Chopin
judith.flanders
Mikhail Fokine, choreographer to both West and East, looked forward and back, too. He studied in the old Imperial Theatre School when the tsars ruled Russia, and he was also Diaghilev’s creative genius at the Ballets Russes, moving dance into the 20th century before and after the Revolution. The Mariinsky, once his home, is a premier exponent of his multifaceted styles. Chopiniana, his 1907 “white” ballet (known in the West as Les Sylphides) (pictured right, photo V Baranovsky), can be inert, shapeless, lifeless. Indeed, it all too frequently is. Saddled with an unappealing score (Chopin Read more ...
mark.kidel
When Alfred Brendel first mentioned Kit Armstrong to me, in early 2008, I knew there was a film there. He was brimming with excitement: Kit had come to him with an interpretation of a Chopin Nocturne that displayed a command and maturity that was baffling considering Kit was 13 at the time of the recording. Alfred led me into his inner sanctum, a practice room filled to bursting with two Steinways, a large carved idol from New Guinea, Liszt’s death mask and a rich and varied collection of paintings and images, some of them revealing the pianist’s wicked Dadaist sense of humour. He slipped the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There must be at least 100 more interesting pianists in the concert world than Lang Lang, but perhaps he is just the best publicist around, because nothing else can explain why such a vacuous display as he gave last night at the Royal Festival Hall could bring a standing ovation. Most of the evening felt like being on a plushly cushioned chintz sofa with Tinkerbell, listening to Bach, Schubert and Chopin being served as a cream tea. Lang Lang Inspires is the slogan at the Southbank Centre all this week, but what is inspiring? His art - or just his vast skills as a public communicator, with 40 Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It had all the hallmarks of being an almighty car crash of an event. Barenboim? Chopin? Turbine Hall? You might as well have dumped the piano at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Actually, acoustically, it wasn't quite that bad. It sounded as if Barenboim was playing next door. Next door in France, that is. Or Germany. Which was where he and five members of the Berlin Staatskapelle had flown in from. Perhaps it was worth another go. Classical music recitals have never been properly tried in the Turbine Hall before (though similar things have and have failed). Certainly Barenboim wasn't to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last night Murray Perahia played Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin, and we heard, quite simply, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann and Chopin. Nothing more need be said, if one follows the Cordelia principle to love, and be silent.Still, as you insist, I will add that it was an ideally private experience between him and me, and I dare say, private between him and every other individual sitting in the Barbican Hall. Perahia, now 63, has always had an inclination towards translucency, for making himself the finest possible veil through which to show you the composers, and yet what Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month, we’ve some virtuoso pianola, Bruckner and Chopin get downsized, and there’s some full-fat Mahler. Rare American orchestral works rub shoulders with Mozart, and a Russian conductor gives his final performance. A British pianist tackles Ravel, and a Danish accordion player seeks Slavic inspiration. Brass players from San Francisco take on contemporary music, and Trio Mediaeval revive 13th-century polyphony from Worcester. And a young Norwegian brings Grieg to vivid life.CD of the Month Grieg: Chasing the Butterfly: Recreating Grieg’s 1903 Recordings and Beyond Sigurd Read more ...
David Nice
Born in 1945 to Russian parents in Tbilisi, Georgia, Elisabeth Leonskaja gave her first major recital at the age of 11 and went on to study at the Moscow Conservatory, emigrating from the Soviet Union to Vienna in 1978 and making a sensational Salzburg Festival debut a year later. Among several unsurpassable recordings are her partnership with the Borodin Quartet in Shostakovich's Piano Quintet, and she has always cited her duo work with the very choosy Richter as a formative influence in her musical life. Here they are playing the first movement of Mozart's Sonata facile K 545, with the Read more ...
David Nice
"Well, Kissin's the star of the show," opined the fatuous gentleman who rolled in late to my row after the first piece on the programme. Possibly not, I wanted to snap back, in the light of that very fine pianist's current erratic form. But in any case this celebrity-hunter had just missed one of the great conductors working effortless miracles of charm on Josef Suk's Scherzo fantastique, the extended lollipop lilt of which could quickly pall in lesser hands.
In any case, effortlessness and charm are hardly Yevgeny Kissin's strong suits, and both are needed if Chopin's early Second Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Mitsuko Uchida’s playing is a glorious collusion of intellect and fantasy. Her recitals are meticulously planned but seemingly unexpected with chosen pieces impacting upon each other in ways one might not have imagined. Three keyboard giants – Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin – were the meat of this recital with not an incidental or superfluous note to be found anywhere. No time off for good behaviour, no fillers, no jolly encores, just bags of unsettling subtext and moments of devastating introspection. Nobody does introspection quite like Uchida, nobody shrinks the Festival Hall quite like Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Five Easy Pieces is the nominal sibling to Easy Rider, which put Jack Nicholson a step from stardom in 1969. But Pieces, this 40th-anniversary reissue reminds you, was a very different film. The soundtrack is Patsy Cline, not Steppenwolf, and we first see Nicholson working in a hard hat, the music and garb of pro-‘Nam hippie-bashers in 1970. But the cultural action is mostly in Nicholson himself, and the simmering storm of dissatisfaction and high intelligence in his odd-angled, lean face, not often inclined here to split into that trademark super-smile.Director Bob Rafelson and producer Bert Read more ...
David Nice
Two pianists, one indisputably great and the other probably destined to become so, lined up last night to show us why the Proms at its best is a true festival, not just a gaggle of summer concerts. First there was the prince of pearly classicism, Paul Lewis, consolidating the democratic Beethoven he’s already established on CD withJiří Bělohlávek and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Then along came the queen of romantic night, Maria João Pires, to unfold a late-night brace of Chopin nocturnes. The whole, well-tempered experience left those of us lucky to be there walking on air.Let me confess that Read more ...
David Nice
So most of us blinked and missed Martha Argerich gliding into Kings Place's Argentine celebrations last week. Yet here I am writing again about this liveliest of venues' Chopin marathon, and like a would-be Prommer who joins the last night party without having been to the Albert Hall more than once in the season I'm culpable of marking the grand finale after experiencing only a slice of modest Cypriot pianist Martino Tirimo's 10 concerts devoted to our bicentenary boy. Never mind: both the encyclopedic recitals I did hear seemed to take us through a turbulent lifetime. That would be true just Read more ...