Proms
alexandra.coghlan
When was the last time you saw a classical soloist wearing a suit and tie on stage? It was the only formal thing about Yo-Yo Ma’s solo Prom last night – a delicious visual anachronism, at odds with the American’s laid-back performance style that is to cello playing what Western horse riding is to the stiffly upright English version. Relaxed and comfortable as none of the other solo Bach performers this season have yet seemed, Ma took his sell-out crowd by the hand and led them through nearly three hours of music – a one-man band, by turns dancing, singing and playing percussion, all with just Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
After the broad, lyrical Shostakovich Tenth Symphony Andris Nelsons presented at the Proms last week, Vladimir Jurowski’s austere and unrelenting Eighth came as a shock. The two performances were equally fine, but at opposite ends of the Shostakovich spectrum. And the effect was intensified last night by a particularly terse programme, delivered with unrelenting intensity. No easy listening here, but plenty of raw emotion, and everything delivered with utter conviction and to the highest musical standards.Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture set the tone. Here, and throughout the evening, the string Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What was a stunningly good Alice Coote recital doing trapped inside an A-level Theatre Studies project? I’m not sure that Being Both – the semi-staged sequence of Handel arias originally commissioned by the Brighton Festival – ever came close to answering, but by about ten minutes in the singing was just so damn good that I stopped worrying and learned, if not precisely to love, then to tolerate the foolishness going on around the music.In case the title wasn’t clue enough, Being Both is the kind of earnest, self-referential exploration of gendered experience (so delicately inverted and Read more ...
David Nice
A concert of Brahms chamber music I could understand, especially given a balance between early and late. An evening of orchestral Brahms, with or without voices, needs much more special pleading. It didn’t get nearly enough last night. An expanded Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, including nine very vigorous double basses – where did the extra players come from? – failing to bite into the wide spaces as smaller ensembles like the Chamber Orchestra of Europe have so splendidly done before it, and a conductor without the right sense of breathing in melody or forward momentum both weighed Read more ...
geoff brown
One astonishing creature was missing from the cavalcade of meerkats and whatnot featured in Sunday afternoon’s Life Story Prom introduced by Sir David Attenborough. I mean, of course, the species known as henricuscowelliensis. Or otherwise, plain Henry Cowell – the American composer-pianist and modernist famous for banging the keyboards with forearms and elbows, slithering around in the most brazen dissonances, and generally creating a ruckus that briefly made him a central figure among 20th century musical mavericks.Instead, he crashed into the evening Prom with his 1928 Piano Concerto, Read more ...
David Nice
It’s hardly surprising that at the grand old age of 86 Bernard Haitink can pack them in at the Albert Hall so that there’s no room left in the Arena and those still queueing 10 minutes before the concert have to go up to the Gallery. But he was also doing it back in 1978, when I went to hear my first Mahler “Resurrection” and found myself too late in the queue for the best standing-place in the hall, stuck in the rafters for the one and only time (never again). The Chamber Orchestra of Europe wasn’t even born then. For the decade after its foundation in 1981, it was a young orchestra; no more Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The only reasonable explanation for the all too belated arrival at the Proms of the SWR Baden-Baden and Freiburg Orchestra is that the festival’s house band, the BBC Symphony, is the one other ensemble reasonably entitled to claim the title of best orchestra for new music in the world. They came with a programme of Boulez, Ligeti and Bartók, 20th century classics all, and well-tailored to their talents. Too little, too late, as it turned out, but what an evening they gave us.…explosante-fixe… is one of those works, following Sachs’s wise words about Walther’s Prize Song, in which the form is Read more ...
David Nice
There were two reasons why I didn’t return to the Albert Hall late on Friday night to hear Andras Schiff play Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The first was that one epic, Mahler’s Sixth in the stunning performance by Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, needed properly digesting. The other was that at Easter I’d heard Jeremy Denk play the Goldbergs in Weimar, and I wanted that approach to resonate, too – dynamic, continuous, revelatory, in a very different way from how I know Schiff approaches Bach.Denk’s recitals are mandatory listening now, and the lunchtime recital yesterday at Read more ...
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 ...
David Nice
So here he was in town with his top American team, the already great conductor whose premature departure from Birmingham has left the players in mourning, unable to choose a successor yet, and whose insistence that it was too early to take up the coveted post of the Berlin Phil’s Principal Conductor blocked what should have been an obvious choice. During their first season together, Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra have already plunged into a series of Shostakovich recordings with a Tenth Symphony of shattering perfection, leading to high hopes that their Mahler Six last night Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s been glorious to hear so much Bach at this year’s Proms – most of it after dark, and still more of it for the most intimate of forces. On paper, the Academy of Ancient Music and BBC Singers’ Late Night concert of Bach choral works didn’t quite have the mystique of Ibragimova’s Solo Sonatas and Partitas, Schiff’s Goldbergs or Ma’s Cello Suites. In practice, though, it was clever piece of programming that came into its own in its Friday night slot, sending people home to the weekend on the very highest of musical highs.It’s hard to look past the line-up of soloists, which reads more like a Read more ...
David Nice
Praise be to Carl Nielsen. Praise always, of course, to one of the greatest symphonists, and happy 150th birthday (again), but gratitude on this occasion is due to a programme mostly lining up Nielsen works rare and familiar, for getting me to the Albert Hall to witness a surely unsurpassable performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto. The sound quality, the near-perfect intonation with which Nikolay Znaider wields his Kreisler Guarneri “Del Gesù” is only the half of it; hearing such close work with an orchestra and conductor equally alert to every small detail without ever losing sight of Read more ...