One girl can hit a high C, and how; the other would surely melt the iciest-hearted in Rodgers and Hammerstein torchsongs. That's Roberta Alexander, on the evidence of her "Somewhere" last night. Together with classy lyric-coloratura Claron McFadden, the beaming high Cs girl, and sophisticated pianist-animateuse Reinild Mees, she ran the gamut of Bernstein's song-and-dance cornucopia. With such physical ease and high spirits from these total artists, even the occasional archness in Lenny's heart-on-sleeve songbook passed with a relaxed sense of fun.
classical music reviews
jonathan.wikeley
If all orchestras inspire a sense of loyalty to some degree, then the Philharmonia perhaps does it better than most. Mackerras is still performing with them, 54 years after he first conducted the orchestra; so is Maazel, who has clocked up 41 years, on and off. There’s Ashkenazy and Dohnányi. And then of course there’s Riccardo Muti, who appears to have been given the unofficial title of conductor-in-chief of anniversaries.
edward.seckerson
It’s a very assured - not to say very brave - young conductor who chooses to make his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra in Sibelius’ notoriously challenging Seventh Symphony. Mighty talents have fallen at this particular fence, defeated by the work’s circuitous evolution and elusive logic. Robin Ticciati has no fear, though, and more importantly has been mentored by a man who knows the Sibelian psyche and terrain better than most – Sir Colin Davis. Could this be his heir apparent?
edward.seckerson
It’s tempting to say that if Martin Fröst didn’t play the clarinet then he’d be an actor or a dancer. But he is an actor and a dancer and at one point during this scintillating recital he even sang, too – whilst playing the clarinet at the same time, of course. That’s a given. It’s an extension of his lissom body, and in his shiny grey silk suit and untucked shirt he looked decidedly feline. Ever heard a clarinet purr? Ever heard it yowl, scamper, hiss, scratch? Has anyone ever pulled so many colours from the old liquorice stick?
jonathan.wikeley
Concert programming can become a little bit predictable, don’t you think? If we’re honest, there are quite a lot of standard programmes bouncing around our halls at the moment. Don’t get me wrong; I understand that putting together an original and enticing programme isn’t easy. There are problems by the bucketload: what to pair with a big symphony, other than another big symphony; what to partner with a radical contemporary piece, other than Bach or something medieval; what to put before Rach 2 at a Proms concert, other than 50 minutes of Xenakis; how to make a concert of bleeding chunks remotely worthy? That sort of thing. And the list goes on. But how refreshing that last night at the Barbican Hilary Hahn succeeded in providing us with something altogether rather different.
David Nice
This is what Chopin anniversary year ought to be all about; not some celebrity showcase of plums and cornerstones in too large a hall before a restless audience, but a thoughtfully planned adventure zigzagging through the complete works on which the listener feels privileged to eavesdrop, and where the chameleonic genius of the composer always comes first. This eighth concert in the enterprising Kings Place "Chopin Unwrapped" series was the first I've been able to catch, and I realised what I'd been missing. Both of Cypriot pianist Martino Tirimo's two halves offered a demanding but enthralling journey from youthful buoyancy into the labyrinths of human thought and feeling.
igor.toronyilalic
It's hard to miss German composer Wolfgang Rihm. He has an enormous head. There it is, bulging from his giant frame, a big, friendly grin slapped onto it while he wanders around the Barbican on his celebratory day, none of it going to waste. Listen to his prolifically combustible music, the million and one ideas hurtling about with the energy of a school playground and the intensity of a burning sun, and you soon realise that all that cranial space is probably quite necessary.
David Nice
As in his first concert this season with the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, Adams the composer-conductor moved last night from the natural phenomena of an older master to his own illuminated chronicle of man-made unease. City Noir, his latest orchestral symphony in all but name, bears his trademark knit of rhythms both bludgeoning and capricious with sinuous melodic nocturnes: the mixture rather as before, but with a fresh twist of LA jazz. You'd think the marriage of harmony and invention would free up his conducting of other men's music. Oddly, though, that remained doggedly beat-bound, to be saved at the last minute by Jeremy Denk's astounding sense of fantasy in Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind.As in his first concert this season with the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, Adams the composer-conductor moved last night from the natural phenomena of an older master to his own illuminated chronicle of man-made unease. City Noir, his latest orchestral symphony in all but name, bears his trademark knit of rhythms both bludgeoning and capricious with sinuous melodic nocturnes: the mixture rather as before, but with a fresh twist of LA jazz. You'd think the marriage of harmony and invention would free up his conducting of other men's music. Oddly, though, that remained doggedly beat-bound, to be saved at the last minute by Jeremy Denk's astounding sense of fantasy in Stravinsky's Concerto for Piano and Wind.
David Nice
As one who came to know the B minor Mass singing in a clogged, 150-strong choir, I welcomed the authentic-movement rush in the 1980s to whittle it down to What Bach Might Have Wanted (if, indeed, he had lived to hear his ideal religious compendium performed in its entirety). For a while, it shrivelled to anorexic dimensions in the shape of Joshua Rifkin's one-voice-per-choral-line hypothesis.
edward.seckerson
What would you imagine the composer John Adams might choose to conduct – apart, that is, from a little something he himself made earlier? Well, the first of two London Symphony Orchestra concerts this week brought no big surprises: Sibelius’ Sixth Symphony was in essence a little like returning to his minimalist roots – a bunch of insistent melodic cells and dancing ostinati. Flanking it, as if to reassert that everything Adams writes is essentially operatic, was orchestral music born of opera: Adams’ own Doctor Atomic Symphony and the “Four Sea Interludes” from Britten’s Peter Grimes. Adams, the conductor, had his work cut out.