Debussy
David Nice
At first it all felt too much. In addition to the garish red arum lilies either side of the platform, an overwhelming scent of eau de Cologne from a neighbour and the always hard-to-fight Wigmore Hall torpor were our diva's pink and purple attire, her flashing jewels, and above all that opulent voice, which even in recitals is more accustomed to bigger spaces and still seemed at times to be channelling her demented Salome from The Rest is Noise festival's opening night.Yet she had a pianist in fellow Finn Ville Matvejeff well up to a certain sacred-monster monumentalism, and by the interval Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Zipangu. What a name for a piece of music. Such a strange and suggestive collection of vowels and consonants. Such a musical string of sounds. A fascinating name. The name, in fact, the programme told me, for Japan during the time of Marco Polo. The life of the composer of the work, Claude Vivier, is fascinating, too, in a grisly way. While completing an opera about a young man who stabs a stranger to death, Vivier was murdered in his Paris flat by a rent boy. Incredible story, incredible-sounding work; you can see why programmers are increasingly attracted to Vivier. I just wish I enjoyed Read more ...
graham.rickson
Debussy: Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune, La Mer, Images Anima Eterna Brugge/Jos van Immerseel (Outhere)Is it worth going to the trouble of tackling Debussy’s orchestral music on period instruments? Jos van Immerseel’s versatile band have already given us historically informed Ravel and Poulenc, and this Debussy anthology has delicious moments. These pieces are already miracles of orchestral refinement. Here, the textures are noticeably clearer and we get to wallow in the sounds made by antique woodwinds and narrow-bore piston horns. Oboes and bassoons come off best – plangent, reedy Read more ...
David Nice
Want to learn more about 20th century music in action? Starting tomorrow, you could lose yourself in the labyrinth of the Southbank’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival, and plough your way through Alex Ross’s monumental but partisan study of that name. Or you could learn a lot in a short space of time from John Adams’s mini-residency with the LSO at the Barbican. There’s an even more essential book to read alongside it, the composer’s Hallelujah Junction, following an insider’s path to finding his own voice after encounters with the rigours of the 12-tone system, Cage-style anything-goes Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's not completely unheard of what Sir Simon Rattle did at the start of last night's Prom, where he elided two familiar works - Ligeti's colouristic classic Atmosphères and the Prelude to Act One of Wagner's Lohengrin - into a seamless whole, beating without stopping from one into the other. But it was still pretty breathtaking. With the Wagner becoming an integral part of, and dreamy payoff to, Ligeti's wheezy Modernist nightmare, the works were transformed. In their place stood one single work: a strange new musical wonder by Ligetiwagner. It was the most magical opening to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
After the all-singing, all-dancing, all-helicoptering brilliance of Stockhausen Mittwoch aus Licht, the dry routine of an opera in concert didn't seem a very enticing prospect. That's the problem with this year's Cultural Olympiad. We're becoming very spoilt by it. What should have been a mouth-watering prospect - a fantastic cast performing a great opera - suddenly began to feel run-of-the-mill when compared to the once-in-a-lifetime event that was Mittwoch. But my concerns were short-lived.I saw and loved the original ENO production of Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten's brilliant Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Can this really be only an afternoon’s travelling away from traffic-choked London? I’m waist-deep in wild blue lupins on a verdant Swiss mountain looking for a concert hall.A cow’s bell nearby is slightly frustrating - beyond the lupins, I guess, is another steep field with the track I need; a paraglider high above me is out of earshot, though they’d be able to see the hall better than I can. I’m trying to get to a masterclass by that captivating operatic soprano of the past, Ileana Cotrubas, who is here as one of the Verbier Festival’s habitual stars-of-stars helping out rising talents. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
How silly an armchair looks in the Royal Albert Hall - like a rubber duck floating in the Pacific. Yet how right it was for those behind this excellent semi- staged Proms performance of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande to try to recreate a bit of fin-de-siècle intimacy for this most intensely intimate of operas. And how appropriate also for there to be a couch on stage in a work that is, and has always been, a psychoanalyst's dream.But it wasn't just the furniture that suggested that we were being given entry to an interior world. Everything about the way this symbolist drama played Read more ...
graham.rickson
Debussy: Préludes, Trois Nocturnes Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune Alexei Lubimov (with Alexei Zuev) (ECM)Historically informed readings of 20th-century music no longer surprise us; Simon Rattle has recently performed La Mer on period instruments and the quest for authenticity continues to advance forward chronologically. Pianist Alexei Lubimov’s Debussy Préludes are played on a restored 1925 Bechstein and a Steinway built in 1913; it’s a surprise to read that Debussy, unlike Ravel and Fauré, preferred a warmer, German sound to the more translucent, lighter tone of pianos by Pleyel Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The repertoire of the OAE is creeping away from the 18th century and into the 20th with such unashamed eagerness, it wouldn't be at all surprising to see them throwing up an urtext edition of "Hit Me Baby One More Time" in a few seasons. Last night, we got 20th-century French impressionism, including a work that was premiered in 1933. Some might call this expansion into the last century bold. Others greedy. But in the hands of their guest conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, it's also never anything less than fascinating.Though it doesn't immediately tally on paper, the match-up made Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2 Peter Hill (piano) (Delphian)Book 2 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier doesn’t often appear without Book 1. It’s sometimes unfairly perceived as drier, more academic than its predecessor. Bach’s didactic aim for Book 1 (“for the profit and use of musical youth desiring instruction”) remains apposite. Sensible pianists won’t underplay this, and what you want to hear is something akin to an interesting lecture delivered by a charismatic guru. And Peter Hill fits the bill – hearing him play Bach is a little like listening to a friendly primary school Read more ...