Classical music
David Nice
“If this isn’t nice, what is?” Kurt Vonnegut’s vow to repeat his Uncle Alex’s mantra when things were going “sweetly and peacefully” has been much on my mind during various idylls this war-torn summer. It certainly applied to hearing three boys and a girl in their early teens play a cloudless early Haydn string quartet in the beautifully restored small neoclassical theatre of a perfect Umbrian hill town. But as so often with troubles elsewhere always at the back of our minds, nothing was quite that simple.The young people were totally focused on the work in a performance of astonishing Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The levels of refinement now exhibited by the Hallé, the stylishness and elegance of the playing, define the special relationship that they and Mark Elder have cemented over the last decade and a half. The opening bars of Berlioz’s Le corsaire came off the page like a manifesto for French sensibilities with rapier-like strings parrying airborne woodwinds like the most flexible of swashbuckling foils. The whole overture was so light on breath and string as to be positively balletic. Elder’s work with period instruments had properly informed both characterisation and sonority; there wasn’t an Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
On paper this was an interesting programme. The Edinburgh Festival traditionally opens with a major choral work, but while the international audience would probably be happy with endlessly recycled requiems and masses, festival directors have often felt obliged to venture into more challenging territory. So for last night’s opening concert the chorus had prominent roles in two separate works on either side of the interval: Scriabin’s Prometheus, The Poem of Fire, and Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien. While there is a superficial resemblance between the hazy tonal landscape occupied by Read more ...
geoff brown
“That,” she said, “is what it must be like when you enter heaven.” And I knew just what my wife meant. The organ was in full regalia, revelling in the marshmallow glory of the chorale theme in Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony, with the orchestra trumpeting behind. The Royal Albert Hall itself proved pretty impressive, even when the gentleman in the row in front spent most of Franck’s Symphonic Variations eating a tub of ice cream. It was that kind of Friday night, with a packed and enthusiastic audience ready to enjoy everything that the BBC Philharmonic and their Conductor Laureate, Gianandrea Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jorge Grundman: A Mortuis Resurgere Susana Cordón (soprano), Brodsky Quartet (Chandos)Spanish composer Jorge Grundman was a vocalist and keyboard player in two bands in his teens, and he’s now a professor of audio engineering at a Madrid university. His website includes this disarming statement: “I consider myself a writer of music more than a composer. I just try to tell stories through the music narrative. I do this in the simplest, almost naive way possible. I want people to find my music sentimental and moving and also, as far as possible, to fancy listening to it again.” I read Read more ...
edward.seckerson
All kinds of narratives were at play in this Prom from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Sakari Oramo - and perhaps the truly adventurous programmer might have double-deployed Rory Kinnear, dispassionately chronicling Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, and taken us beyond the Overture and into the melodramas of Beethoven’s Incidental Music to Egmont. Mind you, that overture will more than suffice as a self-contained drama when it is as boldly drawn as it was here with a daring expansiveness in the lowering F minor Introduction and equally impulsive and defiant allegro with John Read more ...
David Nice
A full day began and ended with Elgar the European, or rather the citizen of the world. After all, the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, played with panache by 180 young musicians in a morning meet-up, owes its swagger to the "Cortège de Bacchus" from French petit-maître Delibes’ ballet Sylvia, while the First Symphony can hold its head high alongside very different masterpieces from the early 1900s by Mahler and Sibelius – though it needs a lift and a shape, which it got in excelsis from the consummate Mark Wigglesworth (****).It’s good to be reminded how Elgar lavished orchestral and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The symphony – that structural pillar of classical music – found itself under siege last night at the Proms. Both Berio’s Sinfonia and Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony assault and subvert, reshape and reimagine the genre, puncturing the Victorian smugness of the Royal Albert Hall with doubt. It was particularly poignant on this, the day after the anniversary commemorations of World War I, that the orchestra of the European Union should perform two works born, however differently, from the conflicts of this tumultuous century – one unable to see beyond the darkness of oppressive rule, the other Read more ...
David Nice
Despairing in the depths of the Second World War, Richard Strauss turned to Mozart’s string quintets as well as the complete works of Goethe for evidence that German culture still existed. Vaughan Williams might well have done the same for his native art during the so-called Great War in homaging the music of Thomas Tallis. In fact his great Fantasia was first performed in 1910, not long after Mahler completed his Ninth Symphony – again, not as a premonition of the cataclysm to come but in this instance as a personal, embattled late chapter reflecting on a life he knew was coming to an end. Read more ...
David Nice
Saleem (born 1976), having dropped the "Abboud" from his name, is one of the world’s most individual top pianists: his recent disc of Mendelssohn concertos with Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester is bound to make my “best of year” list. Nabeel, his brother and junior by two years, has served for some years as a violinist in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, first-rate peacemaking brainchild of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. Yet the siblings would surely agree that the bigger picture established by Nabeel, which Saleem has been part of for the past year or so, means more Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The first half of last night’s Prom was supposed to be linked by the theme of the First World War, but Anthony Marwood’s illness meant that Sally Beamish’s Violin Concerto, based on All Quiet on the Western Front, had to be replaced at late notice by her accordion concerto The Singing. And what a felicitous change it was; James Crabb stepped in to give a glowing performance of a fascinating and subtle work which, for me, is a better piece than the intense and difficult Violin Concerto.After the interval came music perceptibly foreshadowing the horrors of the Second World War. Walton’s First Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dutilleux: Symphony no 1, Tout un monde lontain, The Shadows of Time Xavier Phillips (cello), Seattle Symphony/Ludovic Morlot (Seattle Symphony Media)As symphonic openings go, this has to be one of the subtlest and most mysterious, a pizzicato passcaglia theme emerging imperceptibly on double bass. You’re reminded of the passacaglia from Britten’s Peter Grimes, as what happens above each repetition can bear little obvious relation to the theme. Then it’ll suddenly coalesce for a fleeting moment, the bass line punchier, as if it’s emerging through cigar smoke in a nightclub. Henri Read more ...