Classical music
David Nice
There are still pockets of musical snobs who want to keep Elgar's two symphonies for the English, and off the worldwide roll call of orchestral masterpieces. Yet a steady line of international conductors - from Solti and Svetlanov to Haitink and Previn - has proved them the adventurous equal of anniversary composer Mahler's symphonic giants. Now Vladimir Ashkenazy joins the ranks. Elgar may not yet be quite in his bloodstream in the same way as Rachmaninov and Sibelius, but in yesterday afternoon's concert there was enough love for the complex composer's Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Whoever said it was better to journey than to arrive might have been thinking of Sibelius. The arrivals can be pretty spectacular – as here in Osmo Vänskä's tremendous account of the Second Symphony – but the getting there – or not – is what this music is all about. When Vänskä conducts Sibelius he doesn’t just traverse the musical landscape, he inhabits it, breathing it in, feeling its pull, overawed at the threshold of where sound becomes silence and vice versa. He is Sibelius’ eternal Wanderer. Barenboim may have stolen the column inches this week but Vänskä has stolen hearts and minds. Read more ...
David Nice
Fashionable concertgoers, if you'll forgive the oxymoron, may have missed the raciest heartbeat of a dizzying week. While Barenboim's Beethoven and Vänskä's Sibelius packed in the cognoscenti at the Royal Festival Hall, kids tagging along to the BBC Symphony Orchestra's "Family Music Intro" and a hardcore of rare-repertoire collectors at the Barbican were treated to a parade of oddball scores dazzlingly communicated by another of those amazing Finnish conductors, Susanna Mälkki, and Portuguese pianist Artur Pizarro.Make no mistake, these are dense programmes the BBC insists on offering, not Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Two very different lessons on love this week. From the Aphrodite-like Joyce DiDonato at the Wigmore Hall, there emerged a correct, wise, honest way to achieve an enamoured state; from the familiarly fickle cast of Così fan tutte - an almost unwatchably faulty bunch of emotional primitives in Jonathan Miller's production for the Royal Opera - very much the wrong way.Miller is absolutely right to press home the point about the unattractiveness of Così fan tutte's group of solipsists. A mirror is the star of the show as a result. No one can escape it. Fiordiligi (Sally Matthews) falls for Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who can sell out four concerts of Beethoven and Schoenberg, even if it's only half-scary Schoenberg, surely looms large in the public imagination. Daniel Barenboim is a great humanitarian figure, and has been a thought-provoking interpreter of the classical and romantic piano repertoire for nearly 60 years, so it's not surprising that half of London wants to hear him in the Beethoven concertos. As a conductor, his natural element is earth; less so air, wind and fire. All four are vital to make a protean late-romantic orchestral monsterpiece like Schoenberg's Pelleas und Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Victoria and Albert Museum intends on 22 February to disperse its collection of musical instruments to other venues, to allow more room for fashion and textile exhibits. Conductor Christopher Hogwood and composer Oliver Knussen are two more well-known names in the list of more than 5,100 signatories to the petition lodged at 10 Downing Street asking for the move to be prevented. theartsdesk invited big hitters on either side to debate the case - Roxy Music designer Anthony Price makes the fashion case, while conductor Laurence Cummings heads the musician's view. And we ask you: What Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
As was hoped, Osmo Vänskä, the livewire music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, showed us exactly why he's the greatest living Sibelian last night in the first concert of the London Philharmonic's Sibelius cycle. Ducking and diving, crouching and corralling, Vänskä worked the podium like some mad ant, scurrying now over to the violas, gesturing now manically to the horns, his hands rattling fiercely like a jilted Old Testament prophet, sculpting, harrying and rousing the orchestra to peaks and troughs of ecstasy and despair. Sibelius's First Symphony has never sounded so spontaneous or Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Craig Urquhart was Leonard Bernstein's personal assistant for the last five years of his life. In this touchingly frank interview he talks about the man he knew, the man he revered, the man who wanted to be all things to all people and who consistently pushed himself to the limit in the service of the music that drove him.
Click here to listen to this episode
The Bernstein Project is a 10-month celebration of Leonard Bernstein - one of the most charismatic men of the 20th century. A composer and conductor who wrote poetry and loved science; a pop icon revered by audiences, critics and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Nico Muhly didn't have to work much to puncture any atmosphere of classical recital formality at the Roundhouse: he only needed to be himself. Young, slightly dorky and very camp, wearing a black garment that blurred the boundaries between cardigan and bathrobe, and bantering lightly with the audience, the Vermont-born New York-based composer gave the impression that he couldn't take himself too seriously if he tried.His performance began with lightness of touch, too, with a recital of the solo piano piece “Mad Rush” by Philip Glass, for whom Muhly often conducts, arranges and plays piano. It Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Had a dastardly dirty bomb gone off in the Wigmore Hall last night and turned us all to dust, the contemporary British classical music scene would, in one fell swoop, have been wiped off the map. No more Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, George Benjamin, Julian Anderson, Simon Bainbridge or Oliver Knussen, all of whom were gathered for the inaugural concert of the year-long residency at the hall of rising compositional star Luke Bedford (above) . This was a fascinating programme, delivered without fault by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Knussen. Most fascinating Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Craig Urquhart was Leonard Bernstein's personal assistant for the last five years of his life. In this touchingly frank interview with Edward Seckerson he talks about the man he knew, the man he revered, the man who wanted to be all things to all people and who consistently pushed himself to the limit in the service of the music that drove him.
The Bernstein Project is a ten-month celebration of Leonard Bernstein - one of the most charismatic men of the 20th century. A composer and conductor who wrote poetry and loved science; a pop icon revered by audiences, critics and musicians alike, and Read more ...
