Schubert
David Nice
Schubert played and sung through a long summer day by the water: what could be more enchanting? The prospect did not take into account the pain in that all too short-lived genius’s late work: when interpreted by a world-class trio, quartet and pianists at the 10th East Neuk Festival, it could be exhausting. So the hours in between were much needed balm on an afternoon and evening in the picture-postcard fishing village of Crail in the East Neuk (cf "nook") of Fife below St Andrews.Grey skies lifted by early afternoon, leaving the sun to bring out the honey colour of much of the local stone Read more ...
David Nice
“I feel so alone I could cry”. As the keynote of Adam Smallbone’s Passion in the breathtaking third series of Rev, that unspoken sentiment provided a passacaglia bass line to the failure of St Saviour’s. Made explicit In the mouths of possibly 600 Londoners just around the corner from that noble edifice, in reality the relatively thriving St Leonard’s Shoreditch, it felt paradoxically uplifting and – I feel myself sucked in to use the word now that I'm signed up to Spitalfields hip – empowering.Arnold Circus, the heart of London’s first major housing project now graced by beautiful planting, Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss was born in Munich 150 years ago today. Christian Thielemann is celebrating the fact by conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden in the juiciest of all-Strauss operatic potpourris, a festive concert to be held in the city’s glorious Semperoper. What wouldn’t I give to hear Anja Harteros, alongside Anne Schwanewilms the loveliest of Strauss sopranos, and chaste nymph Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel in a peerless operatic epilogue? In fact the Dresden Music Festival, my host, ended yesterday and seems to function as a separate entity with its own period-instrument orchestra. I Read more ...
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Piano Concertos 1-5 Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, BBC Philharmonic/Gianandrea Noseda (Chandos)Two of Prokofiev's five piano concertos are so well-embedded in the repertoire that they tend to dwarf the other three. So it's great to have the whole lot squeezed comfortably onto a pair of discs. I've long enjoyed Ashkenazy's 1970s accounts, accompanied by a beefy LSO under André Previn. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet's playing is rather different; he realises that there's more to Prokofiev than pure brawn. Not that these performances are lightweight in any sense – the remorseless cadenza in the Read more ...
Mark Valencia
Of Schubert’s two great cycles, the youthful ardour of Die schöne Müllerin sits best with a tenor while the bleak wretchedness of Winterreise lends itself to the baritone voice. These, of course, are personal prejudices, for both works can be sung in either range (and indeed beyond, as the presence in the Wigmore Hall audience of a leading female exponent of Winterreise, Alice Coote, reminded us), but it’s what experience has taught me. On this occasion Coote, like the rest of us, was there for a baritone, for it was Gerald Finley’s moment to mount an assault on this forbidding summit among Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It's a considerable irony that a musician as dedicated and as serious as pianist/conductor Christian Zacharias should suddenly, at the age of 63, gain bragging rights on Youtube (see next page). There wasn't really that much he could do about it. It happened last October. A mobile phone went off as he was directing a Haydn concerto from the keyboard in Sweden. You can see his silent but intense frustration as he stops playing. “Don't answer,” he says. He waits until the loud noise of the moble phone stops, and gets back to playing. Accidents happen, and "Haydn Killed by Cell Phone" has now Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A rare thing indeed. A British singer/pianist duo has had the patience, and also been given the opportunities over a number of years, to own and to inhabit a thoroughly individual and intelligent interpretation of Schubert's Winterreise.Tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook were in recital at Temple Church last night as part of the Temple Winter Festival, their performance also broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. They were at their best when giving a reminder of quite how much beauty, balance, subtlety and variety there is in the songs of Schubert's winter journey. Comparing last night's Read more ...
David Nice
There are probably more fine string quartets in the world than audiences to listen to them, or so a gloomy estimate from a major chamber music festival would have us believe. Fortunately the Wigmore Hall usually guarantees crowds to hear the best, and at the highest level too we’re spoilt for choice. After two outstandingly vibrant recent visitors, the Belcea and Jerusalem Quartets, the equally touted Pavel Haas Quartet merely seemed very good rather than great, though they upped the stakes when mercurial 22-year-old Daniil Trifonov joined them for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet.At first, there Read more ...
Humphrey Burton
The most intensive period of music-making I’ll ever experience, celebrating the 100th birthday of Benjamin Britten in and around his home town, ended on Sunday. I’m an Aldeburgh resident and I attended everything on offer. I thought the best way to provide an overview was to compile a diary of the past four days with a line or two about each event. Thursday 21 November (eve of the birthday) 3pm A stiff North-East wind is blowing down Crag Path and the rain is near horizontal: the Storm Interlude from Peter Grimes comes to mind. A brisk walk up the hill to pay respects in the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Miyoshi: Piano works Yukiko Kojima (piano) (Odradek)Akira Miyoshi was born in Tokyo in 1933. Listen blind to the earliest piece on this disc and you’d think it could be an early work by the late Henri Dutilleux, and it’s no surprise to read that Miyoshi studied in Paris in the 1950s. Miyoshi’s Piano Sonata was completed in 1958, and it’s an arresting, attractive piece. It’s at its best when the piano writing is stripped bare, the harmonies reduced to their essence. Miyoshi’s faster writing can be dizzily exciting, but can feel as if it’s merely obeying our expectations of what a Read more ...
David Nice
It’s not because I lament the annual end of a love-hate relationship with the Albert Hall that the last few days of Proms feel rather melancholy. A bittersweetness lies rather in the drawing-in of evenings, however hot it is, so late night Schubert for one and then two pianos seemed like an appropriately introspective way of saying farewell this year.Imogen Cooper – why on earth she’s not a dame is a big mystery, though perhaps not if you look at the honours set-up – can always be relied upon to draw you in to the light-fading of late Schubert. Sure enough, after the startling summons Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The moment when Alfred Brendel shuffled on stage during the Verbier Festival’s 20th Anniversary Concert not to play, but to turn pages for long-time colleague Emmanuel Ax, expressed everything that is so special, so extraordinary about this festival. Walking off together, arms around each other’s shoulders, these were not just international soloists, they were two great old men and two even greater musicians. Verbier has made a lot of good friends during its 20-year history – a mere blink of the eye, as classical festivals go – and in this birthday year it was no surprise that they might just Read more ...