Haydn
Gavin Dixon
Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra have made the Shostakovich Tenth their calling card. Their recent recording of the work on Deutsche Grammophon has received universal acclaim, and now they're making their first European tour together, performing the symphony in London, Salzburg, Lucerne and Paris. It’s a great choice, a work that plays to all their strengths, conductor and orchestra alike. But this varied programme also demonstrated other facets of this versatile and increasingly distinctive partnership.How refreshing to hear Haydn performed by a symphony orchestra, bold and Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the Scottish Chamber Orchestra the transition from its home in the Queen’s Hall to the much larger spaces of Usher Hall is not always a happy one. Earlier this season an experimental performance of Mahler’s fourth symphony lacked heft in the larger Edinburgh venue, for this listener at least, but would have swamped the smaller. Many disagreed.But no such worries with this joyful performance of Haydn’s The Creation. Although the orchestra of about 50 looked quite spare on the large stage, and the chorus a compact bunch in the middle of the choir stalls, the sound filled the space Read more ...
David Nice
Mahler once wrote that his symphonies were edifices built from the same stones, gathered in childhood. In each of the four recitals I’ve heard from Yevgeny Sudbin, he’s moved several of his repertoire cornerstones around to different effect in the piano-programme equivalents of a very large symphony orchestra playing a Mahler symphony: massive sonorities, total structural grasp, huge intelligence.Take the placing of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre as filtered through the virtuosic imaginations of Liszt, Horowitz and Sudbin himself. It looked last night as if it was going to be an official encore Read more ...
graham.rickson
Classical composers have always enjoyed depicting the implausible. Operas based on mythological subjects abound, creating near-impossible staging demands. Musical works based on science fiction are far rarer. Haydn's plodding opera Life on the Moon isn't one of his most scintillating works. More engaging is the first act of Janacek's comedy The Excursions of Mr Brouček, its pickled hero dreaming himself onto the surface of a moon inhabited by a colony of fey artists and intellectuals. The most tantalising of sci-fi operas never got beyond initial discussions: Stravinsky was so enchanted by Read more ...
David Nice
As I sat, engaged and occasionally charmed but not always as impressed as I’d been told I would be, through violinist-animateur Richard Tognetti’s lightish seven-course taster menu of string music with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, it was worth bearing two things in mind. One was that this happened to be merely the official zenith of a truly enlightened three-part project; on Monday, parts of the programme had been played first to educate all ages and later to grab a young audience in more relaxed mode as part of the OAE’s pioneering Night Shift series. The other qualification Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
I declare an interest. In the last 10 years or so the Scottish Ensemble has twice, at my invitation, visited the Borders village where I live, about 30 miles south of Edinburgh. On both occasions the ensemble performed a rich and challenging programme in front of a rural audience awestruck that such uncompromisingly competent music-making could descend on a village hall more accustomed to flower shows and badminton tournaments. As a promoter, I was amazed that the ensemble’s answer to my invitation was, without equivocation, “yes”. When the day came, a dozen players turned up, and with Read more ...
David Nice
You may be more familiar with the Italian title, Il mondo della luna, but chances are you won’t have seen this or any of Haydn’s other 16 operas. You haven’t missed much, at least until the last of his works as court composer to the Esterházy family, Armida, an "heroic drama" rather than the slim comedies which don’t seem to have inspired the composer to the heights of his symphonies and string quartets. Glyndebourne failed to trigger a revival with La fedeltà premiata in 1979 – my first acquaintance with the house as a teenager; young Simon Rattle was conducting – and more recently the Royal Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Adams: City Noir, Saxophone Concerto St. Louis Symphony/David Robertson, with Timothy McAllister (saxophone) (Nonesuch)There's a lot going on in John Adams's City Noir. Ideas come thick and fast, and for every few that are skilfully developed, another gets cast aside. The composer's description of this three movement symphony as “the soundtrack to an imagined noir film” fits nicely – though it's busier and more elaborately scored than most soundtracks. Best to think of noir in terms of subject matter rather than colour. Much of City Noir gleams and dazzles. We get blinding sunlight Read more ...
theartsdesk
He was not only a bracing conductor/harpsichordist pioneer in period-instrument authenticity, writes David Nice, but also a gentleman and a scholar. My only direct acquaintance with Christopher Hogwood, who died earlier this week at the age of 73, was in two projects dear to his heart: the recording of Handel’s Orlando, mentioned by its countertenor star James Bowman below as a highlight of his career, and his phenomenally well researched Haydn symphonies series, both for that handsomely logo-ed early music branch of Decca known as L’Oiseau-Lyre.Hogwood was very much a part of my own Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony no 8, Janáček: Symphonic Suite from Jenůfa Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck (Reference Recordings)Dvořák's Seventh has the Brahmsian drama, and the Ninth has the crowd-pleasing tunes. But the major key Eighth is the most radical, and Manfred Honeck's remarkable performance highlights its originality in some style. Honeck's interventionist approach won't be to all tastes, but he justifies every interpretive decision in his sleeve notes, and the musical results are pretty special. He sees the composer here as ''liberated from Germanic models... completely at Read more ...
David Nice
José Mourinho is Setúbal’s most famous son. Non-Portuguese readers are not expected to know the two other celebrities most feted by this extraordinary port city on the estuary of the River Sado, with miles of sandy beaches opposite where a school of dolphins resides and the lush national park of the Arrábida mountain range just to the west. Luísa Todi, the Portuguese mezzo who graced the court of Catherine the Great, gives her name to the lovely garden avenue which is the city’s most relaxed hub; poet Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage’s statue looks over the central square in his honour (“hardly Read more ...
graham.rickson
Haydn: Nelson Mass, Symphony no 102 Boston Baroque/Martin Pearlman (Linn)In a week bristling with geo-political tension, we need Haydn's "Mass for Troubled Times" more than ever. Here, Boston Baroque's natural trumpets blast out their tattoo in the Kyrie with a punch matched by that of the choir. Such a magnificent opening – the boldness due in part to Prince Esterházy's economically-driven downsizing of Haydn's orchestral forces. Woodwinds and horns had been dismissed, and trumpets and timpani were used instead to supplement the ripieno strings. Martin Pearlman's swift speeds are Read more ...