BBCSO
Peter Quantrill
Opening It’s All About Piano!, a short but packed festival shared between Kings Place and the Institut français in Kensington, Mikhail Rudy made a rare appearance in the UK. The premise was unusual if hardly revolutionary, a meeting of music and film in which it was not obvious which was the accompanying medium. Was Rudy the silent-film pianist, or were the movies illustrative of latent narratives in Janáček and Musorgsky? Neither. And therein lay the recital’s success.It was back in 2012 that the Cité de la Musique in Paris commissioned from the Quay Brothers a film adaptation of Kafka’ Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Pierre Boulez sits in the back of a car as it drives across Westminster Bridge. He is talking about the audience appeal of his music, and he is characteristically direct. If the performance is good, and the situation is right, he insists, then audiences will come. That was back in 1968. The interview was featured in one of the documentaries that began today’s event, and it proved prescient. Boulez at 90, the day-long festival of music by the BBC Symphony Orchestra's former chief conductor, was well planned (by the BBCSO) and well performed. And the audiences came: every event was well Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ruperto Chapí: String Quartets 1 and 2 Cuarteto Latinoamericano (Sono Luminus)Think string quartet and you tend to think Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart. Maybe Bartók and Shostakovich. But generally something respectable, well-behaved and Northern European. Not Spanish, unless it's the one by Ravel. So you need to make the acquaintance of Ruperto Chapí. He came to prominence in the late 19th century as a zarzuela composer. Born near Alicante in 1851, he trained in Rome and Paris, returning to Spain in 1880. In the years immediately before his death in 1909 he composed four string quartets, a Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The BBC Radio 3 announcer came on stage to introduce the concert and promised us "the 100 minutes" of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony in the second half. Some of us smiled and assumed he (or his scriptwriter) had made a howler. Last time the Eighth was done in London, Jukka-Pekka Saraste led a vigorous account, not unduly rushed, taking under 75 minutes. The announcer, did we but know it, was giving us fair warning. Three hours later, boos and cheers mingled as the Brahmsian figure of Leif Segerstam shuffled off stage, wreathed in unBrahmsian smiles. London audiences boo at horrid German purveyors Read more ...
David Nice
Hair-raising guaranteed or your money back: that might have been a publicity gambit, had there been one, for Sakari Oramo’s latest journey with the BBC Symphony Orchestra around a Nielsen symphony. That he knows the ropes to scale the granite cliff face of the Danish composer’s Fourth, “Inextinguishable”, Symphony was not in doubt (he gave a shattering performance with his own City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the 1999 Proms). Less expected was his confounding of much-maligned Barbican acoustics with layered impressionism in a Sibelius tone-poem and Zemlinsky songs, and of an utterly Read more ...
David Nice
Rattle and the Berliners went home at the beginning of the week with vine-leaves in their hair. There's now something else to celebrate. Exactly one week on from the second concert in their Sibelius cycle, the Barbican hosted even more of an all-out stunner, starting with Sibelius no less compellingly conducted than the best of last week’s symphonic cycle and ending with a performance of the "Inextinguishable" Fourth Symphony by this year’s other 150th birthday composer, the great Dane Carl Nielsen, which electrified from start to finish.In his first ever concert with a major London orchestra Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
If what you wanted to do was go out to the middle of the Mexican desert, invert the Cross and dip it in blood, screaming obscenities all the while, surrounded by a sunburnt band of fellow travellers all off their heads on mescalin, Tutuguri is definitely the music you’d want to do it to. Which is OK, because those are pretty much the images conjured up by Antonin Artaud’s poem-radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God, which prompted Wolfgang Rihm to make a two-hour instrumental setting of this "Rite of the Black Sun" for large orchestra, taped chorus, howling vocalist (Leigh Melrose) Read more ...
David Nice
Was 1911 the best ever year for music? Works premiered or composed then include Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and the Tenth Symphony he’d completed in outline by the time of his death that May, Sibelius’s most austere masterpiece, the Fourth – for which the little oddity which opened last night’s concert, The Dryad, sounded like a sketch – and Nielsen’s Third, self-subtitled “Espansiva” but in this performance more like the “Inexhaustible” to blaze a path for the “Inextingishuable” Fourth. Even Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto of 1909, Read more ...
David Nice
Offshoots of the Venezuelan El Sistema’s worldwide dissemination as well as other youth and music projects continued to bloom and grow in 2014. The morning after what was the orchestral concert of the year for many who caught it, Alexandra Coghlan (see below) and myself included, players of the European Union Youth Orchestra reconvened in the Albert Hall to workshop three classics with musicians from nine British youth orchestras and London schools.How proud the EUYO's founding music director Claudio Abbado would have been of this ongoing good work (he died, as if we could forget, this year Read more ...
David Nice
How disorienting it is to find century-old works in the concert repertoire of which you can still say “I’ve never heard anything like it”. That must have been the reaction of most audience members last night to Tuscan-German composer Ferruccio Busoni’s 85-minute symphony-concerto for piano, orchestra and male voice choir, since only a few will have caught what classical anoraks tell me was its only other London performance in recent years, at the 1988 Proms.This misleadingly named Piano Concerto crowned a magnificent triptych of a concert programme centred around the Janus-headed year 1902, Read more ...
David Nice
Had the BBC Symphony Orchestra been at full stretch, rather than in the neoclassical and otherwise selective formations of last night’s concert, it might have outnumbered the live audience. Perhaps I exaggerate, but not much; this was never going to be a box-office hit. A big-name soloist might have made a difference. But just about every orchestral principal last night was a star, thanks to the cornucopia of solos in Respighi’s Trittico botticelliano and Strauss’s Suite from Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Besides, the programming was clever and satisfying, no doubt about it, with the blue skies Read more ...
David Nice
What Anne-Sophie Mutter is to the violin, Alison Balsom to the trumpet and Sabine Meyer to the clarinet, so is Sioned Williams to the harp. Though Meyer had the glass-ceiling distinction of being the first woman in the Berlin Philharmonic, Williams’s service to the BBC Symphony Orchestra has been longer (nearly 25 years so far as principal harp). And while all four artists have had major new works composed for them, the harpist’s commission of six pieces to celebrate her 60th birthday would seem to be a record. And who else would have part-remortgaged her home to pay for the enrichment, an Read more ...