Debussy
geoff brown
“I don’t want to be a Cyclops,” Pierre Boulez said in 2010, faced with the prospect of conducting a Chicago concert with only one working eye. Eye troubles, alas, have continued to bedevil the octogenarian giant of contemporary music, which is why his current engagements with the London Symphony Orchestra – there’s also a tour to Paris and Brussels this week, and a second Barbican engagement next Tuesday - have fallen into the hands of a younger composer-conductor of advanced habits, the admirable Hungarian Peter Eötvös.And what good hands they are: not perhaps as fastidiously incisive, but Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Just a typical night at the ballet. The sun god rises with his goddesses, people play tennis and flirt in a garden, a handsome young chap struts his considerable stuff on a Twenties beach, and an array of white-tutu’d ballerinas perform deliciously difficult and exultantly accelerating steps. So many stories flit by in an evening of ballet, so many ideas and fancies, so many dancers skim through your vision. Debussy caresses your ear, majestic Stravinsky, teasing Milhaud, Lalo like a large stuffed brocade sofa. How is it that this kind of evening is not typical of the ballet?
English National Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was a lovely narrative to last night's CBSO concert. The muggy oppressiveness of Britten's Four Sea Interludes (and Passacaglia) appeared somehow explained by Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, then dissolved by the love letters that were the Strauss songs and then finally set free - psychologically and orchestrally - in Debussy's La Mer. Parallel to this, the great German tenor Jonas Kaufmann was being washed out to sea; his Mahler and Strauss songs were being lapped at from both directions by Debussy and Britten's portraits of the salty waters. Technically Kaufmann was anything but at Read more ...
ash.smyth
Who does the PR these days for Middle Eastern extremists? Whoever it is clearly wasn’t on board when the Palestine Liberation Front decided to whack the Achille Lauro. Or wasn’t aware that chucking a wheelchair-bound pensioner into the Med was the sort of move unlikely to garner widespread international support for the cause.It’s bemusing to me that anyone could interpret The Death of Klinghoffer as in any way anti-Semitic (anti-Israel, maybe…) or, for that matter, that anyone could consider it offensive were the opera to be found stridently anti-Palestinian-extremism. But, y’know, whatever. Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Sometimes the most disturbing images exist only in our imaginations - and so the questions posed in the preface to Bartók’s operatic masterpiece Duke Bluebeard’s Castle become especially pertinent: “Where did this happen - outside or within? Where is the stage - outside or within?” The answers, surely, lie “within”, making the prospect of a “semi-staged” climax to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia Bartók series, Infernal Dance, a potentially troubling one.There was a “set” - a grey-walled shell and a pendulous shard-like mobile whose mere presence had one fearing the worst. And so the first Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Czech Suite, Two Slavonic Dances Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics)It’s easy to become a little obsessed with obscure, underrated music. You bang on and on about works which you’re convinced are masterpieces which no one ever seems to play. Which means that it’s also easy to dismiss pieces of classical music which are genuinely popular. You think you know them so well as to never need to hear them again. Grieg’s Piano Concerto and Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony are perhaps the easiest of all to undervalue; they’re deservedly loved because Read more ...
David Nice
What do visiting German performers add to the Edinburgh International Festival's Auld (Scotland-France) Alliance thread? Simple: when they communicate as superbly as soprano Diana Damrau and Jonathan Nott's Bambergers, the music-making works at the highest level. The fact that Damrau enlisted French harpist Xavier de Maistre for one of the most singular song recitals I've ever heard, and that the symphony concert set Messiaenic pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard at its centre, simply gave us more for our money in a cavalcade of light to illuminate the grey tail-end of the festival.Damrau has Read more ...
David Nice
All aboard the chrome locomotive for composer-conductor Oliver Knussen’s annual magical mystery tour. You may notice rather few fellow passengers in the Albert Hall; that’s a given with this event (though the Proms could have thrown in and advertised one of Olly’s Top 10 OTT Favourites – I’ve heard him proclaim them - to drum up more trade). You may also find rather too many stops for change of crew. But so long as you sit forward to catch the results of his famously acute hearing, second only to Boulez’s, you’ll get something out of a long, unsexy ride.Part of the pleasure of multi-work Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
If much of the Austro-German repertoire is about hiking to a spiritual peak, the Franco-Spanish is about diving down to the orchestral depths. The music of Ravel, Debussy and Falla has beefy shoulders and powerful legs. But the vast watery expanse of the Royal Albert Hall is hard-going even for these expert paddlers. I've never seen anything by these composers that hasn't drowned in this space. So I came to last night's concert hoping that the BBC Philharmonic's new Spanish conductor, Juanjo Mena (he takes over officially next season), would show us all how to ride out these waters.He Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week we review Bellérophon, a rare Baroque opera from Lully which was exhumed by Christophe Rousset and performed for the first time last year, Debussy recorded live from the Barbican, and we answer the key question: how much is too much Percy Grainger? Would, for example, 19 discs be considered sufficient?Debussy: La mer, Jeux, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune London Symphony Orchestra/Gergiev (LSO Live)
If you don’t know Debussy’s 1913 tennis-inspired ballet Jeux, then start here. Performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with choreography by Nijinsky in May 1913, it flopped, and had Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It’s Holy Wednesday in Cuenca, and going round the corner into Cathedral Square I’m surrounded by hordes of guys in multicoloured mufti who look like the Ku Klux Klan, with unnecessarily pointy hoods. Twenty of them are carrying a heavy float with a large statue of Jesus on it. In Cuenca things are fairly austere, compared to other places where there’s a lot of self-whipping, or where, if you have sin on your conscience, you may end up banging nails into your hands, as in Mexico. Still there are alternative amusements – the Copa Del Rey final of Real Madrid v Barcelona is blaring out of bars Read more ...