Rachmaninov
David Nice
If Brahms’s First Symphony has long been dubbed “Beethoven’s Tenth”, then the 23-year-old Rachmaninov’s First merits the label of “Tchaikovsky’s Seventh” (a genuine candidate for that title, incidentally, turns out to be a poor reconstruction from Tchaikovsky’s sketches by one Bogatryryev). Yet unlike the other near-contemporary works in last night’s programme, Szymanowski’s Concert Overture and Scriabin’s Piano Concerto, it has a disturbing individuality, a heavy heart that is truly worn “inside out”, as Vladimir Jurowski’s season-long Rachmaninov festival with his London Philharmonic Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Anyone whose affection for Rachmaninov is bounded by the Second Piano Concerto or the Paganini Rhapsody might be surprised to learn that his own favourite work of his was his setting for unaccompanied choir of the Vespers, or All-Night Vigil, of the Russian Orthodox Church. Admittedly he uses the Latin “Dies irae” in the Rhapsody, and the “Blagosloven yesi” from the Vigil does battle with it in his Symphonic Dances. But these are no more than Lisztian self-dramatising pieties. The Vigil setting, made at the height of World War I in 1915, is proper, self-effacing piety, and I suspect Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Daniil Trifonov, 23, has shot to prominence as one of the hottest pianistic properties of the moment. With multiple competition wins behind him, including the Tchaikovsky in his native Russia, plus a recording contract with DG and a frenetic globe-trotting schedule, he is now a very busy young man. Last night’s London appearance was his recital debut at the Royal Festival Hall, a venue only accorded to the biggest names in the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, the new season of which he was opening.A sizable though not quite capacity crowd of pianophiles largely took this young Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, chief conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, heads its major new series devoted to the music of Sergei Rachmaninov, in context with his forerunners and successors. This is to be the largest celebration of Rachmaninov ever undertaken in a single season, with 11 concerts to include all the composer’s key works for orchestra, including some in rarely heard early versions, placed in context with music by his inspirations, contemporaries and successors including Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Szymanowski, Scriabin and Vaughan Williams.Here Jurowski tells Read more ...
David Nice
After Monday’s Respighi extravaganza at the Proms, it was back on the rainbow express for more wonders of orchestral colour last night. In the young Stravinsky’s large-scale signing-in and poor depressed old Rachmaninov’s signing-off, you could trust Sir Simon Rattle’s Berlin army of generals to turn in any amount of subtle colours.It seems fair to launch by praising Stefan Dohr’s first horn and the cor anglais of Dominik Wollenweber as the respective signature tones of The Firebird and the Symphonic Dances. But while I’ve spent an obsessive interim period of listening to confirm Respighi has Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Russians were coming - and the prospect of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, even without the added attraction of hearing it in Igor Buketoff’s questionable choral arrangement where the Tsarist hymn is taken at its word and does a Boris Godunov on us, had the promenade queue fast stretching towards South Kensington. And if ever music replicated the excited buzz of something in the air Stravinsky’s Scherzo fantastique did, raising the curtain almost imperceptively through the scurrying of muted strings and surprised woodwind punctuations.Here is music that redefines the idea of airborne until, Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Action film fans should stay away from this Roman Polanski duet. But those who like their sexual politics served in symbolic form will be delighted. Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner stars as an actress, Vanda, and Polanski-lookalike Mathieu Amalric as the writer-director Thomas.It's not entirely an adaptation of the 1870 novella by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whom the word masochism derives), but a version of the David Ives play about the link between sexual obsession, pleasure and pain. Venus in Fur is like a play: the entire 95 minute duration is set within the confines of a Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Having a strong company style is usually no bad thing, especially if – as with San Francisco Ballet – the main component of it is a commitment to excellence. It has been impressive watching the gritty energy with which, night after night, the American visitors to Paris dish up meaty triple bills (most pieces coming in at 35 minutes or longer) and serve them with éclat. Polish and professionalism like this help dancers keep going through a gruelling tour, and ensure audiences go away happy. But you can have too much of a good thing.In my case, the good thing was lyrical contemporary ballets Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
No quibble about the result. Pianist Martin James Bartlett deservedly became BBC Young Musician of the Year 2014 at Usher Hall in Edinburgh last night. The 17-year-old, a student at the specialist Purcell School in Hertfordshire, and at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music took the title with a very strong performance of Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He was watchful, alert to every nuance, playing idiomatically, and with a very convincing sense of the shape of the piece right through to the final pay-off. He also established a lively partnership with the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Some artists acquire (or create) cults of personality because – Byron, Wagner or Van Gogh – they are just so obviously fruity. Some others, though less fruity, are venerated because their work is so tear-prickingly astonishing that we are desperate to get closer to its source. Shakespeare is one such; George Balanchine, the twentieth-century Russian-American choreographer, is another. Serenade (1934), the first piece he made in America, is a thing of wonder. Ever argued with a music-lover who thought most scores would be better without dance’s cheap, distracting visuals? Show ‘em this, Read more ...
David Nice
Am I alone in a readiness to sacrifice all four Rachmaninov piano concertos – though maybe not the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – in favour of the second sets of Preludes and Études-Tableaux? Probably not, after last night, when Nikolay Lugansky unfurled the 13 Op. 32 Preludes as one discombobulating symphonic cosmos. This is probably as close as we can come today to being in the presence of Rachmaninov himself, the greatest recorded pianist I know.Some find Lugansky cold. Let’s just say that he favours Apollonian control and poise over Dionysian abandon, though not always. And if Apollo Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Vasily Petrenko used his baton like a piratical rapier to galvanise the London Philharmonic violins in their flourishes of derring-do at the start of Berlioz’s Overture Le Corsaire. And the brilliance was in the quicksilver contrasts, the lightness and wit of inflection which lent a piquancy to the panache of this great concert opener. The arrival of the main theme - tantalisingly delayed - was almost balletic in its vivacity and even the final trumpet-led assault suggested a Byronic hero as French as he was feral. One of Petrenko’s great strengths as a conductor lies with the sharpness of Read more ...