Classical music
Simon Thompson
Handel probably wrote his cantata Clori, Tirsi e Fileno in 1707 while he was in the service of the Marquis of Ruspoli in Rome. It tells the story of the shepherdess, Clori, who has two lovers that she plays off against one another to no great effect, everything culminating in an ending that’s suspiciously neat even by Handel’s standards.The Dunedin Consort (pictured below by Andy Catlin with John Butt in an earlier concert) are the best conceivable advocates for it, with their silky strings and star soloists, particularly Matthew Truscott’s fiendish violin obbligato and Toby Carr’s beguiling Read more ...
graham.rickson
Shostakovich: Symphonies; Concertos; Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District Yuja Wang (piano), Baiba Skride (violin), Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Boston Symphony Orchestra/Andris Nelsons (DG)Shostakovich: The Symphonies Gürzenich-Orchester Köln/Dmitrij Kitajenko (Capriccio)Here are two big Shostakovich boxes, released to mark the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. Dmitri Kitajenko’s symphony cycle, a mixture of studio and live performances, was recorded between 2002 and 2004. Originally boxed up as a set of SACDs. Capriccio’s budget priced reissue gives us just the stereo mix, the engineering Read more ...
David Nice
Pianist Bruce Liu wasn’t the only star soloist last night, though he certainly had the most notes to play. Attention was riveted by at least five Philharmonia members and their maverick principal conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali as percussionist in a joyful Prom.First off the mark was Antoine Siguré, probably the most compelling orchestral timpanist I’ve ever encountered. Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, daughter of two of Los Folkloristica’s founding members, gifted him solo rollickings which gave her Antrópolis the nature of a concerto, punctuated by snatches of music from Mexico City’s Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
For Delius – then a young man, visiting Norway in the late 1880s to walk in its mountains – his first encounter with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra was nothing less than an epiphany. Already high on the grandeur of nature in a country defined by its shimmering fjords and austere mountains, he found the text to be an intoxicating affirmation of the glories of the world in a humanistic universe.It took him several years to complete A Mass of Life, the choral work defined by many as his masterpiece, which was eventually brought to the public attention in 1909 at a London performance Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a Proms paradox that’s familiar to Early Music fans. Some works are too challenging – too big, too expensive, too uncommercial, too obscure – to do anywhere else. The trouble is, the Royal Albert Hall is the absolute last place you’d want to hear them.So you go, and half-hear, half-imagine a performance that requires you to fill in the blanks of acoustic, space and detail, superimposing cathedrals, ducal staterooms or Venetian balconies as required. It’s not nothing, but it’s not the full Monteverdi either.Luckily for us, Hervé Niquet and his Concert Spirituel had done quite a lot of Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Right from the bracing brass fanfare that began this Sea Symphony, you know exactly where you were: right in the midst of the deck, with the spray in your face and the wind in your hair. The London Symphony Orchestra is midway through a residency at the Edinburgh International Festival. They’ve been the classiest musical act to grace the Usher Hall stage so far this festival, and this bracing performance of Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony has been the best thing they’ve done, not least because they fully grasped the scale of the piece and the many moods it goes through. This Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Leonard Elschenbroich and Alexei Grynyuk crafted a fine programme for their EIF recital, centring around Brahms’ relationship with the Schumanns. He famously met them in 1853, when Robert Schumann declared him the next great thing in German music. The following year, however, Robert attempted suicide, launching a decline that lasted until his death. Brahms stayed close to Clara until her death in 1896, in response to which he wrote the Vier ernste Gesänge. The only “originally scored” thing on the programme (★★★★) was Brahms’ Second Cello Sonata, which Grynyuk and Elschenbroich Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Water surged through this Prom from first spray to last drop. But there was nothing damp or diluted about Edward Gardner’s helmsmanship as he steered the London Philharmonic Orchestra through a succession of liquid rhapsodies: three from the early 20th century; one from 1993.Aigul Akhmetshina, the star mezzo (and ubiquitous Carmen) who sang in Ravel’s Shéhérazade song-cycle, went with the flow herself in a notably collegiate performance that impressively blended her own sumptuous instrument with the lush orchestration around the vocal line. On paper, this looked like an almost overloaded Read more ...
David Nice
Performers and public alike always treasure a beautiful and, in this case, remote setting for a music festival. But people matter as much as sense of place. When the players work together in various combinations for the duration, and tell you this is the highlight of their musical year, you know the achievement is utopian. And that was certainly the case with eight dynamic Bulgarian instrumentalists and three visitors new to the magic of Kovachevitsa.The Off the Beaten Path Chamber Music Festival isn’t the first Bulgarian institution to bring culture to this perfectly preserved but not Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Fresh from their triumph at the Proms, the Budapest Festival Orchestra arrived at the Edinburgh International Festival with a programme that centred on dance, and culminated in as fine a performance of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (the complete score, not the suite) as you’d hope to hear. This is music that the Budapest players have in their blood, and you could tell that in the way they conjured up sound that managed to be grimy and nasty but lush at the same time. Iván Fischer paced the manic opening more slowly than you’d expect, but he shaped the unfolding drama with masterful edge, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Ravel: La Valse Orchestre de Paris/Klaus Mäkelä (Decca)Rereading the composer’s memoirs and performing the Symphonie Fantastique have rekindled my interest in all things Berliozian, so this new album arrived at a good time. Bits of it are really impressive, Klaus Mäkelä audibly relishing some of Berlioz’s more outré effects. How could a 27 year-old from a non-musical background write something so radical? The first movement’s tonal shifts are brilliantly managed by Mäkelä – try the moment at 10’40” where the clouds suddenly descend, and note how he gives Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Say what you like about this year’s slimmer-than-usual Edinburgh International Festival, but when it has hit the spot, it has done so triumphantly. Nowhere has that so far been truer than in the piano playing, as this pair of concerts demonstrated. In the Queen’s Hall on Tuesday morning, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy joined forces in a programme of four-handed piano (★★★★★), sometimes on one keyboard and sometimes on two, that climaxed in a transcendent, dazzling, occasionally stupefying performance of Messiaen’s visionary Visions de l’Amen. From the very opening, Kolesnikov played Read more ...