BBCSO
alexandra.coghlan
It’s at times like this that I give thanks for the Proms. Who else would (or could) have put together a programme pairing Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique with an 18th-century sonic fantasy, or topped it off with a substantial UK premiere? A bit bonkers on the page, it remained so in performance. But the dramatic logic was absolutely sound; forget a stroll in the Swiss Alps or on Italian hillsides, these were musical journeys of a more primal kind, tugging at the thread of the human psyche and following it down to its darkest depths.Hell, according to a certain French authority, may be “other Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The ideal First Night of the Proms sets the tone for the season, perhaps flagging up some of the themes to be followed up later, offering a blend of novelty and familiarity, and preferably ending with a roof-raising choral blockbuster. This programme successfully ticked those boxes, but took until the second half to really catch light.Unlike last year, which took place under the shadow of a terrorist in France, the 2017 edition could be more straightforwardly celebratory. And unlike the Last Night, although there are First Night conventions, there was no danger of the tail of licensed foolery Read more ...
Robert Beale
It may not have had the symbolism of the Ariana Grande concert just down the road, but in its own way the joint Hallé/BBC Philharmonic performance of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder said as much about Manchester as the rock jamboree did. It was originally meant to be a birthday party for Sir Mark Elder, 70 just two days before, and there was something of a celebration still, though with bag searches on the way into the Bridgewater Hall (pictured below) and awareness of all that had happened the feeling was naturally muted.Sir Thomas Allen’s brief speech before the performance summed up a sense of Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Made from girders, say the brewers of an infamous Scottish fizzy drink. If you could siphon the music of Edgard Varèse into a can, that’s what it would taste like. Blunt, acrid, inimitable, fizzing with closely guarded, possibly unpleasant ingredients. The danger was that exposure to his entire output in one day would prove no more palatable than chugging through a two-litre bottle of Irn-Bru.Thanks to some sensitive programming and superbly prepared performances, however, the BBC’s “Total Immersion Day” did not entail saturation. Instead, the indomitable strength of a personality, and a Read more ...
David Nice
Bomb-dropping is the new black again in Trump's dysfunctional America. Awareness of that contributed to the crackling cloud of dynamic dread hanging over last night's concert staging of John Adams's opera-oratorio - my description, not his - about the July 1945 desert testing of the plutonium bomb under the supervision of self-divided Robert Oppenheimer, an American Faust. But then the music's insistent stepwise descents towards the centre of the earth, in various modes and illuminated colours, the claustrophobic volume of much of the variegated score in the no-escape close-ups of the Read more ...
David Nice
Not your usual blockbuster for Holy Week, this. In other words, neither of the Bach Passions but a Requiem, and not – these days, at any rate – one of the more often-performed ones (it's not among the 79 works listed in The BBC Proms Guide to Great Choral Works). Dvořák's laments and optimisms may not soar as consistently as Verdi's, but the (late) style is invariably the man here, and the pay-off for a broken back in the early stages is a bigger healing later on and a final cathartic lament. Certainly no conductor could be more devoted to Dvořák's steady wonders than the great Jiří Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A new opera from Peter Eötvös is a major event. More than any other composer today, he has the ability to create sophisticated contemporary music that supports and enriches sung drama. This concert presented the UK premiere of his Senza sangue, a short, one-act work for just two singers and orchestra. It proved an ideal vehicle of the composer’s unique talents, and the work was given an excellent performance by conductor Simone Young and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Eötvös himself is also a conductor, and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle is central to his repertoire. Senza sangue is intended as a Read more ...
David Nice
It's official: if you want to be guaranteed an infallible musical adrenalin boost in London, you can always be sure to find it with Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo and his BBC Symphony Orchestra. And it's not just a question of splashy excitement: Oramo is a rigorous rehearser. Detlev Glanert's fiendish new tone poem Megaris would not have been half as vivid or pleasurable without extraordinary preparation. As for Nielsen and Sibelius, there is no conductor in the world I'd rather hear today in their music than Oramo.This was a concert of journeys, sea-girt in the first half, with plenty of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The BBC Symphony Orchestra has continued its long-standing support of British contemporary music with this première of a new commission, Michael Zev Gordon’s Violin Concerto for violinist Carolin Widmann. Gordon’s music deals in abstracts – new and old, familiar and unfamiliar, simple and complex – but with an unusual directness and clarity of expression. The concerto is not a virtuoso showpiece, but rather an exploration of the lyrical and expressive qualities of Widmann’s playing. It proved an ideal match, with Widmann here making the best possible case for the new work.Widmann’s tone, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Send in the paradoxes. Richard Rodney Bennett (1936-2012) had been so obsessed as a young man by music of the avant-garde, he would hitch-hike to Darmstadt to be in the same room as his (then) idols Berio, Maderna, and Boulez. He and Cornelius Cardew premiered important works by Boulez in the UK. And yet this was the same man who would later write, sing and play a cabaret song, “Early to Bed”, based on an endearing habit of Blossom Dearie.This was a composition student thrilled to receive his first film commission – to score a film glorifying the robustness of British insurance – and who Read more ...
David Nice
Has there ever been a more pertinent time to revive the poetic mythologies of Brecht and Weill? The writer said that the good-life-for-dollars city of Mahagonny was not exclusively an American state of mind and should be set in any country where it's performed. But the inverted morality tale of The Seven Deadly Sins explicitly references seven American cities. And with lines like (in the Auden/Kallman translation) "If you show your offence at injustice, Mr Big will show he's offended", it's very much of the moment. Add a performer of colossal magnetism like Storm Large, the slickest Weillian Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Lest we forget. On Flanders’ Fields. For the Fallen. No one does stiff-upper-lip, buttoned-up remembrance quite like the English. Since its composition only a little over half a century ago, the War Requiem has become our national anthem for the departed. When Britten’s hastily greasepainted collage of Wilfrid Owen and the best bits of Mozart and Verdi (not to mention Berlioz) is retired every so often, something more muted is generally preferred for chilly November evenings: Fauré, or at a stretch Duruflé, Requiems as sympathetic to sing as they are to listen to, with melodies as sweet as a Read more ...