Mahler
David Nice
Two hours' drive from Tbilisi over a beautiful mountain pass, lushly wooded on the descent, the Tsinandali Estate has been central to Georgia's wine-growing district of Kakheti since poet-prince Prince Alexander Chavchavadze produced the first bottle in 1841. Natives and overseas tourists come to wander the English-style arboretum, described by Alexandre Dumas the Elder as the Garden of Eden, and visit the modest palace where rakish Russian writer Griboyedov putatively seduced his host’s 16 year old daughter Nino, married her and travelled with her to Iran, where he was promptly murdered in Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The conductor Thomas Søndergård turned 50 on Friday. He marked the occasion, which coincided with the opening concert of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s winter season, with a short homily on the contradictions of age – “the young seek experience, adventure and wisdom, the old seek only one thing: youth” – addressed to the audience before a programme of three works whose composers were all in their early twenties at the time of writing: Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, Berg’s Seven Early Songs, and Mahler’s First Symphony.It was a bold start to a season that promises rich pickings from the Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Since time immemorial the Edinburgh International Festival has started with a juicy choral epic designed to show off the Festival Chorus and the opulent Usher Hall. So this performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony would normally have been billed as the opening concert. But the forces of democratisation and outreach have been at work. In recent years the festival has kicked off with a large scale free “opening event,” aptly mirrored by the popular free fireworks concert at the end.This year the grand opening event was in fact a concert on Friday evening by the very same orchestra as that Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s a curiosity of music that a performance can occasionally be better – more persuasive and impressive – than the work itself. Even Britten’s most devoted advocates would find it hard to rank the Piano Concerto among his masterpieces. In his account at the BBC Proms last night, however, Leif Ove Andsnes carved out a niche for the piece as a confident yet quizzical response to the genre, standing diffidently to one side.Yes, the opening Toccata sounded more than ever like fluent but second-hand Prokofiev; the following wrong-note waltz limped along as a poor cousin to the Spanish-accented Read more ...
Robert Beale
As end-of-term concerts go, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony is a biggie. In fact it’s hard to imagine any place of secondary education where they would even contemplate it.But for Chetham’s School of Music, the "Symphony of a Thousand" was a doable task, and for Stephen Threlfall’s last public appearance for Chetham’s as director of music it became a thrilling triumph. They’re only part of the way through celebrating 50 years of Chetham’s existence in 2019 – this was number 32 in a 50-concert series running through the year – but of those 50 it will probably be remembered the longest.Recorded for Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No 10, completed and arranged for chamber orchestra by Michelle Casteletti Lapland Chamber Orchestra/John Storgårds (BIS)Other Mahler symphonies have been downsized on CD: there are superb transcriptions of Nos 7 and 9 from Peter Stangel’s Taschenphilharmonie and the Camerata RCO respectively. Michelle Casteletti’s version draws most heavily on Deryck Cooke’s idiomatic performing version (rightly so; the various other completions don't sound like Mahler), played here by just 24 musicians: single winds and a tiny string section, backed up with harp, percussion, piano and Read more ...
David Nice
Charismatic, full of vital elan to the end, inconsistent, fitfully creative, a casually anti-semitic Conservative Catholic married to two of the greatest Jewish artists, Alma Mahler/Gropius/Werfel née Schindler can never be subject to a boring biography. A child of her fin de siècle time, torn between the need to be free and the will to inspire great figures, she was all too often gauged by the men who loved and tried to dominate her. Cate Haste gives us their verdicts, but the picture drawn from Alma's diaries and autobiographies only confirms the general portrait.There's little new here, Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic have given memorable accounts of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 4 in Manchester before – notably conducted by Günther Herbig in 2010 and by John Storgårds in 2014 – but surely none as harrowingly grim as under Mark Wigglesworth this time. A welcome foil to it, then, were Mahler’s five dream-like Rückert-Lieder, forming the 20-minute first section of the concert programme, and winsomely sung by Roderick Williams.He is a master of so many vocal genres, and in these poem settings demonstrated a surprising variety of expression within the confines of their superficially simple Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As one half of British politics convulsed into a deeper spasm of suicidal fury, it came almost as a relief to hear a great Anglo-Italian conductor lead an impassioned Roman orchestra in a massive, terrifying symphony once described by a (German) maestro as the first example of musical nihilism. Ah, but that’s the paradox of Mahler’s Sixth. His so-called “Tragic” symphony – though he disavowed that label for the epic, 85-minute work he premiered in 1906 – might amount to an overpowering expression of grief, rage, and despair at the cruelty of fate. But to get there Mahler not only deploys, but Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No 7 Budapest Festival Orchestra/Ivan Fischer (Channel Classics)“It is my best work and it has a cheerful character.” So said Mahler about his Symphony No 7, and on the basis of this exuberant, feisty performance, Ivan Fischer agrees with him (“…may this reading contribute to a revalidation!”). Fischer doesn't see the work as problematic, his love for the symphony expressed without a trace of indulgence. There's so much to enjoy here. The first movement's juddering opening is superbly done, the music's slow awakening rivalling the start of Mahler's 3rd. The jump cuts Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly 17 years ago, Simon Rattle inaugurated his era at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic with Mahler's Fifth Symphony. It couldn't hope to possess the thrill of discovery which had marked his Birmingham Mahler – after all, the Berliners had long enjoyed a more organic view of the composer with Claudio Abbado – but eventually the team gave us a supreme Proms performance of the Seventh Symphony, the one best suited to Rattle's curious form of micro-management. The London Symphony Orchestra, on the other hand, must be so relieved to be free of Gergiev's superficial Mahlerian glut, and while Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
No successor has yet been named to Vladimir Jurowski as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic, so it is interesting to note that Edward Gardner is making several appearances with the orchestra this season. The two conductors are similar in their dynamic approach and brisk, efficient tempos. But where Jurowski focuses on detail, drawing exceptional clarity from the ensemble, Gardner seems more impulsive, structuring the music with similar care, but punctuating to greater dramatic effect with surprisingly emphatic tuttis. This concert, of Beethoven, Elgar and Mahler, demonstrated an Read more ...