Creative old age brings with it not just the expected serene glow but also a singular urgency, a fresh intensity, or so that magisterial pianist Claudio Arrau once wrote. Arrau was a living testament to his claim; so, now, is the 84-year-old Sir Charles Mackerras. Everything he's chosen to bring to life this season has a valedictory quality, or perhaps he simply selects the best. His Philharmonia diptych of concerts led us from the Wagnerian end of the world on Thursday to a Sunday afternoon of prelapsarian innocence in Beethoven's pastoral idyll and paradise regained in Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.
classical music reviews
igor.toronyilalic
Even Schubert’s very earliest compositions terrify. His first songs, written when he was only 13, are unforgettably vivid, gory, messy, mangled, full of darkness and horror, like dead little birds. He never shakes off this Gothic sensibility; it’s never ironed out of him. A part of him remains untutored, untamed, right to the end, and over time his dark preoccupations gather a more and more frightening shape. Pitch blackness is reached in his Piano Sonata in A minor, D784, one of strangest pieces in the whole piano repertoire, a work of utter nightmarishness and a focal point for last night’s stunning all-Schubert recital from Imogen Cooper.
edward.seckerson
Wigmore Hall does not always take kindly to big voices; it’s an easy hall to over-sing. But when the singer is the American soprano Christine Brewer and the sound so open, so rich and effulgent, hall and voice become one resonance. It’s almost as if Wigmore is selective in its response. It warms to the right voice in the right music. Brewer in Strauss is about as right as it gets. And besides, regardless of the venue, Brewer has never sung to be heard; she sings to be understood.
igor.toronyilalic
Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's Wigmore Hall recital plunge and soar, catch you by the feet and dangle you by the ankles.
David Nice
Let's suppose that off-centre genius among opera directors Richard Jones had been asked to bring his imagination to bear on Sir Colin Davis's latest Verdi-in-concert. I imagine he might have weighed up leading men, chorus and the conductor's unexpected blend of manicure with flash alongside swathes of masterful beauty, and decided to follow up his 1940s Windsor Falstaff at Glyndebourne with a 1970s Otello set in Surbiton.
David Nice
To summon spirits from the vasty deep is the ambition of too many overloaded contemporary scores. George Crumb is better than most at getting those spirits to come when he calls, yet even he touches the transcendental more surely the fewer instruments he engages. That, at least, seemed the conclusion to draw from the latest of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's perilous but admirable "Total Immersion" days exposing a curious audience to the style of one composer, and here giving us the chance to compare the grandiose and the intimate.
Ismene Brown
We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical music to a general audience today - he calls the status quo into question, and he may be right. So he turned a concert programme into a video show, focusing on Musorgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Schumann’s Kinderszenen, to which would be set a visual installation around him and his piano.
igor.toronyilalic
Nesting gay men and posh female totty by the bucketload in the audience last night. Fill any programme with Baroque opera and that’s what you get. Why? Because the Baroque is aspirational pop. It's grounded in the same musical tricks that drive on the chart-topping hits of Kylie or Madonna: pumping ostinati, unshake-offable tunes and harmonic Häagen-Dazs - obvious harmonic loops that you can't get enough of. Though last night the hook was even simpler: a beddable boy.
Ismene Brown
There’s something beyond detailed and attentive musicianship that’s needed in Schubert’s last, most desolate song-cycle, Winterreise (“Winter’s journey”). It’s a dramatic arc that unites these 24 songs into a journey, the number of breaths in time and miles in distance that elapse from the first poem to the 24th, and bring you a sense of contact with the person undergoing this terrible suffering. Someone who is not Schubert, the composer, or Müller, the poet, but a third person.
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways of being orchestral. About as many ways, in fact, as there are of organising the body politic. At one extreme there are the fascist orchestral states with their Kim Il-sung-emulating conductor-tyrants (Fritz Reiner's Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for example). At the other you have the right-on, conductorless cooperatives of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The Camerata Salzburg takes up an Enlightenment middle way, fostering gentlemanly camaraderie and a rotating leadership of the wise.