Classical music
David Nice
A Leipzig church is surely the place we’d most like to be for Bach on Good Friday. Never mind: the Barbican Hall is kinder to the best period instrument ensembles than it is to big symphony orchestras. Better still, having sat stunned and weepy for a good few minutes at the end of this performance, I’m happy to evangelise and proclaim that no better team could be assembled anywhere for the original 1724 version of this world-changing musical Passion.Richard Egarr (pictured below by Marco Borggreve), directing from the harpsichord, no doubt deserves the credit for the line that passed, without Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Billy Budd John Mark Ainsley, Jacques Imbraillo, Matthew Rose, Philip Ens, Glyndebourne Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Sir Mark Elder (Glyndebourne)I missed this staging of Britten’s Billy Budd, first performed in May 2010. I’m increasingly convinced that it’s the best of Britten’s operas, taut, well plotted and musically flawless. The brass-heavy score is a marvel, its battleship grey orchestral palette accompanying an all-male cast. It contains one of the greatest, yet simplest of Britten’s inspirations in the form of the stark sequence of orchestral chords heard in Read more ...
geoff brown
Any conductor who ends a concert with only one leg on the ground, as if engaged in the Highland fling, is either a little fanciful or has been utterly carried away. In Keith Lockhart’s case last night, it was probably a bit of both. No-one can take charge of Duke Ellington’s big band tone poem Harlem by impersonating a lamp-post, especially at its roaring end, the epitome of jubilation in sound. But the BBC Concert Orchestra’s transatlantic Principal Conductor is also a conscious showman. Sometimes his hands trace such sensuous curves that you feel he’s stroking a Ming vase.All his gifts for Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In 2007 the English tenor, Ian Storey, made a dramatic and highly visible debut as Tristan in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the season opening of La Scala, Milan, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Patrice Chereau. It was seen by millions on TV, in cinemas, and on DVD and marked a big development in this singer’s career. This year he will be singing Siegfried in Götterdämmerung, again under Barenboim, as part of a complete bicentennial Ring cycle at the BBC Proms.Storey eschews the heldentenor label preferring to call himself a “dramatic” tenor but whichever way you look at it his Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies 4 and 7 Academy of St Martin in the Fields/Joshua Bell (Sony)Nothing to shock here – no period timbres, no radical speeds and no indulgence. If you’re hoping for a sense of the epic, the self-consciously profound, you might want to look elsewhere. These classically-tinged Beethoven performances aren’t even part of an upcoming cycle. However, Joshua Bell, conducting and leading, delivers performances of sublime grace and wit. He gets so much right, such as the hushed anticipation at the start of No 4 and the disarming simplicity of the movement’s main material. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Zipangu. What a name for a piece of music. Such a strange and suggestive collection of vowels and consonants. Such a musical string of sounds. A fascinating name. The name, in fact, the programme told me, for Japan during the time of Marco Polo. The life of the composer of the work, Claude Vivier, is fascinating, too, in a grisly way. While completing an opera about a young man who stabs a stranger to death, Vivier was murdered in his Paris flat by a rent boy. Incredible story, incredible-sounding work; you can see why programmers are increasingly attracted to Vivier. I just wish I enjoyed Read more ...
David Nice
“I do not believe in miracles,” scoffs Herodias in Oscar Wilde’s - and Richard Strauss’s - Salome. “I have seen too many.” I know how she feels. So it was a bit of a shock to find the highest-kicking of today’s composers, John Adams, and his inseparable genius director Peter Sellars, taking the raising of Lazarus seriously in the first part of their latest opera-oratorio (my term, not theirs, and also applicable to El Niño, Adams’s millennial take on Christ’s birth and its concomitant hazards).What that meant in practice, for me at any rate, was to sit through Act One compelled by every Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The 36th Dresden Music Festival has a big title and even bigger ambitions. Empire is a theme which Artistic Director Jan Vogler hopes will embrace not just the cultural achievements of the British Empire but the broader implications of the word. The Brits are coming for sure with a range of music stretching from the Renaissance via Purcell to Elgar and Britten. The Americans are coming, too, with the New York Philharmonic “in residence” under their Chief Conductor Alan Gilbert. And 2013’s big anniversaries - Wagner, Verdi, Lutosławski, Britten - will be celebrated in style.Vogler, who has Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony no 9 Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra/Gustavo Dudamel (DG)This new, live, Mahler 9 sounds impressive – microphones are closely placed and you really feel in the thick of things. Dudamel’s intakes of breath are clearly audible but not intrusive. His first movement is outstanding. The timings are expansive, but the pace doesn’t slacken. Each precipitous climax is paced with mature skill, the tension cannily ratcheted up. There are moments when you genuinely think that it’ll all end happily, making the third, funereal crisis a shocker, Dudamel’s raucous trombones putting Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
For finding new popes as much as for hunting down new music, looking to the ends of the earth seems a fruitful route to take. Last night saw the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican residency with their principal conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. And with them, they brought the latest music from the Pacific rim, all of it quite surprising.Surprising, that is, for not being very surprising. For the new music from West Coast Americans John Adams and Joseph Pereira, and Korean Unsuk Chin, didn't sound like you might expect. It wasn't bracingly fresh or pioneeringly brave. Nor did any of it Read more ...
theartsdesk
Regular readers of theartsdesk will know that we have a lot of time for Volker Bertelmann, the composer-pianist-producer better known as Hauschka. Adapting styles from rigorous minimalism through romantic compositions to club-inspired electronica, he has ploughed his own furrow through postclassical and leftfield music.So we were very happy when, to trail a show he's doing tomorrow night at London's Bishopsgate Institute with regular collaborator violinist Hilary Hahn, and his new remix album, he offered us the first showing of this 38 minute concert recorded in Nairobi, Kenya last year Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What Manchester has today, Vienna will have tomorrow. The BBC Phil’s composer/conductor HK “Nali” Gruber is taking his musicians and singers back home to the Wiener Konzerthaus to reprise this concert next week. You can’t fault it for variety – Stravinsky, Britten and MacMillan, Gruber’s predecessor as composer/conductor here. But the main thrust is celebrating Stravinsky. It is the centenary of The Rite of Spring. In the BBC Phil’s series of celebratory concerts, we here came to his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, also premiered in Paris, in 1927. It hasn’t been heard in Manchester for nearly 20 Read more ...