Liszt
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 ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Don't expect polish," announced Ivan Fischer apologetically. "Things vill go rrrong. We may start pieces again." The tuba had been turned into a tombola. The percussionists were playing their buttocks. Someone else was blowing a Hungarian didgeridoo. A certain amount of madness was expected from the second Prom, an experimental Audience Choice concert. But the Mahler One of the first Prom? Who knew that that would be equally if not even more outrageous.As Edward Seckerson once wrote on theartsdesk, Mahler is about extremes: extremes of dynamic, tempo and texture. And death-defying extremes Read more ...
David Nice
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 Wagner's Meistersinger Prelude not the orchestra's wise Hans Sachs but a Walther von Stolzing in conducting terms, tipped unexpectedly by one source outside the BBC as Bělohlávek's successor. Lean and hungry Dane Thomas Dausgaard masterminded the most brilliantly co-ordinated Prom I heard last year, and he excelled again last night. As the programme' Read more ...
David Nice
Older pianomanes may lament the passing of the great Russian schooling that gave us the likes of Sofronitsky, Yudina and Richter. I'm not so sure. The younger generations may have dropped the mystic torch, but their more even-tempered approach can beguile. Yevgeny Sudbin forms the current holy trinity with Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Lugansky. His latest Wigmore recital was revelatory, not always in a good way; that broad beam needn't have swept every corner of the broad Russian church he so singularly constructed in the programme's second half. But anyone who can make Liszt sound as lucid Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The world tour that the Proms offer this year touches down in no more fascinating musical country than Hungary, with three of its great composers, Liszt, Bartók and Kodály brought into the Albert Hall last night by the ever-stimulating Vladimir Jurowski with his hot gypsy band, the London Philharmonic Orchestra.This acoustic is not a happy place for the syncopations and sharp rhythms of Hungarians, who are never afraid of a silence or a missed heartbeat, never rush to end a note when they can increase the suspense by holding it. As a result, Kodaly’s Dances of Galánta had a rougher ride than Read more ...
David Nice
Here we are again. Marvel as you enter at the aptly gaudy lighting of Albert's colosseum, but know that unless your place is with the Prommers towards the front of the arena, the musicians will often sound as if they're in another galaxy - maybe one hinted at in the George Herbert words, if hardly the Judith Weir music, of the opening BBC commission, Stars, Night, Music and Light. Though spattered with Messiaenic orchestral paint - not to mention the obbligato sniffalong from my annoying neighbour - it felt like a very tame, rather olde-British gambit. Not so the great blazes and catastrophes Read more ...
graham.rickson
This week’s reviews include a generous Liszt anthology played by one of the 20th century’s most fondly remembered pianists. There’s a reissued box of Beethoven symphonies performed on modern instruments by one of the classiest European orchestras. Heading further north, we've a repackaged set of Sibelius symphonies with some essential extras.
Beethoven: The Symphonies Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus/Kletzki (Supraphon)
This lovely box set feels naughtily indulgent after the bracing, clean textures of Emanuel Krivine’s recent period-instrument Beethoven cycle. Paul Kletzki, born in Read more ...
David Nice
What next - Boulez and Daniel Barenboim in Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov? The two numbered Liszt concertos are probably as far as they're going to go in lacier romantic repertoire, and last night it didn't feel far enough to justify the predictable standing ovation. Like three of the works on the advertised programme - Wagner's Siegfried Idyll the exception - the performances were masterly and original without hitting the heights, revealing in orchestral textures and pianistic versatility without being revelatory.Curiously, of the two it was Barenboim who fell shorter of every facet required by Read more ...
David Nice
For last year's Europe Day concert, presidency-holder Spain fielded a Paco Peña showstopper in what's for the past three years been the venue of choice, St John's, Smith Square. This 9 May, the Hungarians' six-month stint yielded not a wow-factor spectacular - for me, that would have been a knees-up with violinist Gaby Lakatos - but instead a worthy and far from dull celebration of the Liszt bicentenary with 13-year-old Ferenc/Franz's one-act opera, Don Sanche.Only sizeable chunks of it, actually, because the nature of the event is a concise, hour-long celebration. Yet if the work Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Word was that four strings had broken in rehearsals. One had snapped only half an hour before the start of last night's Liszt-fest at the Barbican. It meant one of two things: either pianist Evgeny Kissin had finally switched off the safety-first autopilot that some had worried had taken hold of this former child prodigy. Or we had a dodgy piano. Thankfully, it was the former. The Russian was a transformed pianist in these transformative works. He had flicked the switch from autopilot to shaman. But before we got to the epic, David Copperfield-like acts of magic of the second half - Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Who knew the changeover of the EU Presidency could be this much fun? Amid the formal bowing and scraping at the Royal Festival Hall bunfights last night that signalled that the Hungarians were now at the tiller of this sinking political ship were some dodgy political metaphors, a round of orchestral Where's Wally and some extraordinary music.Conductor Ivan Fischer had shuffled his Budapest Festival Orchestra as if a pack of cards and distributed them seemingly chaotically across the stage. The principal bassoon was with the first violins. First flute led the cellos. Horns, principal Read more ...
David Nice
Heartfelt birthday salutations to the great pianist first known as plain Stephen Bishop. For a recital in the early 1980s, when he first added the paternal Croatian "Kovacevich", introducing me to late Brahms piano music - Op 117, never more evanescent or troubling since - and the Beethoven Tempest Sonata, an incentive to tackle that work as best I could. For many unbudgeable CDs on the shelves, including the great duo partnership with one-time other half Martha Argerich and late Schubert sonatas. And for having the characteristic modesty, last night, to give a protégée the central spot in a Read more ...