Classical music
igor.toronyilalic
The death of the late great American virtuoso Earl Wild a few weeks ago has had me poring over youtube trying to find a decent clip of him in his prime. You'd think there'd be a raft of footage of a man who spent three decades as a staff pianist for NBC, then ABC, all while building up a virtuoso concert career that saw him become one of the most respected pianists of the 20th century. There is some fizzy footage of him performing Chopin and MacDowell on the American variety and talk shows of the 1950s (which I wish would happen today; I'd pay good money to see Krystian Zimerman perform a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I took advantage of one of the last "extra" opening days the V&A is offering for its musical instruments gallery to check out the fuss. Having been sitting on the fence - sympathetic to the pleas for historic fashion displays, though drawn by my background as a violist and pianist to the music side - I came out fuming.Yes, musical instruments are about playing (an argument that some are using to closet them away in congenial stately homes like Hatchlands for occasional performing upon for select audiences) but the overwhelming effect of those instruments is that man will go to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
To find a single completely successful piece in a contemporary music programme is rare enough. The sieve of time has yet to separate the wheat from the chaff. But to find complete satisfaction in all five pieces programmed, and for all five pieces programmed to be by the same composer, is a testament to one thing: that George Benjamin is a total genius. I am not the first to have noticed this. The six-year-old Benjamin was Messiaen's favourite pupil. They are pictured above; a white-haired Messiaen is sat in the middle next to a bashfully bushy-haired Benjamin.At 20, while still a student, he Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
It’s a rare national culture festival that presupposes its audience will have no knowledge whatsoever of the culture concerned - or even be able to locate the country itself on a map. But that, we must assume from the “Azerbai-where?” promotional bus ads, was the starting point last November for organisers of the BUTA Festival of Azerbaijan Art, a series of very well-connected art and music events in London going on this month. Realistically, until petrol starts to be sold with a “produce of” notice, the country’s brand recognition looks set to stay on the low side.BUTA may have started as Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Me and the Pope have had our disagreements – on condoms in Africa, gay rights and his frankly appalling Christmas album. He’s keener on the Tridentine Mass than me. But I had some sympathy with him about Maciejewski’s Requiem, which received its British premiere last night as part of the Polska! year of Polish culture. When he was merely Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he wrote to the composer’s brother Wojciech in 2001, “It speaks directly to the heart, without demanding, as contemporary music often does, any learned intermediary”. Such intermediaries have usually not been kind to the Requiem. “ Read more ...
william.ward
The latest subject in the BBC Four series of composer portraits by Christopher Nupen is Ottorino Respighi. One of the most unfairly neglected major composers of the first half of the 20th century, his reputation has suffered less from not being considered at all, but for having been confined to his trilogy of tone poems that evoke respectively the Fountains, the Pines and the Traditional Festivals of Rome. Nupen's film, made in 1982, puts a welcome case for his more challenging but less well-known work.Composed over the course of 12 tumultuous years – from Italy’s disastrous participation in Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
In taking on a new name last year, Retrospect Ensemble and director Matthew Halls were aiming to get rid of the “early music” label that had been stapled on to them in their previous incarnation as the King’s Consort. When I spoke to Halls last April he was positively a-tremble at the thought of putting on Brahms and Schumann with his newly rebranded group. If you think that sounds like what a lot of these so-called “early music” conductors have been doing, you’re right – it’s very much the done thing to have an illicit romp on the leather sofa of romanticism. And why not? If it works it’s Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
According to award-winning film-maker Tony Palmer, the London Polish Daily newspaper has gone "ape-shit" over the re-release of his dramatised Chopin film, The Strange Case of Delfina Potocka, accusing it of maligning the good name of Chopin/Poland/The Polish Daily. They were planning to interview him tomorrow but cancelled, accusing him of "more or less anything you can think of", Palmer tells me.The paper was apparently incensed that Palmer's 1999 film accused Chopin of being anti-Semitic, of being a political revolutionary, and that it cast aspersions on the truth of the romance between Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The V&A has made a small concession to the musical outcry over its plan to substitute musical instruments with fashion galleries - an outcry you read first on theartsdesk. It is opening the instruments gallery for extra days before the closure on 22 February.Today, the first Wednesday of the month, would have been the only usual February opening day. But now there are six extra days to see the instruments, tomorrow, the weekend of 13-14 February, and the long weekend 19-21 February, before the collection is closed.Our item reported the petition to Downing Street protesting at the musical Read more ...
David Nice
Yes, he can make the music smile when it needs to as much as he does himself. Had we but cash enough and time, many of us Londoners would travel more often to witness what further heights young Latvian Andris Nelsons can persuade the already world-class City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to scale. It was certainly worth the trip to hear how Richard Strauss's colossal Alpine Symphony could sound in Birmingham's Symphony Hall - a venue which, compared to London's less monster-friendly Royal Festival Hall and Barbican Centre, rolls back the roof and lets the air into the big Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You can't ever expect immediate liftoff from a rusty old Lada. Spluttering, shaking and rattling make up as much of the first few minutes of the experience as that of actually moving. But then, before you know it, you're halfway to Plovdiv, and you wonder what you were complaining about. It's what happened last night with Libor Pešek's Czech National Symphony Orchestra. Juddering through the first two pieces (the Polonaise from Dvořák's Rusalka and Smetana's winning Polka from The Bartered Bride) at leaden tempi, the stringed body barely hanging on, the brass and percussion engine sputtering Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The returns queue gets longer and so does the wait – considerably longer than the 69 minutes of programmed music in this the second of the Daniel Barenboim Beethoven/Schoenberg series. But what a satisfying two–course meal it was: Schoenberg’s “transfigured night” of desire and confession, Verklärte Nacht, and Beethoven’s grandest piano concerto, No 5, “The Emperor”. Two perfect pieces in dramatic juxtaposition and the reassuring feeling that nobody on the planet knows them better or is more acutely aware of their importance in the greater scheme of things than the man whose hands were Read more ...