Mahler
Ismene Brown
Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Italian unification under Victor Emmanuel II - the exiled king whose supporters chanted "Viva Verdi!" (Verdi = Victor Emmanuel, Re D'Italia). Naturally, Italy's premier orchestra, the Orchestra dell'Accademia di Santa Cecilia, under their conductor Antonio Pappano, chose to celebrate this in Basingstoke.Basingstoke has, in The Anvil, a thunderingly good 1,400-seater concert hall regularly visited by top orchestras (Maazel and the Philharmonia soon, the Bolshoi soon after). It is a fine and moving thing to see that as anonymous a place as this Hampshire Read more ...
Ismene Brown
At the 11th hour (as we all know from the current telly series), English National Ballet has pulled a gorgeous plum out of its back catalogue that throws open vistas of what a ballet company should be: Serge Lifar’s sumptuous Suite en Blanc. Why this beauty, laced with the hot Spanish deliciousness of Eduard Lalo’s 1881 music, hasn’t been done for 35 years can presumably be put down to its sheer difficulty, because this is a ballet that bathes the eyes in lipsmackingly tricky, astronomically stylish choreography - stylish as only French classical ballet can be.It’s dressed in white and Read more ...
David Nice
What a versatile master is the Royal Opera’s resident dynamo Antonio Pappano. On Saturday night, he was in the Covent Garden pit getting big-band sounds and tender elegies from the whole orchestra in Turnage’s Anna Nicole. And here he was again, moving from a surprisingly fine score to a great one, the shadow-of-mortality approach to Chinese poetry that is Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, albeit in its ingenious chamber reduction by Schoenberg. Oh, and with the small detail of a mezzo’s ultimate challenge being faced by a baritone.That implies two degrees of colour-deafness before a note is Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes historical recordings by a neglected violinist and interesting interpretations of Brahms and Mahler. A notorious choral blockbuster works its insidious magic, and Australia’s best-known classical musician takes on Kipling. Two young pianists shine in very different repertoire, and orchestral fireworks are provided by a provincial French orchestra. Can a respected British conductor cast new light upon a staple of 20th-century British music? And what does one of the world’s scariest film scores sound like played by four people? Spiritual sustenance is Read more ...
David Nice
So the Berlin Phiharmonic’s high-profile five-day residency staked its ultimate curtain-calls on one of the most spiritual adagio-finales in the symphonic repertoire (most of the others, like this one to the Third Symphony, are by Mahler). We knew the masterful Sir Simon's micromanagement and the Berlin beauty of tone would look to the first five movements of the Third's world-embracing epic. But would the sixth flame, as it must, with pulsing inner light and strength of long-term line?Let me leave that burning question until last, just as it somewhat suspensefully hung fire in this third of Read more ...
David Nice
Sir Simon Rattle's clever programming struck again last night, showing us that musical neoclassicism - for want of a better word, which would be something like neo-everything - didn't begin with Stravinsky, whose Apollo ballet is surely his most elevated set of gestures to the past. Tchaikovsky, the rococo twiddles of whose complete Nutcracker this team seems to have enjoyed so much on a recent recording, would probably take the palm, though Mahler, of all composers, will do, too. At least, his Fourth Symphony begins that way. And soon there was more music not of this world to match Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Anything anyone else can do, we can do better, seemed the mantra last night. It's probably a bit churlish to accuse the finest orchestra in the world of arrogance - surely that's their job? But the first night of the Berlin Philharmonic's four-day stay in London (yesterday, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, tonight and tomorrow, the Barbican), in which three of the four pieces required conductorless chamber ensembles, did seem decidedly show-offy. Can these very fine orchestral members really rattle off a quartet as well as a symphony? Not without Simon Rattle, they can't.That's not to say that Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Mahler cycles in his centenary year are about as predictable as dead leaves in autumn. But they perhaps belong more in Birmingham than in some other cities. Mahler, after all, was a big factor in making Simon Rattle’s name, and Rattle was a big factor in getting this superb concert-hall built. So the current cycle there, now halfway through, is like a civic statue to the Master: a tribute both ways, honour to the giver and the receiver.The fourth term in this equation, the CBSO’s present music director, Andris Nelsons, also has excellent Mahler credentials, and some may feel it’s a shame that Read more ...
David Nice
As Mahler symphonies rain down from heaven - or flare up from hell, according to your viewpoint - in this second anniversary year, it's wise to choose carefully. But why earmark Jiří Bělohlávek's performance of the Sixth above the likes of Gergiev, Dudamel, Jurowski or Maazel? Because he's been working his way through the cycle with his BBC orchestra at the careful rate of one a year; because he knows what space to give, and what colours to draw; and above all, because he refuses to batter our hearts too fiercely too soon - crucial for the most insistent tragic chapter in Mahler's symphonic Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It was with Mahler’s Opus 1 – folkloric cantata Das klagende lied – that Vladimir Jurowski so memorably launched his role as the LPO’s principal conductor, and it was to this work that he returned last night. Four years on and he asked his audience to consider it within a rather different narrative; in lieu of an arc of Germanic development, moving from Wagner’s Parsifal Prelude to Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Jurowski instead framed it with Hungarian works from Bartók and Ligeti. While the dialogue between these three exploratory pieces may have been more oblique, Jurowski’s highly Read more ...
David Nice
Believe it or not, some critics can't get enough of London's superabundant concert scene. I could hardly be sour about not catching Gustavo Dudamel's first Barbican concert on Thursday night, spellbound as I was by his predecessor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, spinning such insidiously beautiful Bartók with the Philharmonia over on the South Bank. Yesterday lunchtime I caught Dudamel coaching 80 of the city's young musicians in the finale of the Beethoven Seventh I'd missed before he went on that night to conduct Mahler's Ninth, surely the symphonic repertoire's supreme Read more ...
David Nice
Most of us don't object to experiments in concert presentation - the occasional one-off showcase to lure the young and suspicious into the arcane world of attentive concert-going, the odd multimedia event as icing on the cake. It's only those pundits obsessed with the key word "accessibility" who tell us that the basic concept of sitting (or standing, as they have at the Proms for well over a century) and listening with respect for those around us needs overhauling. It's a typical journalistic conception of "either/or" instead of "all approaches welcome" - a case of what an American academic Read more ...