Bruckner
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony No 9 (with Finale completed by Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca) Berliner Philharmoniker/Sir Simon Rattle(EMI)Anton Bruckner’s last symphony is near perfect in its three-movement form. The realisation that the Finale was left almost complete after Bruckner’s death in 1896 is something you’d rather not confront. The vast Adagio closes in a mood of such otherworldly serenity that it’s difficult to imagine anything following it. We’ll get to that last movement later; programme your CD player to play the first three tracks alone and you’ve a very decent conventional Bruckner Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony no 5 Lucerne Festival Orchestra/Claudio Abbado (Accentus DVD)This is a remarkable performance of a famously intractable work. You may think you can cope with the massive scale of Bruckner’s final three symphonies, but the Fifth always seems to me the most unwieldy. The gear shifts, the changes of dynamic from pianissimo to ear-splittingly loud seem more pronounced than ever. And the tunes are starker, less ingratiating. Claudio Abbado’s pacing, his shrewd handling of structure are rock solid, and he does make the piece sing, cohere in a way that I’ve not heard before. Read more ...
geoff brown
Noticed that nip in the air recently? The reason now is obvious: conductor Osmo Vänskä, the brisk wind from Minnesota, has blown into town, challenging London’s orchestral musicians to give beyond their best and uncover new layers in repertory works they previously assumed they knew backwards. Last year, the London Philharmonic sweated blood with the Minnesota Orchestra’s rigorous conductor over Sibelius’s symphonies; last night, in a one-off, orchestra and conductor faced up to Bruckner and his Fourth Symphony, the Romantic. The result wasn’t universally liked. An aggrieved gent, Read more ...
David Nice
Pundits have always yoked architecture and Bruckner together, touting void and mass at the expense of the dynamic experience music ought to be. Abbado and his Lucerne Festival Orchestra favoured sinuous instability in the Fifth Symphony earlier this week, making the very foundations gyre and gimble. Relatively solid ground last night was due to a more sober conductor and Bruckner symphony: a mixed blessing. The grand design, in fact, came from Leif Ove Andsnes in Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, making overall sense of a work which has always seemed swooningly resistant to it.If that meant Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We're living through a golden age of Bruckner conducting. A revolutionary age. Young sparks like Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Ilan Volkov are doing extraordinary things with the Austrian's music, experimenting with speeds and phrasing, reshaping him in a more extraterrestrial, more lithe and modern mould. All of which means that trying to get yourself noticed conducting Bruckner in the 2010s is a bit like trying to get yourself noticed as a footballer in 1970s Brazil. Good luck.But before we got a chance to assess whether the living legend Claudio Abbado made the grade in his Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ravel: Complete Music for Violin and Piano Alina Ibragimova, Cédric Tiberghien (Hyperion)Ravel’s output for violin and piano clocks in at around 50 minutes, so there’s a generous bonus on this CD in the shape of Guillaume Lekeu’s Violin Sonata. Lekeu, a pupil of Cesar Franck, died in 1894 aged 24 and his sonata was written for the great Eugene Ysaÿe. For Lekeu, good music was all about feeling, not charm. He was so highly strung that hearing the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan at Bayreuth caused him to faint and be carried unconscious from the theatre. His sonata is an accomplished piece, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
David Fray certainly has the locks to be a piano virtuoso (eat your heart out, Franzi). And he has the looks, the troubled brow, the pallor and a suitably eccentric manner (the Glenn Gould hunch and hum came out for all the runs). But does he have the hands?He definitely has hands. And on last night's viewing they were the right hands for Mozart. The understated Piano Concerto in C major K503 has never been the most popular of Mozart's concertos. Eschewing virtuosity and outward emotion for sunny but sensitive inward mooching, the work requires an especially careful and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Landscape painting may be dominated by the Dutch. But in music it is the Austrians who know best how to evoke the majesty of the great outdoors. In the first of last night's two Proms, one of the most awesome of Anton Bruckner's snow-capped symphonies, number five in B flat major, accompanied a new high climb through the Tyrol from fellow Austrian Thomas Larcher for two great musical off-pisters: violinist Viktoria Mullova and cellist Matthew Barley.What was most peculiar about this concert was how the 19th-century Bruckner and contemporary Larcher seemed to have switched shoes. It was Read more ...
David Nice
Honour your senior master conductors: there aren't so many of them left now. Abbado and Haitink spring most readily to mind, but orchestral musicians may also nominate Neeme Järvi, who celebrated his 74th birthday last week. A passionate patriot and the man his country voted "Estonian of the Century" in 2000, he proudly sports the colours of the national flag in concert attire by virtue of a natty added blue handkerchief. But since he emigrated from Estonia in 1980 and had his name wiped from the Soviet recording label, his career has been truly international, his discography probably a world Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It was Groundhog Day. Murray Perahia, due to play the Schumann Piano Concerto last night under Bernard Haitink, was indisposed and at the last minute Maria João Pires rushed in with Mozart 27. Just the same happened in 2006, strangely enough, with exactly the same three artists and orchestra. As you ponder that for a coincidence, what this shows is the powerful bonds that exist between musicians, between Haitink and these two pianists, whose virtues have much in common: impeccable lucidity and light-filled emotion.But it didn’t help last night’s programme at all unfortunately. For this Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Popping up on royal wedding day from the Niebelheim where they spend most of their working life, the WNO Orchestra brought with them a birth-and-death programme: hatch and dispatch, rather than match. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was a thank-you present to Cosima for their baby son, born out of wedlock; Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony turned into an epitaph for Wagner when he died in 1883, though most of it was written while he was still alive but ailing.Might they have planned it differently had they known? Wedding marches and arrivals of queens of Sheba would have drawn the Valleys coach parties; Read more ...
graham.rickson
This weekend's classical highlights comprise an eloquent tribute to a 20th-century master, entertaining cabaret songs from Weimar-era Berlin and some sublime Bruckner choral music recorded by an Edinburgh choir.Music of Tribute: Alban Berg Ieva Jokubaviciute (piano) plays works by Berg, Scelsi, Apostle, Ali-Zadeh, Finney and Gilboa (Labor Records)
Having already focused on composers as diverse as Villa-Lobos and Scarlatti, the next disc in this series from Labor Records mixes two seminal early works by Berg with pieces composed in tribute. Alban Berg’s fusion of Modernism and fin-de-siècle Read more ...