Elgar
David Nice
Rattle and the Berliners went home at the beginning of the week with vine-leaves in their hair. There's now something else to celebrate. Exactly one week on from the second concert in their Sibelius cycle, the Barbican hosted even more of an all-out stunner, starting with Sibelius no less compellingly conducted than the best of last week’s symphonic cycle and ending with a performance of the "Inextinguishable" Fourth Symphony by this year’s other 150th birthday composer, the great Dane Carl Nielsen, which electrified from start to finish.In his first ever concert with a major London orchestra Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar. Hmm. Music for the home counties. Party conferences. Golf clubs, and chaps wearing tweed jackets. All wrong, of course; it’s easy to forget that this most misunderstood of composers was actually a bit of an outsider. A self-taught, working-class Catholic, he definitely wasn’t a member of the establishment.Elgar’s First Symphony isn’t music for crusty old buffers, and John Wilson’s coruscating performance with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain served to highlight its many wonders. Despite the vast forces assembled, has Elgar’s scoring ever sounded so transparent? Or, dare I Read more ...
David Nice
As I sat, engaged and occasionally charmed but not always as impressed as I’d been told I would be, through violinist-animateur Richard Tognetti’s lightish seven-course taster menu of string music with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, it was worth bearing two things in mind. One was that this happened to be merely the official zenith of a truly enlightened three-part project; on Monday, parts of the programme had been played first to educate all ages and later to grab a young audience in more relaxed mode as part of the OAE’s pioneering Night Shift series. The other qualification Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar: Symphony no 1, Cockaigne Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo (BIS)No one says there's anything unusual about an orchestra in Liverpool recording Shostakovich, or a Manchester band producing a new Sibelius cycle. So why do we make such a lot of self-congratulatory fuss when a non-British team performs Elgar? He's a major late-romantic figure, and at his best he's easily the equal of Mahler and Strauss. Elgar symphonies aren't uniquely English in appeal, and this disc makes that point handsomely. That it comes from a Finnish conductor and a Swedish orchestra is Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The levels of refinement now exhibited by the Hallé, the stylishness and elegance of the playing, define the special relationship that they and Mark Elder have cemented over the last decade and a half. The opening bars of Berlioz’s Le corsaire came off the page like a manifesto for French sensibilities with rapier-like strings parrying airborne woodwinds like the most flexible of swashbuckling foils. The whole overture was so light on breath and string as to be positively balletic. Elder’s work with period instruments had properly informed both characterisation and sonority; there wasn’t an Read more ...
David Nice
A full day began and ended with Elgar the European, or rather the citizen of the world. After all, the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, played with panache by 180 young musicians in a morning meet-up, owes its swagger to the "Cortège de Bacchus" from French petit-maître Delibes’ ballet Sylvia, while the First Symphony can hold its head high alongside very different masterpieces from the early 1900s by Mahler and Sibelius – though it needs a lift and a shape, which it got in excelsis from the consummate Mark Wigglesworth (****).It’s good to be reminded how Elgar lavished orchestral and Read more ...
David Nice
A monstrous celebration prefaced by thunderous organ chords is always going to be more the Albert Hall’s kind of thing than a comic opera viewed through the wrong end of the telescope. So Strauss’s Festival Prelude kicked off a first half of 150th birthday celebrations in more appropriate style than last week’s Der Rosenkavalier. Unfortunately what it ushered in worked less well up to the interval; but then there was Elgar’s Second Symphony to redeem all with heart and soul, the best possible visiting card for a golden-age Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko.You could Read more ...
David Nice
“And suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.” To fill the Albert Hall – where a sizeable number of participants are standing, of course, in the best place – as handsomely as this, and as clearly, takes some work. Sir Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra know how to manipulate the space to best effect, and Elgar’s oratorios, of which The Kingdom is the third and last, are among the few works which mostly benefit from the warm halo it places around the sound.I only wish this one had been The Kingdom’ Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Sir Adrian Boult laid the foundations for its revival, more recently Sir Mark Elder found astonishing illumination within it, and now a third knight of the realm - Sir Andrew Davis (the latest recipient of the Elgar Medal) - chivalrously stamps his authority on it and brings it in from the cold.Elgar’s The Apostles is both typical and startlingly untypical of the composer. So much about its retelling of the gospels is spare and concentrated, so much is understated with that peculiarly English air of dispassion that until you grow accepting of its stately pace you crave the urgency and Read more ...
David Nice
Last year a DVD appeared featuring the 15 winning performances from the start of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition up to 2011. I watched them all, skimming if any seemed a notch below par but staying with most. You could see the star quality and the promise in many who have since become great artists, including Karita Mattila, Anja Harteros and Ekaterina Shcherbachenko. But only two seemed like the fully finished article from the start: Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky in 1989 – the year Bryn Terfel won the Lieder prize – and American soprano Nicole Cabell in 2005, the Read more ...
David Nice
Arise, Sir Edward – Gardner, not Elgar, whose First Symphony the former conducted last night. Well, maybe a knighthood’s too premature; although the daft honours system has rewarded others in the operatic world for less, and Gardner has already served two brilliant terms at Glyndebourne Touring Opera and ENO, there was just one aspect of the symphony that he didn’t seem quite to get last night.It was the visionary gleam, its flipside the pain of the composer’s tortured introspection, which he missed by a centimetre and which knights of greater experience like Sirs John Barbirolli, Adrian Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Vasily Petrenko used his baton like a piratical rapier to galvanise the London Philharmonic violins in their flourishes of derring-do at the start of Berlioz’s Overture Le Corsaire. And the brilliance was in the quicksilver contrasts, the lightness and wit of inflection which lent a piquancy to the panache of this great concert opener. The arrival of the main theme - tantalisingly delayed - was almost balletic in its vivacity and even the final trumpet-led assault suggested a Byronic hero as French as he was feral. One of Petrenko’s great strengths as a conductor lies with the sharpness of Read more ...