Classical music
graham.rickson
Elgar: Enigma Variations, Rehearsal documentary BBC Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Bernstein (ICA Classics DVD)Leonard Bernstein’s DG recording of Elgar’s Enigma ruffled a few feathers when it appeared in the early 1980s. This ICA Classics DVD is a much better option – the accompanying live performance recorded with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall in April 1982 with good sound and a decent image, and the rehearsal footage which was shown on BBC Two a few days later. Director Humphrey Burton points out in his booklet note that Bernstein in his final decade tended towards Read more ...
David Nice
Night life in the Square Mile, at least from the perspective of my evening routes around the Barbican, is dominated by booze and sportiness. The way to last Thursday’s concert was blocked by a Bloomberg relay marathon, and cycling through the tunnel towards Milton Court yesterday evening, I encountered the bizarre spectacle of carnival-style trucks pedalled by a dozen drinkers apiece, sitting at a central "bar" and already well oiled. City money, though, still supports culture, and never more impressively than in underpinning Milton Court's new collection of performance and teaching spaces Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
“Lighting design”. Are there two more terrifying words to find in a concert booklet? Since I last went to a normal concert, it seems that the lunacy that is the tradition of bathing audience and stage in as much light as possible as if we were some kind of site of forensic investigation or a harvest of hash has been replaced - at least for symphonic dramas like Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette - by its twin pole of idiocy: lighting design (capital L, capital D). Last night, this meant traffic-light signalling helpfully reminding us when to feel sad (blue) or happy (orange).Of all the works to Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was the first of the ten concerts in the Temple Music Society's autumn/winter season. The Society uses two venues right in the heart of London, Temple Church and, as last night, Middle Temple Hall, most famous as the site of the first performance of Twelfth Night in 1602.Traditions run deep in this place. The audience sit on comfortably upholstered – and occasionally creaky – wooden seats under the watchful gaze of no fewer than eighteen metal suits of armour. The walls are bedecked with the personal crests of lawyers past, their names magniloquently latinised. A profession that often Read more ...
Harriet Smith
There are few more beautiful places in the world to make music than Banff, the arts community founded in 1933, originally to teach drama. From small beginnings it became a name uttered with a certain reverence among the music world. And that is still true today, despite the fact that the centre is now as populated by conference attendees and "leaders of the future" as musicians, dancers, writers and artists. It rather nattily describes itself as a "creativity incubator" and, unless you have agoraphobia, it's impossible not to find inspiration and peace in the Canadian Rockies in which it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Miyoshi: Piano works Yukiko Kojima (piano) (Odradek)Akira Miyoshi was born in Tokyo in 1933. Listen blind to the earliest piece on this disc and you’d think it could be an early work by the late Henri Dutilleux, and it’s no surprise to read that Miyoshi studied in Paris in the 1950s. Miyoshi’s Piano Sonata was completed in 1958, and it’s an arresting, attractive piece. It’s at its best when the piano writing is stripped bare, the harmonies reduced to their essence. Miyoshi’s faster writing can be dizzily exciting, but can feel as if it’s merely obeying our expectations of what a Read more ...
David Nice
Rumour machines have been thrumming to the tune of “Rattle as next LSO Principal Conductor”. Sir Simon would, it’s true, be as good for generating publicity as the current incumbent, the ever more alarming Valery Gergiev. But if the orchestra wanted to do something fresh and daring, it would be better advised to take the plunge with Robin Ticciati, a disarming mix of youth - he’s still only 30 - and mastery; his romantic rubato, the freedom with the phrases, already strikes me as more convincing than Rattle’s has ever been, as last night's Dvořák testified.If that more interesting Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Hungarian composer Bela Bartók’s analytical rigour and folk-inspired voice have established his position as one of the most original voices of the twentieth century, but he still represented a bold choice for the opening event of the 2013 Kings Place Festival. Aurora Orchestra principals Thomas Gould (violin), Timothy Orpen (clarinet) and John Reid (piano) performed his Contrasts trio for violin, clarinet and piano with lyrical intelligence in the beautifully balanced acoustic of Hall One.Contrasts was commissioned in 1938 by jazz and swing clarinettist Benny Goodman, and the clarinet Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Peter Grimes Alan Oke, Giselle Allen, Britten-Pears Orchestra, Chorus of Opera North/Steuart Bedford (Signum)This live Peter Grimes was recorded at Snape Maltings in June, shortly before the same forces performed the opera on the beach at Aldeburgh. Tim Albery’s staging received rave reviews, and a film of the event is currently on release. Those of us who missed it will find some solace in this well-recorded pair of discs. Steuart Bedford worked with Britten in the 1970s and conducts an inspired account of a score which still manages to surprise. All is taut, tense and Read more ...
David Benedict
BBC Four’s new series Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies is shocking. The overwhelming majority of arts-based TV consists of programmes consigning specialist knowledge/presenters to the sidelines in favour of dumbed-down, easily digestible generalisations mouthed by all-purpose TV-friendly faces. But this three-part series is fronted by, gasp, a composer who uses insider knowledge to hook and hold the viewers.To be fair, film composer Neil Brand was onto a winner since TV, the home of show and tell, is an ideal place in which to examine and explain exactly how music works with Read more ...
David Nice
So we glide between seasons from one communicative diva giving her all in a vast space to another casting spells in intimate surroundings. While Joyce DiDonato, not perhaps one of the world’s great voices but certainly a great performer, was captivating the Proms multitudes on Saturday night, the Wigmore Hall’s concert year sidled in with Bryn Terfel and Simon Keenlyside, no low-key singers. But then nor is Anne Schwanewilms, the finest of Strauss sopranos onstage and the most nuanced of Lieder singers, here on a flying visit – and airborne it was - for a BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert.Lieder Read more ...
theartsdesk
"What I’m looking for is that fraction of a second that at least I could remember the concert by." At the start of the 2013 BBC Proms season, photographer Chris Christodoulou let theartsdesk into the secret of snapping conductors at work. Now that the Proms are over for another year, we publish not the official shots, but the ones which are simply too quirky to be released by the BBC press office. These images may not particularly flatter their subjects, but they do capture what it is to be a silent maestro magically conjuring sound from the massed ranks of an orchestra. Make sure to click on Read more ...