BBC
BBC Proms: Ma, BBCSO, RobertsonWednesday, 31 August 2011
Over the past six weeks of the Proms the BBC’s hard-working Symphony Orchestra has performed everything from Britten to Brahms, Verdi to Volans. Their Mahler with Ed Gardner was an operatic epic, their programme of English music for Mark... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Fray, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Van ZwedenWednesday, 31 August 2011
David Fray certainly has the locks to be a piano virtuoso (eat your heart out, Franzi). And he has the looks, the troubled brow, the pallor and a suitably eccentric manner (the Glenn Gould hunch and hum came out for all the runs). But does he... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Hooray for Hollywood, John Wilson Orchestra, WilsonMonday, 29 August 2011
Hooray for Hollywood! The title of last night's Prom didn't officially have an exclamation mark. But if any concert deserved a screamer, it was this one. A delirious mutual enthusiasm pinged back and forth from stage to audience all night as the... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Elijah, Gabrieli Consort & Players, McCreeshMonday, 29 August 2011
Mendelssohn loved looking back. And nowhere more so than in his blockbuster oratorio, Elijah. But what was most striking about last night's monumental performance at the Proms was how much he was also clearly looking forward and outward, and how... Read more... |
BBC Proms: BBC Singers, Sinfonye, Hollingworth, Wishart, Cadogan HallSaturday, 27 August 2011
Twelfth-century abbess, healer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen had no formal musical training. Perhaps because of this her music – exquisite arabesques of chant melody, animated by the conviction of her religious beliefs – creates a language all its... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Rinaldo, Glyndebourne Festival OperaFriday, 26 August 2011
What was the audience on? They tittered when the bicycles came on, nearly cried when the whip was unleashed and virtually pissed themselves when the warring sides in Handel's crusader fantasy Rinaldo started fighting it out with hockey and lacrosse... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Graham, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, DavisThursday, 25 August 2011
The spectacle of an orchestra named after Mahler playing Stravinsky irresistibly calls to mind Stravinsky’s report of a performance of the Eighth Symphony in Zurich in 1913. “Imagine”, he wrote to Maurice Delage, “that for two hours you are made to... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Douglas, BBC Symphony Orchestra, DausgaardMonday, 22 August 2011
Having been away in remote mountain places, I hadn't heard that the BBCSO's chief conductor Jiří Bělohlávek was taking a month off to recover from a virus. So it was a bracing last-minute shock to find the man stepping up to the podium to conduct... Read more... |
BBC Proms: London Sinfonietta, BBC Singers, Atherton, Cadogan HallSunday, 21 August 2011
Sirs Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies have now been at each others’ heels for almost 60 years. First, the composers were students together at the Royal Manchester College of Music. Then, once their careers began flourishing they kept... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Ax, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, HaitinkSaturday, 20 August 2011
"O, reason not the need!” cries Shakespeare’s King Lear, insisting on certain unquestioned rights. The phrase came to me listening to Bernard Haitink conducting Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto and Fourth Symphony last night. The 82-year-old Haitink... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Ax, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Haitink/ Hewitt, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, ManzeSaturday, 20 August 2011
Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, Brahms, and one work dedicated to Brahms by Schumann. That's right: it was Brahms night at the Proms. No scary new works. No discombobulating new interpretative glosses - dear old Bernard was our guide. Nothing to... Read more... |
BBC Proms: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ilan Volkov/ Viktoria Mullova, Matthew BarleyFriday, 19 August 2011
Landscape painting may be dominated by the Dutch. But in music it is the Austrians who know best how to evoke the majesty of the great outdoors. In the first of last night's two Proms, one of the most awesome of Anton Bruckner's snow-capped... Read more... |
