Elgar
David Nice
We had, as presenter James Naughtie so wryly remarked, set aside our mourning weeds for the low-key glamour of celebrating a far from moribund classical recording industry. Movers, shakers and humble BBC Music Magazine contributors all shifted from the airy dining space at the ever-accommodating Kings Place yesterday - I won't forget the mint marshmallow - and descended to woody Hall One for the magazine's 2013 awards.Editor Oliver Condy had a hard act to precede in the shape of quick-quipping Naughtie, but he made us laugh with news of an anniversary less vaunted than Wagner’s, Verdi’s or Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We’re still in the foothills of the Southbank Centre’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival, but already the harmonic ground is becoming unsteady underfoot. Last weekend saw the gemütlichkeit of Johann Strauss give way to the brutality of Richard Strauss, exposed us to the moistly chromatic flesh of Salome that lies behind the seven veils, and showed just a hint of Schoenbergian ankle. So surely this weekend’s return to 1900 and Elgar’s choral-society-stalwart The Dream of Gerontius is something of a retreat?Not exactly. Although latterly exorcised of its dangerous Catholic subversion and Read more ...
David Nice
Elgar declared a “massive hope in the future” as the human programme behind his epic First Symphony’s final exultant sprint. That hope was sprinkled like gold dust around the featured artists of this all-English concert. There are good reasons to be optimistic about the effective, colourful scores of 32-year-old Anna Clyne; we know that Benjamin Grosvenor, her junior by 12 years, is already a pianist of mercurial assurance, a real front-runner. And the BBCSO stole a march on the other London orchestras in 2013 with abundant fighting spirit, rising to the special focus demanded of them by a Read more ...
David Nice
Her Majesty was making a rare concert-hall appearance to present the Queen’s Medal for Music, and any little Englanders in the audience might have been tempted to link royalty to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. But conductor Robin Ticciati, with a generosity and wisdom beyond his 29 years, raised this orchestral masterpiece to the universal level it deserves. Elgar’s "friends pictured within" trod air and revealed every aspect of their often shy, beautiful souls.It should come as no surprise that the score transcends labels of nationality, provinciality even. After all, what is "Nimrod" but the 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 ...
alexandra.coghlan
The first panel in a would-be triptych, Elgar’s The Apostles is also something of a prototype – the musical experiment whose risks would culminate so strikingly in The Kingdom. Tackling the crucifixion from “the poor man’s point of view”, its occluded, obscured vision of events has atmosphere in abundance but a distinct lack of dramatic focus. There’s an awful lot of telling, climaxing in such an astonishing bit of showing that you almost forget the previous two hours’ tedium. Almost.Last night’s Proms performance re-enacts almost exactly Mark Elder and the Halle’s performance (and recording Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar: Enigma Variations, Cockaigne Overture, Pomp and Circumstance Marches 1-5 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Barry Wordsworth (RPO)Never underestimate the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Less generously funded than the other major London orchestras, most of their concerts are now given in the lovely Cadogan Hall near Sloane Square and not the Festival Hall. They soared under the directorship of Daniele Gatti, and are currently led by Charles Dutoit. And while their string sound is occasionally less refulgent than that of the LSO or Philharmonia, their brass and winds are consistently 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 ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's one of the great perversities of modern cultural life that orchestras from America and Venezuela visit London more often than those from Birmingham or Manchester. A perversity and a shame, as last night's exceptional performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and CBSO Chorus on a rare visit to the Barbican showed.Not even the cancellation of their chief conductor Andris Nelsons (owing to a family illness) or Toby Spence was able to derail things. The essentials were simply too good. There's nothing quite like a first-class English orchestra Read more ...
geoff brown
Originally, this concert was to open with that mercurial wonder Martha Argerich playing an unspecified piano concerto. Then its first item became Martha Argerich not playing anything, for the good lady, almost as rare a visitor to Britain as the Man in the Moon, did what she’s famous for doing. She cancelled. Acting with award-winning panache, the Barbican then found a substitute artist who’s recently become even rarer, the violinist Maxim Vengerov. Known for his golden tone, charisma and fire, Vengerov last performed in Britain with his violin in 2007: the year of his serious shoulder Read more ...
judith.flanders
“Over the top” is a curious expression. Originating in World War One, to mean going over the edge of a trench and into battle, it has altered by degrees to mean anything extravagant or outrageous. And Gloria, which is arguably Kenneth MacMillan’s masterpiece, has both the literal and figurative meanings of going over the top layered upon each other.The spare, terse set by Andy Klunder, a skeletal structure in front of a small slope, in sere, dying yellows and dried-blood reds, gives us our no-man’s-land, where soldiers (the Tommy’s tin hat is the only indication of occupation or period) Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Stately females sailed the corridors like grand multicoloured liners. Grown men in boaters and Union Jack waistcoats raced balloons to the Royal Albert Hall ceiling. Beachballs. Streamers. Flags. Fancy dress. One St George's Cross read "Votes for Women!" My first thoughts were: how lovely, in a way, that the mentally ill are allowed a day out like this.It does strange things to you, does the Last Night. Most amazingly strange was what it did to Lang Lang. His performance of Liszt's First Piano Concerto lacked all the customary vulgarity. Technical precision was from the start giving Read more ...