been laden since birth with political meaning, much of it contradictory. Does the notorious, all-consuming march in the first movement represent the advance of the German Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sarah Willis's day job is as a member of the horn section of the Berlin Philharmonic. In recent years she has also become a roving ambassador for the instrument and a familiar face presenting and interviewing on the Berlin Phil's Digital Concert Hall. In 2010 she released her first solo recording, of the Brahms trio for horn, violin and piano. That combination of instruments is once more the foundation for her second solo CD. But there all similarities end.Horn Discoveries migrates from blues to classical contemporary, stopping off in light romantic territory on the way. There is also a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is dominated by the doleful clang of cowbells. They are an other-worldly intrusion into an otherwise familiar musical scene – unless you happen to be in Verbier, that is, in which case they are just another everyday part of the aural landscape. To hear this particular metallic clanging in its natural environment just before entering the concert hall and hearing its artificial twin, to walk out of the same concert hall into the same views that inspired Mahler to compose in the first place, is something unique to this glorious mountain-top festival.Classical music fans Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Twenty years ago Ute Lemper came to the Usher Hall to sing Kurt Weill. The young pretender to the Lotte Lenya throne performed then on a bare stage with little more than a piano as accompaniment. Last night, she swept onto a platform crammed with a massively augmented Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with saxophone, guitar, banjo, rhythm section, accordion, grand piano, and a squadron of percussion. Microphones, foldback, and towers of gently whirring loudspeakers filled any remaining space. Seductive lighting dappled the walls.In her cabaret repertoire of Weill, Eisler, Marlene Dietrich and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Louis Andriessen: La Commedia – a film opera in five parts Dutch National Opera, Asko Ensemble, Schönberg Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw (Nonesuch)This the liveliest recording of a contemporary opera I've ever heard, in a belter of a performance. Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's La Commedia is an unwieldy, unorthodox opera. It's described in the booklet as a set of five mini-cantatas, each setting texts from Dante's Divine Comedy. Frustratingly, the libretto isn't included with this set, but can be downloaded. Grumbles aside, I began listening without texts and was glued to the work for Read more ...
David Nice
“Ah now, I can’t promise you sun,” says a Scots lady-in-waiting of her native weather to a novice Englishwoman near the start of Rona Munro’s masterly James Plays. It’s the first of many references to make the audience laugh knowingly. Well, after four days of the worst weather Edinburgh Festivalgoers can remember, the sun came out yesterday morning. There’s no better place to be than the airy Queen’s Hall if you want an 11am recital of light and shade – and to say that of yesterday’s duo programme is an understatement. Come late afternoon, and the light was still dappling the green lawns and Read more ...
geoff brown
Some things that spread like wildfire, like ebola and wildfire itself, are not good news at all. But performing Nielsen’s symphonies? That’s another matter entirely. In the next concert season, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia both begin Nielsen symphony programmes, while the LSO several years ago cycled through one of their own with Sir Colin Davis. Yesterday, the BBC National Symphony of Wales and their current Danish conductor – will it ever be someone Welsh? – bit off one of the mightiest in the set, the battle-scarred Fifth, with its disruptive side-drum. At this rate, Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
If you want an image that defines, for this writer at least, the essence of the Edinburgh Festival, it is the sight of Greyfriars Kirk full to capacity at 5.30 pm on a blustery Monday afternoon. At other times of year this sort of event might be hopefully billed as a “rush hour concert”, sparsely attended by commuters en route to the suburbs, but at festival time Edinburgh has a whole new demographic. Fighting its way past the tourists photographing Greyfriars Bobby (pictured below) could be seen an enthusiastic international audience to whom the prospect of an hour-long concert is one sure Read more ...
David Nice
After the European Union Youth Orchestra hit unsurpassable heights last week, the Proms plateau of excellence remained available to another youth carnival of weird and wonderful 20th century monsters. If the EUYO showed us that Shostakovich’s bewildering Fourth Symphony, for all its grim trajectory and ultimate annihilation, is also an orchestral showpiece, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain demonstrated that the same could be said, with freedom and character encouraged by conductor Edward Gardner, for Stravinsky’s Petrushka before Lutosławski, following Bartok’s example, Read more ...