Ravel
David Nice
Back at the Barbican for a new season after a Far Eastern tour, the BBC Symphony Orchestra returned to pull off a characteristic stunt, a generous four-work programme featuring at least one piece surely no-one in the audience woud have heard live before. This time, the first quarter belonged exclusively to the unaccompanied BBC Singers in one of the most demanding sets of the choral repertoire. After which the seemingly humble but dogged and vivacious Marc Minkowski helped create orchestral magic of three very different kinds, defining French composers’ infinite capacity for play.Serious Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The visits of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester are a regular Proms highlight, only preceded (for me) by the John Wilson Orchestra in the speed with which they go from announcement to diary. Last year’s concert under Gatti was a whirling celebration of dance – a beautifully programmed narrative that spun us from Wagner to Ravel and left us breathless. The year before Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov brought us passions from East and West, united by the precision of Sir Colin Davis. This year it was the turn of Shostakovich – that youth orchestra staple – and for the first time I was left a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Debussy, Poulenc, Ravel, Françaix: Piano Concertos Florian Uhlig (piano), Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern/Pablo González (Hänssler Classic)I salivated when I read the tracklisting on this immaculately produced disc. I wasn’t disappointed; you’d need a heart of ice to resist Florian Uhlig’s playing. Debussy’s three-movement Fantaisie pour piano et orchestre, completed in 1890, is a concerto in all but name. The first performance was heavily cut; Debussy withdrew the piece in a huff and it was only heard in full after his death. This is delectable music, firmly Read more ...
David Nice
On most of her London visits, Elisabeth Leonskaja has been an unassuming high priestess of the mysteries and depths in core sonatas by Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert. This time she applied her Russian-school style of orchestral pianism, tempered as always by absolute clarity, to burning the mists off Ravel, Debussy and the French-inspired Romanian, Enescu. She went on to give us colossal enlightenment in what must be the greatest work ever composed by a 19-year-old, Brahms’s Third Piano Sonata in F minor.If Brahms was the last of the titans, Leonskaja embodies the twilight of the gods. We Read more ...
David Nice
Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite capable of tearing at our heartstrings. That they did so unremittingly last night was very largely due to the supernaturally beautiful sounds master conjuror Stéphane Denève drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Yet more than just the icing on the cake was the collective and individual presence of students from the Royal Academy of Music for Ravel's L' Read more ...
graham.rickson
Frank Bridge: Orchestral Works BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Richard Hickox (Chandos)Frank Bridge’s reputation has endured through the advocacy of his most famous pupil, Benjamin Britten. Britten revived several of Bridge’s large scale works in the 1960s and even credited his teacher with inspiring his own pacifist sentiments. So you’re curious as to whether Bridge’s music would have endured at all without the Britten connection. Listening to this comprehensive Chandos set, Bridge’s position as a shadowy transitional figure comes into sharper focus, the early Edwardiana yielding to a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ravel composed only two operas, both one-acters, widely separated in time, superficially very different, but both in a way about the same thing: naughtiness. In L’Heure espagnole (1911), the clockmaker’s wife, Conceptión, entertains a succession of would-be lovers in her husband’s absence. In L’Enfant et les sortilèges (1924), the little boy who won’t do his homework, who smashes the teapot, pulls the cat’s tail and rips the wallpaper, suddenly finds his victims coming to life and scaring him to death.Naughtiness, rather than wickedness: Torquemada, the clockmaker, turns a blind eye on his Read more ...
geoff brown
One top student orchestra playing on its own can be exciting enough. Two playing together can produce a charge of dynamite that might not leave the building standing. That was so anyway in last night’s Prom, when players from New York City’s Juilliard School and London’s Royal Academy of Music, by now frequent collaborators, joined up to shake the earth with thunderous brass, swooning strings, diamond precision, a velvet bloom – every characteristic of a world-class orchestra except the honour of being conducted by Lorin Maazel.Instead the podium was occupied by America’s favourite composer, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The repertoire of the OAE is creeping away from the 18th century and into the 20th with such unashamed eagerness, it wouldn't be at all surprising to see them throwing up an urtext edition of "Hit Me Baby One More Time" in a few seasons. Last night, we got 20th-century French impressionism, including a work that was premiered in 1933. Some might call this expansion into the last century bold. Others greedy. But in the hands of their guest conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, it's also never anything less than fascinating.Though it doesn't immediately tally on paper, the match-up made Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 7, In Nature’s Realm, Scherzo capriccioso Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics) Each of Dvořák’s last three symphonies is a wonder, and the Seventh is possibly the best of the lot. It’s a work which can get under your skin. The dark D minor tonality is so right for this music; there’s a brooding darkness to the orchestral sound coupled with swaggering rhythmic drive. And the melodies are consistently gorgeous. The symphony is often described as Brahmsian, though José Serebrier rightly suggests that Dvořák was a better orchestrator, having Read more ...
graham.rickson
Renée Fleming: Poèmes - Music by Ravel, Messiaen, Dutilleux (Decca)The veteran French composer Henri Dutilleux is known for his select, refined output; this is a musician who only speaks when he’s sure he has something worth saying, usually expressed in music of intense elegance and poise. American soprano Renée Fleming, known to the composer, was chosen to give the first performances of his recent song cycle Le temps l’horloge in 2009, and it’s a live recording from 2009 that we get here. Four contrasting poems are set alongside a brief orchestral interlude, and the results are compelling. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There must be a protest movement going on in Birmingham’s ballet against London’s - if down south they insist on Kenneth MacMillan’s box-office blasters, so in the Midlands it’s Frederick Ashton’s more fragile work that reigns. BRB director David Bintley’s northern chip on the shoulder has its uses, and especially this spring. After his hugely entertaining Hobson’s Choice last week, here is a double bill of Antiques Roadshow Ashton that it's unlikely today's Royal Ballet (trying so consciously to be hip) would think of rediscovering.Its problem, soberly, is that both pieces are difficult to Read more ...