20th century
graham.rickson
An unreleased live recording from a much missed conductor provides heartwarming food for the soul, while another podium giant brings musicality to uncompromising Modernism, aided by a phenomenal pianist. Meanwhile, a Hungarian exile in Hollywood takes a break from composing film scores and thinks of home.Dvořák: Symphonic Variations, Symphony No 8 London Philharmonic Orchestra/Mackerras (LPO)
One of those rare conductors universally liked by orchestral musicians, Sir Charles Mackerras’s untimely death last year hasn’t stopped the steady stream of reissues and live recordings. The Philharmonia Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
A subtly haunting and brilliantly composed photograph by André Kertész lives on as a wistfully memorable image of exile: in Lost Cloud, 1937, a small, isolated cloud drifts we know not where next to a New York skyscraper. Kertész is one of the quintet of Hungarian Jewish photographers who are acknowledged as among the greatest of the last century. Kertész, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa, Martin Munkácsi and Brassaï are the most familiar among the staggeringly accomplished Hungarian photographers who feature in the Royal Academy’s exhibition Eyewitness.It is to the Transylvanian Brassaï, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s the oldest coup de théâtre in the postmodernist playbook – the curtain rises to reveal an audience staring back at us – but still, in the opening seconds of Willy Decker’s Peter Grimes, one of the most effective. Our theatrical doubles here are sinister creatures indeed, massed rows of sombre Victorians whose brutal Christianity is no less severe than the angles of John Macfarlane’s set. As gazes meet across the courtroom in that moment we confront ourselves, discover ourselves in the folk of the Borough, implicated absolutely in their tragedy. Returning for its first Covent Garden Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we’ve a brilliant, budget-priced box of Beethoven symphonies played on authentic instruments. It’ll remind you of how much fun there is to be had with this most iconic of composers. A historical recording of a famous cellist reappears, but the best reason to listen to the disc is to hear a famous Czech conductor achieving miracles. And there’s an entertaining, educative DVD featuring a conductor who’s in his element when addressing an audience.Beethoven: Complete Symphonies La Chambre Philharmonique/Krivine (Naïve)
Beethoven symphonies played on modern instruments feel more and more Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"I used to be able to run down these," whispered a wobbly 77-year-old Harrison Birtwistle to friends as he stumbled down the stairs to the Queen Elizabeth Hall stage to take his bow at last night's London Sinfonietta concert (for some inexplicable reason part of Ray Davies's Meltdown series at the Southbank). Birtwistle and his former partner-in-crime Peter Maxwell Davies - and their feral musical creations - used also to be very good at running foul of the musical establishment. For some reason, Sirs, Harrison Birtwistle, CH, and Peter Maxwell Davies, CBE, Master of the Queen's Music, don't Read more ...
fisun.guner
Who were the Vorticists? Were they significant? Were they any good? And does this little-known British avant-garde movement – if it can be called anything as cohesive - really deserve a major survey at Tate Britain? Many of the group’s paintings never survived the First World War, and nor did one of its most talented supporters, the precocious French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; two of the most talented artists who did – David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein – were never signatories to its manifesto, and Epstein, for one, distanced himself; and, in its short life, there was only one Read more ...
graham.rickson
A 20th-century Austrian symphony receives a memorable first recording, coupled with a witty, rarely played slice of Schubert. Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is heard in a powerful reading recorded in the Royal Festival Hall. And we’ve an intelligent, logical coupling of two ballets commissioned by Diaghilev.Mahler: Symphony No 2 Resurrection LPO and Choir/ Jurowski, with Adriana Kučerova (soprano) and Christianne Stotijn (mezzo soprano) (LPO)
The LPO’s own label have already released a staggering performance of this work under the late Klaus Tennstedt, so you do wonder nervously how this Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we’ve some pioneering, trailblazing Mahler with a dramatic twist, courtesy of a conductor who mentored Leonard Bernstein. Elsewhere, there are some disconcerting, dark sounds from a youthful German composer, and a supremely entertaining disc of highly theatrical vocal works courtesy of Paul Hillier’s immaculately drilled Theatre of Voices. Turn on, tune in and drop out while listening to Cathy Berberian’s cartoon-inspired Stripsody, and consider the very question of what constitutes music.Mahler: Symphony No 3, Debussy: La Mer Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie Orchester/Dimitri Mitropoulos ( Read more ...
stephen.walsh
No point in going to WNO’s Turandot expecting to see images of old Beijing, for all the charming lady in a Chinese floral hat on the programme cover. The curtain goes up on the inside of an enormous galvanised dustbin festooned with photos of what might be lads from the football team but are actually Turandot’s victims to date. Calaf is a vagrant, Turandot a blue-suited Rosa Klebb, Ping, Pang and Pong fascisti bureaucrats in coloured suits, the “Popolo di Pekino” (both sexes) shirted and tied office workers, and so forth. Perfumes of the East? Forget it. This is Beijing Mussolini-style.Like Read more ...
graham.rickson
This Saturday we’ve a new recording of a famous Russian symphony played by an Italian orchestra under their London-based principal conductor. There’s a rare Shakespearean opera written in the 1950s by a Swiss master using a German text. And a Scottish composer celebrates his 60th birthday with an invigorating collection of piano and chamber works.Rory Boyle: Music for Solo Piano, Phaethon’s Dancing Lesson
James Willshire (piano), Bartholdy Trio (Delphian)
As a 12-year-old I sang in the first performance of Scottish composer Rory Boyle’s children’s opera Alfege. Dressed in grey tights and Read more ...
josh.spero
Richard Nagy's gallery has said that they don't want millions of people rushing to see their show of Egon Schiele's drawings of women - it's only a small second-floor space on New Bond Street after all, and 50 fragile pictures crowd the walls. But don't let that dissuade you from seeing one of the shows of the year.Schiele instantly summons up consumptive young women, déshabillées, angular, all the colours of livid bruises. His pencil marks are as sharp as the malnourished women's ribs. This show, however, shows why he was able to turn tawdry subject material into transporting art.
The Read more ...
judith.flanders
Max Bill might be the missing link in modern art. He died only in 1994, yet he studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s, taught by Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Kandinsky. It is hard to imagine that someone who was working at full strength less than 20 years ago could have a past that is so strongly entwined with these legendary names – hard to imagine, that is, until one looks at the work displayed in this fine retrospective, which even so manages to encompass only five decades of a nearly seven-decade-long career.A Swiss artist (he was one of the few, or perhaps Read more ...