BBCSO
Peter Culshaw
Chilly Gonzales is a self-mythologising huckster, a throwback to a vaudevillian tradition of entertainer. He’s had enormous success producing the likes of Feist, is in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest solo piano concert (over 27 hours), and starred in the "existential sports movie" Ivory Tower as the inventor of “jazz chess”. His early albums were a crashed-up mélange of funk, electronic, rap and lounge, but his biggest success was a curveball of an album, Solo Piano (2004), a set of introverted Satie-influenced pieces. In a pop world where even playing keyboards Read more ...
David Nice
The prospect of adventuring from one unpredictable day to the next in the course of Michael Tippett’s Triple Concerto, and from dawn to twilight in just over an hour’s orchestral music from Wagner’s Ring, seemed very much weighted in the English composer’s favour. Frankly, had Mark Wigglesworth only conducted Siegfried’s Funeral March in this concert’s second half, he would have consolidated an already glowing reputation as a top-notch Wagnerian. That he and the BBC Symphony Orchestra burned their symphonic way through Dutch percussionist Henk de Vlieger’s audacious, unbroken “orchestral Read more ...
David Nice
Somehow the manic cry of “Scooby-Doo man!” from the back of the stalls didn’t seem too incongruous. We were in the thick of Shostakovich’s craziest symphony, the Fourth, composed in the mid 1930s when such maverick Russian talent was about to be stamped on and potentially quite a sledgehammer of a season opener for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Instead dapper Jukka-Pekka Saraste - a more than satisfactory replacement for the great Neeme Järvi - ran through this nightmarish world like an open razor, every cutting gesture aimed with deadly accuracy, having allocated the spiritual healing to a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
The BBC Symphony Chorus did a mass Mobot. A posse of medal-winning rowers and sailors led the encore of Rule, Britannia. The Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja entered in Team GB trackies. It has been, we can probably agree, a summer unlike others we have known. Every year the Last Night of the Proms celebrates Britishness as if we’ve won a stack of golds and wowed the world, when mostly – these no longer being the 1890s - we haven’t. But for obvious reasons last night’s Last Night had the chance to put clear blue water between itself and the regular warm bath for jingoists. In the new dispensation Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Eric Whitacre – less a composer or conductor, more a global choral phenomenon. Just the mention of his name in last night’s concert introduction drew whoops and wolf-whistles from the crowd, certainly not a reaction you tend to get for Beethoven, Boulez or Cage (though perhaps the latter gets a silent cheer). Like or loathe the hype that surrounds Whitacre, there’s no denying his role in popularising choral singing, nor the pure American genealogy of his style, which we can trace back through Morten Lauridsen and Randall Thompson to Bernstein and even Copland.Making his Proms debut with the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
After the all-singing, all-dancing, all-helicoptering brilliance of Stockhausen Mittwoch aus Licht, the dry routine of an opera in concert didn't seem a very enticing prospect. That's the problem with this year's Cultural Olympiad. We're becoming very spoilt by it. What should have been a mouth-watering prospect - a fantastic cast performing a great opera - suddenly began to feel run-of-the-mill when compared to the once-in-a-lifetime event that was Mittwoch. But my concerns were short-lived.I saw and loved the original ENO production of Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten's brilliant Read more ...
Daniel Ross
Shamefully, the Albert Hall was just over half full for this impeccably programmed celebration of that most "youth" of ensemble types, the Wind Orchestra and Brass Band. The air of a glorified school concert was blessedly absent throughout (except for the slightly patronising between-movement applause), which meant that both of these tack-sharp outfits could present their selections seamlessly and without fear of the usual "but they're so young!" silliness in an exclusively British programme.Highlights were very definitely the NYWO's version of Brixtonite Gavin Higgins' monumental response to Read more ...
geoff brown
Two weeks to go to the Olympics, of course, but the Proms Olympics – 84 concerts in 60 days – have already taken off, with Britain placed first, second, third and fourth. For last night’s First Night concert was one where everything except Canadian singer Gerald Finley was British: the composers, the conductors (all four of them), the orchestra, certainly the weather.There was also something distinctly British about the concert’s failure to be unquenchably festive. The best of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s playing, and some of the BBC Symphony Chorus’s most ravishing sounds, went into Delius’s Read more ...
peter.quinn
How incredibly heartening that this latest edition of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's Total Immersion, focusing on the music of the contemporary Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt, sold out days in advance. Including an introduction to Pärt's music by the BBC Radio 3 presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Dorian Supin's documentary film about the composer, 24 Preludes for a Fugue, a freestage event by the BBC SO Family Orchestra performing a new work inspired by Pärt's music, and three concerts, Saturday's day-long exploration provided an embarrassment of riches.The BBC Radio 3 producer who introduced the Read more ...
David Nice
Is it ever a good idea to programme two symphonies by one composer in a single concert? Maverick Valery Gergiev is likely to stand alone in applying the rule to Mahler. Yet curiously his Prom marathon of two big instalments made more sense as stages on a journey than yoking together the outwardly less time-consuming symphonic adventures of Sibelius. Jukka-Pekka Saraste's attempt last night to run the opposing approaches of the last two Sibelius symphonies head to head worked no better than usual.Maybe it partly felt that way because I have too fixed an idea of how much there is behind the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s typical: you wait ages for a Belshazzar’s Feast and then two come along at once. And judging by the performance delivered by Ed Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night, Andrew Nethsingha and his massed Cambridge choirs will have their work cut out to follow it next week at the Royal Festival Hall. Throbbing with dance, gaudy as an Eastern bazaar painted by a second-rate Victorian artist, Gardner’s Belshazzar was a wash of Technicolor extravagance among the twee reds and greens of Christmas classical programming.And speaking of gaudy – it was quite the curiosity that Read more ...
David Nice
When telling a complex musical story, handle with care. Interpreters need have no fear of composers who find selective, tone-friendly angles in their literary sources, like Janáček with Gogol’s Taras Bulba in last night’s searing finale, or Zemlinsky with Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the saturated climax of the previous evening. But what about Dvořák in oddball, potentially enriching mode, setting every jot and tittle of a folk ballad without actually using words or voices? Don’t, whatever you do, chop off the arms and legs, the fate that befalls the pretty maiden of The Golden Spinning Read more ...