Ravel
David Nice
Last time I was in a Wigmore audience for a Sean Shibe recital, his electric-guitar second half had many regulars fleeing the hall (he later said that the amplification had been meddled with – it was too loud, though the work in question, Georges Lentz’s Ingwe, was always going to be a stunner). No softLOUD this time, only mostly soft, a meditative journey from the relative simplicity of 16th century lute music to the mid-20th century, every modest harmonic twist in the later stages striking fresh on the ear.You wanted to be out in the country on a summer night listening to this programmeThis Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Some production concepts seem so obvious, in retrospect, that you wonder why they haven’t been tried more often. Traffic hums in the foreground in the opening shots of Grange Park Opera’s new film of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, the passing cars reflected in the window of an antique clock dealer’s store. Ticking fills the soundtrack as we dive inside, like Mr Benn entering his magical shop; at the same time, the piano sounds Ravel’s perfumed opening chords. Reality or fiction? Opera or documentary? Torquemada’s clock shop is apparently genuine, and the setting could be any 21st century high Read more ...
Robert Beale
Jonathan Bloxham makes his debut as conductor with the Hallé Orchestra in the third of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts on film. It’s a poetry-connected programme in several respects and features poet laureate Simon Armitage reading both his the event horizon (to introduce the whole programme) and Evening (immediately before Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite).The event horizon is engraved in steel on the Hallé St Peter’s centre (pictured below right with Simon Armitage), where the concert was filmed, and reminds us in one way of what we’re missing: do you remember when concerts used to begin “ Read more ...
David Nice
For the performers and the venue there can be nothing but praise. To be back in Kings Place’s Hall One after so long was to realise afresh that no other London venue gives such air to soaring strings – and these ones truly did soar and gleam. For the programme, not quite so much. When you begin in the heights – as the first of the evening’s concerts, the one I was lucky enough to attend, did – with Ravel’s Duo for violin and cello, two bouts of romantic rodomontade can quickly pall, however committed the performances.A confession: I signed up for “Kanneh-Masons and friends” without looking at Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berliner Philharmoniker/Kirill Petrenko: Music by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Franz Schmidt, Rudi Stephan (Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings)Kirill Petrenko’s supposed indifference to making recordings is overstated: there’s a whole load of stuff to watch on the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall, and own-label CD releases have included John Adams’ The Wound Dresser and Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony. That same, excellent, Tchaikovsky performance is the one included here, made in March 2017, this five-disc box set also including a Tchaikovsky 5 taped two years later. This takes a Read more ...
David Nice
Colette’s sharply fantastical libretto for Ravel’s second one-act opera imagines wrongs exercised upon objects and animals by a naughty child revisited by the victims upon the perpetrator. In a giddying venture which may be the most imaginative use yet of circumscribed lockdown days, director and founder of the new Virtual Opera Project Rachael Hewer turns Colette into Carroll, and instead parades a sequence of illogical tableaux set in this time of Coronavirus. That they work so brilliantly is due to artist Pearl Bates's visual sorcery and the further design work of Leanne Vandenbussche as Read more ...
David Nice
Nobody would wish it this way, but orchestras playing on a stage specially built-up for distancing to a handful of invitees have never sounded better in the Royal Festival Hall. The Philharmonia’s outgoing principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is a master of exquisite textures, and Ravel, arguably the greatest orchestrator ever, has come under his sympathetic microscope on many occasions. It says much for Britten that his writing for strings and human voice stood the comparison with the French master last night in an enchanted hour of music.Britten’s haunting response to Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gabriela Montero: Piano Concerto No 1, ‘Latin Concerto’, Ravel: Concerto in G Gabriela Montero (piano), The Orchestra of the Americas/Carlos Miguel Prieto (Orchid Classics)Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero describes herself as “a globalised, Latin-American woman raised on a diet of European classical music with multiple side-dishes of Pan-American folklore.” Her Piano Concerto No 1 succeeds because the Latin elements are so seamlessly integrated. This is the most viscerally exciting contemporary concerto I've heard, rivalling Stewart Goodyear’s Callaloo in terms of impact. How well, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
You can tell a lot from the opening of Brahms’s Second Symphony. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra began it – and it’s not the first time they’ve done this in a big German symphony – as if in mid-flow: a broad, sunlit river of music, rolling out as if it had already been going on somewhere else already, and we’d only just tuned in.And if there’s one characteristic that defined this performance, it’d be that combined sense of inevitability and wonder. There was more to it than just that, of course: Birmingham's Symphony Hall offers near- Read more ...
Clara Mouriz, Roderick Williams, Joseph Middleton, Wigmore Hall review - the song recital as mixtape
Sebastian Scotney
It’s the age of the mixtape. And of the Only Connect sequences round. Last night’s Wigmore Hall song recital, under the curious strap-line “Basque Blood and the Folksong” was centred around Ravel songs – the Wigmore Hall has a focus on them this season – but was also in the habit of departing from Ravel and taking in a fair few whistle-stops en route: Britten, de Falla, Fauré, Jesús Guridi, Alessandro Scarlatti, Schumann and Trad. (Scots).The Ravel songs were focused on those with more exotic and folk-ish inspiration. They included some rarities, such as his setting of “Ye Banks and Braes”, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The arc of Daniil Trifonov’s reputation has soared and then, to some ears, stalled in a familiar modern way. Russian Wunderkind pianist bags a sackful of competition trophies (Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky prizes; Gramophone Awards). Early recitals and recordings display stupendous technique allied to audacious, beyond-his-years interpretation. Hype shoots off the scale. The prodigy from Nizhny Novgorod (born 1991!) is the new Richter, Rubinstein, Argerich und so weiter… Then come the iffy PR-driven choices; the unwisely stretched repertoire; the odd duff gig. The jury, having garlanded the Read more ...
Robert Beale
In contrast to a classic film soundtrack played live with the film, the idea in "symphonic cinema" is that the music, and its interpretation, come first. So the conductor is literally setting the pace, and to some extent the atmosphere, while the film is controlled in real time by an "image soloist", and the visuals follow the music’s lead rather than the other way round.It’s the brainchild of Lucas van Woerkum, who is that soloist, appearing on stage next to the rostrum like a concerto virtuoso, with a touchscreen as his instrument, and taking his bows alongside the maestro – in this case Read more ...