LSO
David Nice
Big orchestras to serve the late romantic masterpieces and contemporary blockbusters still aren’t the order of the Covid-era day, even in streamed events, at least not in the UK. The London Symphony Orchestra is so far unique in bigging up the strings as well as bringing on the full brass and percussion thanks to the unique nature of what was previously its rehearsal space and venue for chamber concerts, LSO St Luke’s.Both for Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle the other month under chief conductor Rattle – due to be streamed, but not for free – and for his Dance Suite alongside Hannah Kendall’s The Read more ...
David Nice
One source of advance information told us to expect a reduced version of Bartók’s one-act Bluebeard’s Castle, among the 20th century’s most original and profound operatic masterpieces. Joining 19 other lucky invitees and some of the LSO brass upstairs at St Luke’s, I realized immediately that the sea of comfortably distanced musicians covering the entire floor space, from violins at the east end in front of a conferring Simon Rattle, Karen Cargill and Gerald Finley, to percussion below us at the west, could only mean the real, full thing: the largest gathering of players I’d seen in London Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Sunday night’s Prom by the London Symphony Orchestra was Simon Rattle’s 75th and surely his strangest. But, in his best style, it was eclectically programmed, balancing novelty with tradition, responded imaginatively to the restrictions in place, and was very well played in the circumstances. These circumstances allowed for more inventive programming than would normally be entertained, but the biggest irony was that the spatial effects that would have sounded so amazing in the hall were only possible because the hall was empty.The required distancing between players became the basis of the Read more ...
David Nice
Time to face the elephant in the room. Five of the six set-ups listed below are free to access; one is not. While big organisations like the Met – despite not paying its artists or staff since lockdown – and the London Symphony Orchestra can use their generous archive releases to plead for funds, the fact remains that classical musicians are penniless right now, and find themselves staring at blank calendars which will in some cases extend way into 2021. Diminishing pleasures in from-home films don’t pay; middle-range groups and institutions already face at the very least a much-reduced 2021- Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The absence of live concerts is not just affecting the "in the flesh" audiences, but also having a knock-on effect for the Radio 3 audience, used to hearing a live or as-live concert every night of the week. The BBC have instead gone to the archive of recentish concerts to keep the In Concert strand alive, and last week’s schedule (20-24 April) presented an array of appetising concerts showing the best kind of enterprising programming. Familiar music alongside the unfamiliar, a range of orchestras in a range of venues, and for me a delightful voyage of discovery and re-discovery.I don’t have Read more ...
David Nice
He may no longer be the Berlin Philharmoniker's Chief Conductor, but by a combination of serendipity and foresight on the orchestra's part, Simon Rattle's last concert in Berlin for the foreseeable future was filmed without an audience and led the way for other, smaller-scale ventures before gatherings of any sort beyond chamber music with players at a distance became an impossibility. The current stopgap is the kind "his" orchestra now, the London Symphony Orchestra, is offering: past films on the nights when a concert would have taken place.The latest, in place of what we would have Read more ...
David Nice
Three deep-veined masterpieces by two of the 20th century's greatest composers who just happened to be British, all fading at the end to nothing: beyond interpretations of such stunning focus as those offered by violinist Vilde Frang, conductor Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra, these works could ask for nothing more than intense silence from the third point of what Britten called the magic triangle with composer and performers - the audience. With hardly anyone these days daring to cough in a concert, and only those present who felt healthy, brave or foolhardy enough to turn Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
#Beethoven250 is in full swing at the Barbican. Like most venues, they are keen to show a different side to the composer in his jubilee year. And the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives ticks all sorts of anniversary boxes. The work is utterly obscure - not a single one of the musicians this evening had performed it before - but it’s large-scale and ambitious, with plenty of opportunities to shine, especially for the chorus and soloists. It was paired with Berg’s Violin Concerto, played by Lisa Batiashvili, an equally virtuosic performance, though of a more subdued work. An ideal balance. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Alina Ibragimova’s solo journey (in 2015) through the peaks and abysses of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas gave me vivid Proms memories to treasure for a lifetime. The Russian-born violinist’s Bach abounds in both majesty and tenderness, as well as a consuming fire of intensity when the music so demands. She brought something of the same quality to her performance last night of Mendelssohn’s E minor concerto at the Barbican. Nathalie Stutzmann conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a menu of well-seasoned 19th-century favourites that began with generous chunks of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Read more ...
David Nice
What a jolting coincidence that one of the 20th century's angriest symphonic beasts should have a rare unleashing on a night of high national anxiety. Whether Vaughan Williams spewed forth his Fourth Symphony in response to darkening European clouds in 1934 or as a sublimation of sexual frustration, given his unhappy domestic life at the time, it hit us all hard last night. There was even some release of tension in the sheer energy of embattled themes and grinding dissonances, thanks to Antonio Pappano's stupendous control of a London Symphony Orchestra on fire.Most surprising, perhaps, was Read more ...
David Nice
So much was fresh and exciting about Michael Tilson Thomas's years as the London Symphony Orchestra's Principal Conductor (1988-1995; I don't go as far back as his debut, the 50th anniversary of which is celebrated this season). Carved in the memory are his concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada in "The Flight of the Firebird" festival, his high-octane piano playing as well as conducting in "The Gershwin Years", the transformative Prokofiev Fifth and Strauss Ein Heldenleben (both fortunately also recorded). He seems a more sober figure now, less swooping of gestures, eyes a little too Read more ...
David Nice
We have John Eliot Gardiner to thank for an unconventional diptych of Czech masterpieces in the London Symphony Orchestra's current season. He had to withdraw from last night's concert - he conducts Dvořák's Cello Concerto and Suk's "Asrael" Symphony on Thursday - but his replacement, Kazushi Ono, was no second-best. Familiar to us in the UK mostly as an opera conductor, firm and clear-headed in the three vivid narratives of the evening, he provided the ideal security for orchestral playing and stunning singing to fly.The programme proved, as always, that there's no slack in Janáček's mature Read more ...