When you go to a Schubert recital, you’re plunged into a whirlpool of emotional ambivalence, heat and chill running together, music and lyrics not always playing the same tune. When Schubert seizes on a poem, it’s not because he’s interested in Mickey-Mousing that poet’s sentiments - on the contrary, he may see a purple passage of words and set it simply, as if deflating it, or he may take a plain statement of action (looking out of a window, say) and fill that phrase with complex music containing a world of dark feeling.
classical music reviews
Peter Culshaw
When I met the Nigerian rebel pop star Fela Kuti I asked him who was the greatest musician - he didn’t hesitate before replying George Frederic Handel. Kuti was wearing only a pair of red underpants at the time and smoking a massive spliff. His music has echoes of Handel, certainly in some keyboard lines, in all its solidity and moments of transcendence. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at Handel’s continuing reach across the centuries and continents. Beethoven and Mozart are among many to have re- arranged Handel.
jonathan.wikeley
Are you allowed to like both Andreas Scholl and David Daniels? I've always felt slightly guilty over this one - it feels somewhat indecent to listen ruthlessly to Scholl for some pieces, and drop him like a spurned lover for Daniels when the mood takes you. Tonight, though, was definitely a Daniels night: bits and bobs from Handel's operas and oratorios, and some modern takes on the great man. It was cabaret-goes-slightly-baroque, with Harry Christophers leading a sparkling Academy of St Martin in the Fields with plenty of zing, just a whiff of campery, and the odd cheeky smile from composer and performer alike.
edward.seckerson
The hills are alive with the sound of... well, Donizetti, actually. His mature "Melodramma Semiserio" Linda di Chamounix arrived towards the climax of a prolific career in opera and was clearly a late attempt to capitalise on his successes and give his adoring audiences a little of everything and at great length. This season-opener concert performance at the Royal Opera (recorded, incidentally, by Opera Rara) was not far short in duration of Verdi’s epic Don Carlo, a starry revival of which occupies this very stage imminently.
jonathan.wikeley
What a splendid little ensemble the Purcell Quartet is. The sort of group that you rather hope might reduce in size as the years go on, so that in the end you can put them in your pocket and carry them around with you all the time. If ever an ensemble could provide a soundtrack to the ups and downs of life then this is it.
igor.toronyilalic
The height of naffness? The best of British? A bit of fun? Opinions always splinter over the Last Night of the Proms. The received wisdom is that, if you have a brain or any genuine care for music, you’re not really meant to enjoy the Last Night; you’re meant to endure it, bravely, stoically, heroically, like a terminal illness, by taking each sonic and visual blow on the chin. What is really not meant to happen is for one to find - next to the usual bits of aural and intellectual GBH - moments of genuine comedy, emotion and even musical revelation.
edward.seckerson
One sure (but expensive) way of luring Zubin Mehta to London is to hire the Vienna Philharmonic, too. He and the orchestra go way back to a time when the Indian-born superstar’s smouldering good looks might have suggested Bollywood as a more likely destination than the Vienna Conservatoire. But only the most precociously gifted 20-something conductor offers up Bruckner’s 9th Symphony for his first recording with the illustrious Philharmonic. And quite a fist of it he made, too. I still return to it from time to time.
igor.toronyilalic
One after the other came their pleas. “Save us!” they cried, “Save us, or we will be no more!” Not the words of the enslaved Israelites of Handel’s oratorio, however, but the sentiments of the English Baroque Soloists, the Monteverdi Choir and their supporters during their pre-concert supplications. Never has the plea of a fundraising concert chimed so well with the thrust of the music.
igor.toronyilalic
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra like to do things their way. They still show little compunction about discriminating on sexual and ethnic grounds and for over 70 years have maintained the idiosyncratic position of having no fixed principal conductor. Instead, like the prettiest girl in the school year, they carefully bestow grace and favour on a special chosen few. One of their longest running relationships has been with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a partnership whose early results – trail-blazingly authentic - regularly raised Viennese hackles. So it was a great disappointment to learn that Harnoncourt – 80 this year - had been taken ill and that Franz Welser-Möst - whose former orchestra, the London Philharmonic, had nicknamed him Frankly Worse Than Most - would take his Proms place.
igor.toronyilalic
What exactly is the point of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies? I don't ask this with any malice or hostility, just in a tone of inquiry. It is a question that I think his new Violin Concerto, Fiddler on the Shore, raises. That is, is Davies still here to shock and annoy, or to assuage? The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Davies's baton presented the British premiere of the work last night, with Daniel Hope as the soloist, in the first of two proms that celebrated the composer's 75th birthday. Within its single-movement span were representations from the two opposing camps of Davies's life and musical language.