Classical music
David Nice
Creative old age brings with it not just the expected serene glow but also a singular urgency, a fresh intensity, or so that magisterial pianist Claudio Arrau once wrote. Arrau was a living testament to his claim; so, now, is the 84-year-old Sir Charles Mackerras. Everything he's chosen to bring to life this season has a valedictory quality, or perhaps he simply selects the best. His Philharmonia diptych of concerts led us from the Wagnerian end of the world on Thursday to a Sunday afternoon of prelapsarian innocence in Beethoven's pastoral idyll and paradise regained in Humperdinck's Hansel Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
A continuing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.
16 December 1899: Noel Coward, sharing a birthday with Beethoven, an early English rapper of the silk polka dot dressing gown and cigarette holder school.
{youtube width="400" height="300"}vdEnxNog56E{/youtube}16 December 1770: Not sure whether to admit this, but I can't have been the sole Sex Pistols fan who only became enamoured of the second movement of Ludwig Van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as a teenager after watching Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, with Alex and fellow droogs discussing the magnificence of Ludwig and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Linked to Joe Muggs' interview with Tim Lawrence on theartsdesk, this is extracted from the introduction of Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992.
Arthur Russell hailed from the Midwest, yet felt at home in downtown New York. Outwardly normal to those who observed his checkered shirt and acne-scarred face, he trod the maze-like streets that ran from the battered tenements of the East Village to the abandoned piers on the West Side Highway for hours at a time, and on a daily basis.The labyrinthine infrastructure and contrasting neighborhoods of lower Read more ...
theartsdesk
Our pick of the latest Classical CDs ranges from Tchaikovsky's first and final symphonies to Greek-themed songs by Schubert, by way of late Stravinsky ballets, rare Roussel, a complete Sibelius cycle, cross-over music for recorder and a Superman Symphony. Our reviewers this month are Edward Seckerson, Graham Rickson and Ismene Brown.CD of the Month
Tchaikovsky: Symphonies No.1 “Winter Daydreams” & No.6 “Pathétique”, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski (LPO)
by Edward Seckerson
Exceptional performances from opposite ends of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic canon – and the secret of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week the BBC News online magazine is running a Portrait of the Decade. Each day has brought a consideration of the words, the events, the people, the objects and, today, the cultural highlights of the decade. I was invited to consider those highlights.In years to come, when they look back on the culture of the Noughties, no one will struggle to identify the overarching theme. This has been the decade in which the professional, the trained talent, has had to budge up and make room. A decade ago, who’d have imagined that the biggest stars in pop would be sourced from a Saturday-night Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Even Schubert’s very earliest compositions terrify. His first songs, written when he was only 13, are unforgettably vivid, gory, messy, mangled, full of darkness and horror, like dead little birds. He never shakes off this Gothic sensibility; it’s never ironed out of him. A part of him remains untutored, untamed, right to the end, and over time his dark preoccupations gather a more and more frightening shape. Pitch blackness is reached in his Piano Sonata in A minor, D784, one of strangest pieces in the whole piano repertoire, a work of utter nightmarishness and a focal point for last night’s Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Wigmore Hall does not always take kindly to big voices; it’s an easy hall to over-sing. But when the singer is the American soprano Christine Brewer and the sound so open, so rich and effulgent, hall and voice become one resonance. It’s almost as if Wigmore is selective in its response. It warms to the right voice in the right music. Brewer in Strauss is about as right as it gets. And besides, regardless of the venue, Brewer has never sung to be heard; she sings to be understood.This BBC Lunchtime Concert began at the beginning of Strauss’ life in song with Zueignung, generally sung at the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's Wigmore Hall recital plunge and soar, catch you by the feet and dangle you by the ankles. To cast the right spell, to heave the right ho, you need the right storyteller, one like the ancient Mariner: a glittering eye, a hoary beard, a man of myth and terror. In fact, you need what we got: the towering Paul Bunyan-like Russian, Nikolai Read more ...
David Nice
Let's suppose that off-centre genius among opera directors Richard Jones had been asked to bring his imagination to bear on Sir Colin Davis's latest Verdi-in-concert. I imagine he might have weighed up leading men, chorus and the conductor's unexpected blend of manicure with flash alongside swathes of masterful beauty, and decided to follow up his 1940s Windsor Falstaff at Glyndebourne with a 1970s Otello set in Surbiton.As things rather stiffly stood on the concert platform racial issues, Love thy Neighbour-style or otherwise, could be left behind. There were instead two pressing questions Read more ...
David Nice
To summon spirits from the vasty deep is the ambition of too many overloaded contemporary scores. George Crumb is better than most at getting those spirits to come when he calls, yet even he touches the transcendental more surely the fewer instruments he engages. That, at least, seemed the conclusion to draw from the latest of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's perilous but admirable "Total Immersion" days exposing a curious audience to the style of one composer, and here giving us the chance to compare the grandiose and the intimate. If the intimate won hands down, that's no reason to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical music to a general audience today - he calls the status quo into question, and he may be right. So he turned a concert programme into a video show, focusing on Musorgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Schumann’s Kinderszenen, to which would be set a visual installation around him and his piano.There is already a CD and DVD set out of this, which I Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The charismatic St Petersburg-born Vasily Petrenko has really been turning things around at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since he took over as Principal Conductor in 2005. With both standards and audiences on the up he has embarked upon his first major recording project – to record all 15 Shostakovich Symphonies for the Naxos label.Two releases are now available and in this exclusive podcast he talks to Edward Seckerson about the project in general and the symphonies in particular. The 11th “The Year 1905” makes extensive use of revolutionary songs and graphically portrays the Read more ...