It always repays to push a world-class orchestra beyond their comfort zone. The BBC Symphony's sound emerged from the refashioning hands of period specialist Marc Minkowski like a naked body from a cold shower: convulsively invigorated and invigorating all those that knocked into it. It was a joy to hear: the best, most intriguing period-playing I've heard for quite a while. For sure the orchestra were more comfortable in Stravinsky's Pulcinella, which went off like a spinning jenny, but the sounds Minkowski managed to elicit from the players in Pergolesi's Stabat Mater chilled the blood. More on all that later.
classical music reviews
David Nice
Mastery was always going to be the overriding virtue of Mariss Jansons's latest appearance; his many visits to London with one or other of his continental superbands guarantee nothing less. But would it, to paraphrase Callas's immortal masterclass question, favour expression or fireworks? The options remain open, for Jansons at least, even in as severe a work as Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, unquestioned masterpiece but also a tour staple. Jansons steered his cultured, mobile Bavarian players neatly, not dispassionately but a little weightlessly through every gear change of the titanic first movement. It was a Sarah Waters novel, an elegantly negotiated page-turner, rather than a Hilary Mantel epic written in blood. Then, with the liberating horn cry of the pivotal third movement, expression conquered all and never let go.Mastery was always going to be the overriding virtue of Mariss Jansons's latest appearance; his many visits to London with one or other of his continental superbands guarantee nothing less. But would it, to paraphrase Callas's immortal masterclass question, favour expression or fireworks? The options remain open, for Jansons at least, even in as severe a work as Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony, unquestioned masterpiece but also a tour staple. Jansons steered his cultured, mobile Bavarian players neatly, not dispassionately but a little weightlessly through every gear change of the titanic first movement. It was a Sarah Waters novel, an elegantly negotiated page-turner, rather than a Hilary Mantel epic written in blood. Then, with the liberating horn cry of the pivotal third movement, expression conquered all and never let go.
edward.seckerson
If Beethoven’s Third Symphony Eroica was the seismic upheaval, not just for Beethoven but for the entire symphonic movement, then the Second Symphony was most certainly the pre-shock. And we can be precise about the moment that Beethoven blows the Haydn model right out of the water and glimpses the far horizon of his brave new world: it’s the extended coda of the first movement where a devious harmonic shift sets collision course for the rip-roaring climax in which the trumpets turn wilful dissonance into exultancy.
igor.toronyilalic
Shuffling about the podium like a cha-cha-chaing Jack Lemmon, slam-dunking his first beats, kicking out his heels for second beats, épéeing the trombone entries like a toy toreador, it wasn't hard to see why Lorin Maazel gets such a regular critical roasting. During The Rite of Spring he was almost playing up the vulgarian tag. "You want vulgar? I'll give you vulgar. Take that ridiculously elongated glissando! And that totally out-of-place ritardando! And that gob-smackingly inappropriate sforzando!" That Maazel is a showman has never been in question. What is more problematic is discerning whether this actually mattered? Eyes away now if you're averse to a bit of heresy but might Stravinsky's Rite and Bruckner's Third actually not both benefit from a bit of vulgarity?
Ismene Brown
In every partnership there is a leader, and it’s not always the featured name. While the hall was packed with Ma followers for this rare cello-and-piano recital, what emerged was a richly sensitising foretaste of what the Emanuel Ax residency is going to offer over the next fortnight. This is one marvellous pianist.
jonathan.wikeley
Was it Chopin’s birthday or wasn’t it? To be honest, no one at last night’s Royal Festival Hall concert probably gave a damn, so wrapped up were they in Maurizio Pollini’s playing. And what playing it was too. The man just sits down and gets on with it – there’s none of that airy-fairy flamboyance and arm waving that certain younger pianists seem unable to perform without. This was an unapologetically old-school concert. Pollini shuffled on in his tails (who wears those any more?), plonked himself at the piano, and had finished the first of Chopin’s 24 Preludes before most of the audience had settled back for the ride.
David Nice
A fervent believer, James MacMillan has no time for what he's called the "instant spiritual highs" of composer-gurus like Glass, Gorecki or John Tavener. His own attempts to grapple with the depth and breadth of his convictions have given us several ambitious works which smack, to me at any rate, of forced rhetoric - the Third Symphony and the childbirth cantata Quickening - but others, too, like the Calvary procession of The World's Ransoming and his violent operatic masterpiece The Sacrifice, which hit home with poleaxing force.
igor.toronyilalic
It has always been a cornerstone of my personal philosophy that beauty and insight can be found in the very lowest of common denominators. That Big Brother, Friends, Love It magazine or Paris Hilton provide revelations about life that are of as much consequence, of as much wonder, as any offered up by the classic pantheon. That that which the people respond to must and usually does have plenty of merit lurking within it.
Ismene Brown
This is the fifth time on theartsdesk that a review has been headed as above - so you must be thinking it had better be justified or bribery will be suspected. But it's not just the phosphorescent fascination that flickers around the charismatic young LPO principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski that draws the crowds, it is his inquiring programming. Last night it was another of those games that one couldn’t resist, if a game, in the end, of two halves.
David Nice
Beware of Zimermania - or, for that matter, of idolising any pianist as the Greatest Living Interpreter of Chopin. Our birthday boy, 200 years old last night (and not on 1 March), as a crucial baptismal register now seems to prove, is too big for any one artist to dominate. He looks to his French heritage for sensuality, to the Polish maternal line for Slavic weight and thoughtfulness. If a sometimes impatient Krystian Zimerman inclined more to the former in yesterday's big celebration, that's not to deny he was a worthy choice of golden-toned celebrant. It was just a pity that it all had to be such a circus, and that the human zoo around the lone figure on the Festival Hall platform took so long to settle.