Classical music
geoff brown
Sirs Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies have now been at each others’ heels for almost 60 years. First, the composers were students together at the Royal Manchester College of Music. Then, once their careers began flourishing they kept rubbing against each other in concert programmes. Inevitable, really: the same organisations commissioned them; they were the Twin Peaks of British Modernism. Even now, for old times’ sake, the pair can’t escape each others’ shadow. Since this Proms Saturday Matinee began with Sir PMD’s unaccompanied motet of 1997, Il rozzo martello, we knew Sir HB Read more ...
Ismene Brown
"O, reason not the need!” cries Shakespeare’s King Lear, insisting on certain unquestioned rights. The phrase came to me listening to Bernard Haitink conducting Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto and Fourth Symphony last night. The 82-year-old Haitink does not question the need for this music - and I’m not sure that’s entirely right. I want the imperative there, I want to feel the urge to be born in those musical paragraphs that Brahms wrote with such generous largesse. To reason the need gives the music its birth again.So this was an evening of exceedingly velvety, light-fingered Brahms, of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, and one work dedicated to Brahms by Schumann. That's right: it was Brahms night at the Proms. No scary new works. No discombobulating new interpretative glosses - dear old Bernard was our guide. Nothing to ruffle the feathers or impede the thirsty ways of the professional champagne-quaffers in the sponsor boxes. Nothing to fear or disturb that is, except for around a dozen LEDed vulvas garlanding the stage.At least I think they were vulvas. They might have been roses. My female friend thought vulvas, too. Anyway, what strange visual imagery. The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Some things just don’t seem to belong in a pairing. The flute and the French horn both have their distinct sonic personality. It wouldn’t be going out on a limb to suggest that the average listener tends to lean towards one or the other. Even Mozart wrote for the horn out of love but trotted out his flute compositions for money. But opposites can and do attract and so it once more proves in a new recording featuring the horn and the flute and, discreetly chaperoning the pair of them, the piano.The musicians responsible for this newly formed ensemble are horn player Dave Lee, flautist Andy Read more ...
graham.rickson
A young American composer's work is showcased by a major label and doesn't disappoint. A classy British horn player enjoys teaming up with a pianist and a flautist. And an impressive cycle of 20th-century symphonies gets a welcome airing, thanks to a hard-working London orchestra and their principal conductor.Martinů: The Six Symphonies BBC Symphony Orchestra/Bělohlávek (Onyx)
Deep joy. There’s a lot of classical music which is justly neglected. But the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s six symphonies are always worth hearing, and this cycle of performances was recorded live at the Barbican Read more ...
theartsdesk
Waiting for a plane has rarely been an amusing, surprising and enjoyable experience - unless a girl takes a flute out of her hand luggage and starts playing Ravel's Bolero. Ignore it, perhaps, but then a man going by pulls a clarinet out of his case and joins in. And then one notices the tapping sounds emerging from the soporific airport buzz. A bloke wheels up a drum on a trolley. Before people know it, they're witnessing a full-blown performance of Torvill and Dean's signature tune played by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in front of their startled eyes.This is an unorthodox and very Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Landscape painting may be dominated by the Dutch. But in music it is the Austrians who know best how to evoke the majesty of the great outdoors. In the first of last night's two Proms, one of the most awesome of Anton Bruckner's snow-capped symphonies, number five in B flat major, accompanied a new high climb through the Tyrol from fellow Austrian Thomas Larcher for two great musical off-pisters: violinist Viktoria Mullova and cellist Matthew Barley.What was most peculiar about this concert was how the 19th-century Bruckner and contemporary Larcher seemed to have switched shoes. It was Read more ...
Ismene Brown
An all-Russian prom with two masterpieces centre stage and a remarkably compelling young violin artist brought in a packed house last night. Esa-Pekka Salonen and Lisa Batiashvili have already recorded Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto, and the bond between them was evident in a delicate yet deeply searching performance of this melancholy, epic work with Salonen's orchestra, the Philharmonia.The concerto retains its human story indelibly: written for David Oistrakh in 1948, it was not permitted a premiere for seven years, as Shostakovich battled with Stalin's sudden volte-face against him Read more ...
geoff brown
Roger Wright’s reign as director of the BBC Proms has luckily spared us some of the more desperate themed programming that ran through the seasons in Nicholas Kenyon’s day. "Music and Shakespeare", I remember; music and the sea; and one year of Spain, Spain and Spain. I never wanted to hear another castanet again. But individual concerts still need careful planning. And if you’re hunting for a convenient hook, the name of Serge Koussevitzky – fiery Russian conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 25 years, double-bass player, minor composer, famed promoter of the new – is as plausible a Read more ...
hilary.whitney
Third in line to share their summer reading selection with theartsdesk is Colin Currie (b 1976), the leading percussionist of his generation. A driving force behind new percussion repertoire for more than a decade, in 2000 Currie was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award for his inspirational role in contemporary music and is in the unique position of being the only instrumentalist to enjoy close collaborative relationships with many of the leading composers of today, notably Rautavaara, Steve Reich and Elliott Carter. His latest CD release, which features Jennifer Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The fact that the world’s most popular ballet score had never, until last night, been performed in full at the Proms says something about the lowly regard in which musical circles long held composition for ballet. The fact that the Albert Hall’s capacity audience bayed six times for Valery Gergiev’s return to take their appreciation of his and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra’s performance of it last night says something about it being about time that musical circles stopped being so snobby.Those of us who haunt ballet theatres have become inured to shoddy performances of Swan Lake, its Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To lose one performer (to misquote Oscar Wilde) may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose three begins to look like carelessness. With last night’s Prom killing off soloists faster than you can say Sinfonia da Requiem there are few who wouldn’t have forgiven a comfortably adequate sort of Sunday evening. As it was, however, despite the loss of Christopher Maltman, John Mark Ainsley and conductor Jiří Bělohlávek, the combined BBC Symphony, Chorus and Singers under Mark Wigglesworth delivered a performance that grasped not only the casual brilliance of Benjamin Britten’s virtuoso writing, but Read more ...