Classical music
Kimon Daltas
The newly restored Royal Festival Hall organ was inaugurated in a celebratory atmosphere with this gala launch concert, which also marks the beginning of the Pull Out All the Stops organ festival.The varied programme included works for solo organ, as well as combined with brass and choir, and included two world premieres composed specially for the concert, one by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and one by the late John Tavener. Four organists took turns (John Scott, Jane Parker-Smith, Isabelle Demers and David Goode), two conductors (Jessica Cottis and Sam Laughton), plus Alison Balsom, the combined Read more ...
David Nice
A voyage around Beethoven by Ives and John Adams, and then beyond him by Berlioz, added up to a vintage San Francisco Symphony programme from its music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Forty years on from his first concert with SFS, he’s still youthful in demeanour, still flapping with seagull (or albatross) like flamboyancy. But is there a chill behind the showmanship? I ended up feeling that way despite what should have been the ultimate cataclysm of the Frenchman’s concluding infernal orgy.The sound of the orchestra is still sleek and bright. That paid dividends in a Bruckner concert I Read more ...
graham.rickson
William Alwyn: Piano Music Mark Bebbington (Somm)William Alwyn was a Suffolk-based composer who died in 1985. He dabbled in painting and writing, and held the post of Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music for nearly 30 years. His output included a cycle of symphonies and the music to several well-known British films. Curiously, he was related to the actor Gary Cooper, even providing the score to Cooper's final screen appearance. Alwyn's piano output, as represented here, more than deserves an occasional hearing. Mark Bebbington gives us graceful readings of Alwyn's 11 Read more ...
simon.broughton
“This is not so much a total immersion, more of a quick shower,” said Simon Wright, biographer of Villa Lobos at the start of the day-long exploration of his music. With up to 1,500 works in existence – the exact number is unconfirmed – he promised we’d be “hacking our way through a tiny part of this immense jungle”, to use another metaphor that seems alarmingly appropriate with this composer.Heitor Villa Lobos (1887-1959) was Brazil’s greatest "classical" composer and yet less than a handful of works are commonly played in Europe. Best-known is his luxuriant Bachianas Brasileiras No 5, in Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No one could accuse Manchester’s musical forces of short-changing Richard Strauss on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Under the title Strauss’s Voice, over two months three orchestras, eight conductors and a dozen soloists have delivered eleven concerts and several open rehearsals and talks. The enterprise has been led as a labour of love by 88-year-old Strauss authority Michael Kennedy, who started the series by enthusing about the composer’s ability “to exploit the radiance, eroticism, drama and tenderness of a voice”, especially the soprano voice.It fell to principal Read more ...
graham.rickson
Haydn: Nelson Mass, Symphony no 102 Boston Baroque/Martin Pearlman (Linn)In a week bristling with geo-political tension, we need Haydn's "Mass for Troubled Times" more than ever. Here, Boston Baroque's natural trumpets blast out their tattoo in the Kyrie with a punch matched by that of the choir. Such a magnificent opening – the boldness due in part to Prince Esterházy's economically-driven downsizing of Haydn's orchestral forces. Woodwinds and horns had been dismissed, and trumpets and timpani were used instead to supplement the ripieno strings. Martin Pearlman's swift speeds are Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Gabriela Montero stands out as different. She is an American-based improvising classical pianist of real quality. She has a courageous civil rights message to convey about the tragedy of unseen arrests and murders in her native Venezuela, but is nonetheless happy to take her curtain call draped in the colourful Venezuelan flag. That sense of difference is reinforced by the staid context of the Southbank Centre's International Piano Series: concerts which almost all start at 7.30 pm, with roughly half on Wednesdays. There's nothing inherently wrong with that predictability, given the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s the thought that counts. That’s what we say about presents. But when the gift is a song by Richard Strauss it is that and more. He made a habit of gifting songs, particularly to his wife Pauline. Several of the Six Orchestral Songs on offer here, as the two-month Strauss’s Voice series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth nears its end, are taken from groups originally celebrating occasions such as their wedding day (10 September 1896).It was Sir Mark Elder’s turn to step up for his first appearance in the series, and he drew some glorious sound from the Hallé, while being Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dukas: L'Apprenti sorcier, Velléda, Polyeucte Les Siècles/François-Xavier Roth (Musicales Actes Sud)Some artists are so prolific that sorting the wheat from the chaff is an impossible task. This isn't the case with Paul Dukas - an intensely self-critical composer who destroyed many of his completed works. It's a surprise to discover that he lived so far into the 20th century, his Paris Conservatoire composition class pupils including a young Olivier Messiaen. Much of what survives is magnificent, though there's only one masterpiece on this latest live recording from François-Xavier Roth Read more ...
David Nice
Valery Gergiev once described Yevgeny Svetlanov’s USSR - later Russian - State Symphony Orchestra to me as “an orchestra with a voice”. Then Svetlanov died and the voice cracked. Which are the other big Russian personalities now? Gergiev’s own Mariinsky? I don’t hear it. Yuri Temirkanov can still bend the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra to his own whim of iron. The Russian National Orchestra was never in the running. But the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, to give its full title, still sounds as deep and rich as it did when I last heard it live nearly 30 years ago.You can Read more ...
David Nice
Nature declined to reveal the Northern Lights over a long winter weekend in Iceland. My hotel was geared up to the spectacle, offering the option of a phone call any time in the night should they appear; but no call came. I only hope the tourists who packed the outward-bound plane hadn’t booked just for that. They’d surely not be disappointed in this most spectacular of lands so long as the weekend package-tour selling point wasn’t an idée fixe, and in any case I suspect half had come to club the night away.Our own Aurora Borealis was simulated in one of the halls of Olafur Eliasson’s Read more ...
David Nice
When I last saw Vadim Repin in action, he was premiering a work of terrific energy and invention which is here to stay, James MacMillan's Violin Concerto. Tonight in Birmingham and on Monday at the Royal Festival Hall he is back on familiar territory with old friends – Vladimir Fedoseyev and the Tchaikovsky (formerly the Moscow Radio) Symphony Orchestra - in one of the pieces which brought him world recognition at 17 as among the handful of truly great violinists in the world today, the Tchaikovsky concerto. The contrast is enough to show the kind of questing player he is, a master Read more ...