Rachmaninov
David Nice
“People think when a person becomes old, he has to become serene,” declared that great pianist Claudio Arrau in his mid-seventies. “That’s absurd. The expressive intensity is, I feel, much stronger, much more concentrated in my playing than years ago.” You could argue the same for Stephen Kovacevich at his 75th birthday concert, though in the case of Schubert’s final, B flat Piano Sonata, was it entirely intensity that had him racing through a work that, back in 1982, he took about 10 minutes longer over, albeit with repeats?Without the promised BBC Radio 3 broadcast, pulled on Sunday, giving Read more ...
David Nice
“Whatever happened to Stephen Bishop?” is not a question likely to be asked by followers of legendary pianism. Born in San Pedro, Los Angeles on 17 October 1940, the young talent took his stepfather’s name as his career was launched at the age of 11. Later he honoured his own father’s Croatian "Kovacevich", by appending it to the “Bishop”. Now it’s plain Kovacevich carved in the pantheon of similar yet unique sensibilities like those of Arrau, Pollini, Richter and Zimerman, alongside masterly exponents of mostly different repertoire like Martha Argerich.On 2 November, in the hottest ticket on Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Cards on the table: the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is looking for a new music director. Having filled its new season with emerging talents – Andrew Gourlay, Daniele Rustioni, Ryan Wigglesworth and Ben Gernon, to name just four – it’s an open secret that any concert directed by a youngish, more-or-less unattached conductor in Birmingham for the foreseeable future is effectively an audition for the job. And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.All of which created a certain buzz around this Birmingham debut by the Romanian-born, Philadelphia-based Cristian Măcelaru. As winner of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Medtner: Piano Sonatas Alessandro Taverna (Somm)It's tempting to dismiss Nikolai Medtner without having heard a note of his music. Those who dismiss him as a less flamboyant Rachmaninov contemporary are making a huge mistake. Prokofiev enjoyed playing Medtner's piano sonatas, and Rachmaninov once described his friend as the greatest of living composers. Post-Revolution, Rachmaninov eventually settled in the US and spent his final days in glamorous Beverly Hills. Poor Medtner ended up in a semi-detached house in suburban Golders Green, dying there in 1951. Become a Medtner fan and you'll veer Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hans Gál: Symphonies 1-4 Orchestra of the Swan/Kenneth Woods (Avie)Previously paired with those by Schumann, Hans Gál'sfour symphonies are now sensibly repackaged as a slimline two-cd set. Musicians are always trying to make the case for previously neglected composers, and it can be a crushing disappointment when you dive in but can't see what all the fuss is about. Havergal Brian's appeal still eludes me, but I've enjoyed getting to know Weinberg. I also "got" Gál; he's definitely one of the good ones. Conductor Kenneth Wood's accessible sleeve notes suggest that Gál's obscurity is partly Read more ...
David Nice
No two symphonic swansongs could be more different than Sibelius’s heart-of-darkness Tapiola and Nielsen’s enigmatically joky Sixth Symphony. In its evasive yet organic jumpiness, the Danish composer’s anything but “Simple Symphony” – the Sixth’s subtitle – seemed last night to have most in common with another work from the mid-1920s, Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto.These are the connections and contrasts that the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor Sakari Oramo has been underlining in his six-concert journey around the Nielsen symphonies. Last night’s typically confounding finale Read more ...
David Nice
Deep pain and sadness expressed through intense creative discipline aren’t qualities noted often enough in the music of Sergey Rachmaninov. Yet they’ve been consistently underlined, with rigour to match, in Vladimir Jurowski’s season-long “Inside Out” festival with his London Philharmonic Orchestra playing at a consistent white heat. Last night’s typically singular finale was crowned by a performance – Jurowski’s first – of the enigmatic Third Symphony as far removed as you could imagine from “tinsel”, a term with which it found itself bizarrely associated alongside lighter pieces in a Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic has something of a track record when it comes to finding conductors destined for great heights. After all, Sir Simon Rattle was a player in Merseyside Youth Orchestra and started his conducting career in Liverpool. The latest RLPO concert, following that great tradition, included a new face. And what an impact she made. The audience evidently loved her – a partial standing ovation, which is something of a rarity on Hope Street – and plenty of whoops and whistles (in the best possible taste) surely mean that she’ll soon be beating a return path to the Liverpool Read more ...
geoff brown
The concert season’s title may be Rachmaninoff Inside Out. But the work that dominated and got people talking in yesterday’s instalment of Vladimir Jurowski’s London Philharmonic series was by another composer entirely. “Weird, isn’t it?” said the man in the row behind. And that was only after the first movement of George Enescu’s massive Symphony No. 3, one of the most remarkable effusions by the composer and crack violinist chiefly known for his pair of Romanian Rhapsodies, popular picture postcards.Jurowski likes programming these early 20th-century epics, the sonic equivalent of the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
To pair Rachmaninov’s brooding and little-performed The Miserly Knight with Wagner's brooding but much-performed Das Rheingold is an audacious piece of programming. The operas share an interest in the mortal power of money, and Rachmaninov’s score has a more distinctly Wagnerian colour than much of his later work. To do so in a single evening, requiring substantial cuts to the score of Rheingold, and to stage them in the Royal Festival Hall, shows boldness verging on the reckless.Both the programme, and the editing of Das Rheingold, were the work of Vladimir Jurowski: the first, a brilliant Read more ...
David Nice
Was 1911 the best ever year for music? Works premiered or composed then include Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and the Tenth Symphony he’d completed in outline by the time of his death that May, Sibelius’s most austere masterpiece, the Fourth – for which the little oddity which opened last night’s concert, The Dryad, sounded like a sketch – and Nielsen’s Third, self-subtitled “Espansiva” but in this performance more like the “Inexhaustible” to blaze a path for the “Inextingishuable” Fourth. Even Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto of 1909, Read more ...
David Nice
How disorienting it is to find century-old works in the concert repertoire of which you can still say “I’ve never heard anything like it”. That must have been the reaction of most audience members last night to Tuscan-German composer Ferruccio Busoni’s 85-minute symphony-concerto for piano, orchestra and male voice choir, since only a few will have caught what classical anoraks tell me was its only other London performance in recent years, at the 1988 Proms.This misleadingly named Piano Concerto crowned a magnificent triptych of a concert programme centred around the Janus-headed year 1902, Read more ...