Classical music
David Nice
Two hundred costumes, over 60 solo roles and the world premiere of a great operatic composer's first thoughts: it's a task which would daunt the best-resourced opera company in the world. The fact that Prokofiev's initial, 11-scene meditation on Tolstoy's War and Peace was launched last night by students with slow-burn but ultimately total confidence, an orchestral collaboration with established professionals and a fusion of production with design at the very highest level could only send us out in to the streets of Glasgow echoing the Russian soldiers' final cries of "Ura!"The most Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Not everyone was playing for the same team in last night's revival production of The Rake's Progress. On the one side were the conductor, choir and soloists, all focused in their service and submission to unravelling this quietly brilliant piece of neoclassicism by Stravinsky - mostly pretty effectively. On the other side were the sets and direction of Carl Fillon and Robert Lepage, which included blow-up caravans, fold-out dolls' houses and a mattress-cum-Hoover sucking in lovers. Attention-seeking stuff . An initial interested "ooh" become a more circumspect "oh?"; bored eyes gave Read more ...
hilary.whitney
"What is it about Schubert’s music that has such power 180 years on? It has nothing to do with who he slept with or what he had for breakfast – it’s the work," insists filmmaker Christopher Nupen, whose series of films about composers is currently showing on BBC Four. "If you’re dragged towards the quotidian and the sensational, you’ll be pulled away from that elusive essence in the work that nobody has ever succeeded in explaining, but which remains one of the highest expressions of the human mind.”Nupen is also emphatic that the films, which feature Bizet, Sibelius, Respighi, Paganini, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was a brilliant moment in the film that began Henze Day yesterday. An ageing Henze, lazying on his Italian veranda, his leg cocked, his bald head - looking as if it had been iced - stuffed into a boater, is confronted by his lurcher dog, James. "Jamez," wheezes Henze, "Vat is it, honey? You vant to sit on my lap? Sis is impossible. Ve are at vork." It's an instructive little episode, a neat glimpse into the winning side of the German composer. The Dr Doolittle side: engagingly sweet, relaxed, flirtatious, interested in the right things; interested in extending a hand to history, to Read more ...
David Nice
Laid-back Tenerife and Gran Canaria won't know what's hit them when the London Philharmonic Orchestra and its principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski land next week. The islands can expect to be sense-bombed by the jungly exuberance of Szymanowski and devastated by the scorched-earth tactics of Shostakovich at his most extreme. Even Londoners used to the highly sophisticated assaults of the city's most challenging orchestral partnership, and faced with the same programme last night, may have been taken aback by the keenly directed electricity of the occasion.Jurowski certainly Read more ...
graham.rickson
This is a revival of the 1993 production originally directed by Phyllida Lloyd (of Mamma Mia! fame). Directed on this occasion by Peter Relton, it still works brilliantly. Lloyd has updated the setting to 1950s Paris with her young bohemians wearing polo necks, jeans and berets. A gleaming motorbike is one of the objects adorning their living space, its condition degenerating along with the health of Mìmi until it is replaced by a pedal cycle in the final act.As the curtain flies up and the orchestra launches into those upward dotted figures, the artist Marcello is splattering red paint onto Read more ...
theartsdesk
Heading up this month's classical selection is a 16-CD budget box set of the complete works of Frédéric Chopin, issued to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the consumptive Pole's birth. Plus we review a rare piano concerto by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a disc of even rarer string orchestra works by the post-war Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, a fresh coupling of the Debussy and Ravel string quartets, a new version of Bruckner's mighty Eighth from the French-Canadian wunderkind Yannick Nézet-Séguin and two sets of historic recordings conducted by "Glorious John" Barbirolli. Our reviewers this Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In this era of spectacular divas from Russia, Latvia and Romania, it is often remarked that the Italian lyric soprano is a commodity in distressingly short supply. Hoping to rectify that sorry situation is Tuscany’s Maria Luigia Borsi, who will be making her London debut at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday, singing a luxuriant programme of Puccini, Catalani and Mascagni.“My favourite composer is Puccini,” says Borsi, “and I feel very good when I sing Puccini’s music. I was born in the south of Italy, near Rome, but I grew up in Tuscany not far from Pisa and Livorno. Perhaps for that reason I love Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera Elektra is a diabolical piece of work - less an opera than an event determined to cut its mark. A vast orchestra of 112 players unleashes a two-hour tsunami of sound across the stage, on which female voices are buffeted like pieces of driftwood, shrieking of mothers who murder husbands, daughters who want to murder mothers, rivers of blood, flayed horses, dogs, bodies. Subtle it isn’t. Loud it is. In the hands of Valery Gergiev and London Symphony Orchestra this week, pulverisingly loud.Can you easily believe that Strauss’s next opera was that fountain of Read more ...
David Nice
Just to contemplate the shifting talent pool of this chamber co-operative can be giddying. Last night 10 great ensemble players, from top violin soloist Alexander Sitkovetsky to three London orchestral principals who must have jumped at the chance to be part of the Razumovsky experience, had their work cut out. Schoenberg and Schubert ask each musician to run the full gamut of Viennese angst and joy. The result was an unrepeatable experience in the spiritual as well as the literal sense.Both Schubert's Octet and Schoenberg's early string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) can feel a Read more ...
David Nice
They're still bringing Beethoven and Shostakovich to London, enriching the mix a little with the cross-referencing of Alfred Schnittke, but the personnel of the Borodin Quartet have changed again. Patriarch cellist Valentin Berlinsky, there at the start over 60 years ago, passed on his bow to Vladimir Balshin before he died. Balshin is a worthy successor, especially since Berlinsky's tone had become translucent to the point of dematerialising and his successor's is rich indeed, but is "Borodin Quartet" now more a brand name than a vital entity?Well, continuity Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
An ongoing series celebrating musicians' birthdays. 7 January 1907: This week, by cosmic or other coincidence, has the birthdays of four composers who wrote some of the most interesting 20th-century music for the piano. Francis Poulenc here plays his Piano Concerto for Two Pianos with Jacques Fevrier.The piece was been dismissed by Klemperer, among others, as little more than a mere divertissement - the tunes, including a section inspired by Balinese gamelan, waft in and out "like the models on a Paris Fashion show" as one critic put it, never to be seen again. It was played to great effect Read more ...