Classical music
graham.rickson
Ghedini: Orchestral Music Orchestra della Toscana/Daniele Rustione (Sony)Yet more music you’ve never heard by a composer who really should be better known. Giorgio Federico Ghedini (1892-1965) wrote an opera based on Melville’s Billy Budd several years before Britten, and revered Bartók, Hindemith and Stravinsky. He admired Schoenberg, though believed that, “through personal experience… it is possible to find and develop a series of 12 sounds that are purely tonal sounds, or with a sense of tonal affirmation.” Ghedini was fascinated by the music of the Italian Renaissance, transcribing Read more ...
theartsdesk
Love is in the air. Today, men and women and boys and girls will be pondering how to say it with roses and cards and candlelit dinners: those three words that contain multitudes. As the old strip cartoon never quite got round to saying, love is... the human condition, which is why a good quantity of the culture we review on this site has to do with it. To help you get into the mood for romancing, we have asked our writers to identify something - anything - in the arts that embodies the L word. There are some obvious choices, some obscure ones, and a whole lot of omissions. So, in the comment Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphonies 3 and 4 NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester/Thomas Hengelbrock (Sony)Brahms’s name is tucked away in disappointingly smallish print on this disc’s imposing cover. In case you’ve missed it, there’s a glitzy new concert hall in the composer’s home city of Hamburg, and this release gives us the first official recording made there. It inevitably sets one thinking about the pros and cons of new halls, and the benefits they bring versus the squillions they cost to build. Does London need a new one? No, it doesn’t – the same money would be surely be better spent on music education in Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Jonas Kaufmann’s legion of admirers could rest content. A well-received Lieder evening last week demonstrated that the world’s hottest tenor property had returned, both to London for a three-concert residency at the Barbican, and indeed to singing after burst blood vessels had forced several months of rest and cancelled concerts.A welcoming party duly cheered away before he had sung a note of the Wesendonck-Lieder. They had to wait until two lines of the fourth song before savouring the peculiar joys of Kaufmann’s voice at full throttle – appropriately enough, on the phrase "Glory of the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two young guys called Ben graced the BBC Philharmonic platform at the Bridgewater Hall – looking almost like Ant and Dec if you let your imagination wander. Ben Gernon, 27, had just been announced as the orchestra’s new Principal Guest Conductor (while predecessor John Storgårds now rejoices in the title of Chief Guest Conductor … it almost seems a bout of alternative facts is coming on), and this was his Bridgewater Hall début. Piano concerto soloist was Benjamin Grosvenor, a virtuoso Manchester knows well.Stickless throughout, Gernon began with Beethoven’s Third ("Eroica") Symphony, played Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Wherever you are in the world, opportunities to see Cecilia Bartoli perform are hard to come by. A one-off chance to see her sing Mozart in Rome was not to be missed. This was a rare homecoming for Bartoli. Born in Rome, she studied at the city’s Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia where many members of the orchestra teach. A quarter-century and more ago, she made her name in Mozart: as in irrepressibly cheeky Cherubino; a Zerlina more than capable of standing up to the Don’s predations; a Dorabella who always seemed to know better than her sister. She does not do doormats.These days, with due Read more ...
David Nice
Only four flutes were on stage at the start of Jakub Hrůša’s latest concert with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the reins of which he took over from Jonathan Nott last September. Charles Ives would have been amazed to hear his “Voices of Druids” on the strings sounding, along with the solo trumpet, from the distance. I suddenly realised why Hrůša smiled enigmatically when I had asked him in interview the previous day whether he would segue straight from The Unanswered Question into Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude (impossible without strings on the platform, of course). The idea was, in fact Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The BBC Symphony Orchestra has continued its long-standing support of British contemporary music with this première of a new commission, Michael Zev Gordon’s Violin Concerto for violinist Carolin Widmann. Gordon’s music deals in abstracts – new and old, familiar and unfamiliar, simple and complex – but with an unusual directness and clarity of expression. The concerto is not a virtuoso showpiece, but rather an exploration of the lyrical and expressive qualities of Widmann’s playing. It proved an ideal match, with Widmann here making the best possible case for the new work.Widmann’s tone, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Debussy: Images, Jeux, La plus que lente San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)Debussy’s tennis-themed Jeux would surely have made a bigger splash had its 1913 premiere not been overshadowed by a certain Stravinsky premiere. This is a real grower of a piece, a tennis-themed ballet given music of supernatural delicacy and subtlety. Jeux is an otherworldly score, one of its mysteries being that it can sound like a new piece on each hearing. I’ve never heard the piece so well performed as it is here, Debussy’s shades and half-lights painted with incredible skill by Michael Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Mitsuko Uchida specialises in elegant, if uncontroversial, interpretations of core Austro-German repertoire, yet she’s never predictable, and every performance is full of unexpected insights and welcome surprises. Mozart and Schumann stand at the far ends of her repertoire, and between them demonstrate what makes her playing great: In Schumann we hear subtlety of tone, gradually shifting moods and psychological depth, and in Mozart an unbridled joie de vivre, elevated, through her consummate artistry, to the highest of artistic ideals.Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C, K 545, was really just Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Yuri Temirkanov chose a shamelessly populist programme for the London leg of the St Petersburg Philharmonic tour. But Khachaturian, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are core repertoire for this orchestra, and ideal for showing off its many strengths. In an impressive coup, they also managed to engage the services of legendary pianist Martha Argerich for the Prokofiev concerto, and the result was a compelling afternoon of Soviet-era classics.On the basis of this showing, the St Petersburg Philharmonic is a world-class orchestra. Their tone is bold and strident, with the focus firmly on the upper Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin has one of the most beautiful voices in the business – a glinting crystal blade sheathed in velvet. She wields it with skill, darting swiftly with coloratura one minute, before stabbing deep with emotion the next. In Handel she’s peerless, and this was an exhibition round of a programme, designed to show both singer and composer at their best.She was joined by violinist Julien Chauvin and Le Concert de la Loge, the French baroque band who are rapidly becoming the go-to backing group for baroque stars including Philippe Jaroussky and Sandrine Piau. Theirs is a Read more ...