Classical music
Sebastian Scotney
Can there be a conductor with a clearer and more affirming beat than Mariss Jansons with the Concertgebouw Orchestra when they're at their best? The listener can just marvel at his capacity to work in partnership with this fine orchestra, to underline and reinforce everything they do, to enable them to land cleanly, decisively and unanimously, to introduce new ideas with care, precision and beauty, to treat the end of phrases with respect, love and punctiliousnes.Jansons can make the Concertgebouw sound in every respect and in every department a marvellous orchestra, even in a hall like the Read more ...
David Nice
With tickets only a couple of pounds more than screenings in the Ciné Lumière, back-to-back – sometimes overlapping - concerts by world-class pianists of all ages, and a lively roster of weekend events around the recitals, what more could you ask from the French Institute’s two-and-a-half day festival? Well, perhaps a better and bigger Steinway. The one that can now transform the cinema into a concert hall, and instigated the first It's All About Piano! weekend last year needed bags of restoration, and given the obstinately dull middle register you have to ask, was it worth it? But then again Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms and Schumann: Piano Quintets Alexander String Quartet, Joyce Yang (piano) (Foghorn Classics)Schumann was the first major composer to pair solo piano with string quartet. His 1842 quintet remains one of the best examples of the genre, perched between chamber introspection and public assertiveness. It's full of splendid moments, springing into life with inexhaustible exuberance. Schumann's fiendish piano writing rarely lets up, and one of the joys of this beautifully nuanced performance from the San Francisco based Alexander Quartet is the contribution made by pianist Joyce Read more ...
David Nice
Arise, Sir Edward – Gardner, not Elgar, whose First Symphony the former conducted last night. Well, maybe a knighthood’s too premature; although the daft honours system has rewarded others in the operatic world for less, and Gardner has already served two brilliant terms at Glyndebourne Touring Opera and ENO, there was just one aspect of the symphony that he didn’t seem quite to get last night.It was the visionary gleam, its flipside the pain of the composer’s tortured introspection, which he missed by a centimetre and which knights of greater experience like Sirs John Barbirolli, Adrian Read more ...
joe.muggs
It seems that the gradual leakage of avant-garde-post-classical-call-it-what-you-will music from the rarefied environment of concert halls and into the spaces traditionally inhabited by alternative and club music is now inexorable. And violinist Aisha Orazbayeva is one of the instrumental (pun intended) figures in this move from trickle to flood. As one quarter of the organising team for the London Contemporary Music Festival (along with erstwhile classical editor for theartsdesk, Igor Toronyi-Lalic), she has helped bring Parmegianni, Schwitters, Radigue and other 20th/21st century composers Read more ...
David Nice
Where did all the terrific programming energy of last year’s The Rest is Noise festival go? One answer – surprising given the orchestra’s former Friday night lite status – is into a two-concert adventure by the BBCCO. World to Come, World Once Known has been devised by Principal Conductor Keith Lockhart to reflect the Janus-headed phenomenon of music just before, during and after the First World War.While the first concert, to be broadcast this afternoon on BBC Radio 3, registered the shock of the new following the cataclysm, last night’s poignant sextet of works examined grief – for lost Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Tchaikovsky de nos jours, is Theodore Gumbril’s dismissal of Skryabin in Aldous Huxley’s Twenties novel Antic Hay. For some reason, Alexander Skryabin has suffered more than most from snap judgements of this kind. He has been the woolly theosophist, the vacuous, over-inflated mystifier, the effete, self-indulgent decorative – everything except the refined, disciplined creative genius. It’s high time these images were consigned to the rubbish dump of history, along with the dull-witted Bach, the mad Beethoven, and for that matter the slushy Tchaikovsky. Skryabin was a superior artist whose Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Piano Concertos 2 and 4 Mahler Chamber Orchestra/Leif Ove Andsnes (piano and director) (Sony)You know that this will be good after just a few seconds; Beethoven's comically strait-laced opening gesture promptly answered by a smartly shaped orchestral tutti. Well-tuned winds and horns are perky, and string articulation is perfect. All so good that you're caught off guard when Leif Ove Andsnes makes his sly entrance and you remember that this is a piano concerto. The lightness of touch is intoxicating, Andsnes scaling down his sound so that he's a perfect match for a well- Read more ...
David Nice
Depth, height, breadth, a sense of the new and strange in three brilliantly-programmed works spanning just over a century: all these and a clarity in impassioned execution told us why the BBC Symphony Orchestra was inspired in choosing Finn Sakari Oramo as its principal conductor. Their anniversary journey through Nielsen’s symphonies next Barbican season – itself a heady mix announced amid the palms of the singular conservatory before a vintage assembly of performances around the Centre – is more fascinating in prospect, for me at any rate, than the promised visits of the New York and Berlin Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The core pulse of Tudor polyphony is often deliciously slow. It gets down to a mesmeric pace of about 30 beats per minute. The listener just has to succumb to it, and the experience, even in the virtually unheated Cambridge College chapel where The Sixteen began its 2014 Choral Pilgrimage last night, was pure pleasure.The names of the three composers whose work form the Sixteen's programme for the concerts of this year's Pilgrimage will be unfamiliar, but Davy, Sheppard and Mundy are all important precursors of Byrd and Tallis, and the sequence of works has been meticulously prepared to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Turning every concert into a party, baroque ensemble L’Arpeggiata are performers in the truest sense. Too often early musicians get away with being shy or downright awkward, visibly uncomfortable when forced to introduce an encore. Not so with these European virtuosi, whose signature improvisations give each member (yes, even the percussionist) the chance to step into a starring role. And don’t get me started on the baroque rap that concluded the group’s most recent London concert…For the second of their three-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall, Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata moved away Read more ...
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Piano Concertos 1-5 Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, BBC Philharmonic/Gianandrea Noseda (Chandos)Two of Prokofiev's five piano concertos are so well-embedded in the repertoire that they tend to dwarf the other three. So it's great to have the whole lot squeezed comfortably onto a pair of discs. I've long enjoyed Ashkenazy's 1970s accounts, accompanied by a beefy LSO under André Previn. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's playing is rather different; he realises that there's more to Prokofiev than pure brawn. Not that these performances are lightweight in any sense – the remorseless cadenza in the Read more ...