piano
Berezovsky, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Järvi, Royal Festival HallSaturday, 25 May 2013
In 1980, an orchestra and conductor then hardly known in Britain came to the Royal Festival Hall. I went to hear Elisabeth Söderström in Strauss’s Four Last Songs; I left stunned by an unorthodox Sibelius Second Symphony and above all by one of the... Read more... |
Lubomyr Melnyk, Village UndergroundTuesday, 21 May 2013
Imagine the rising and falling piano cadences of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Then plug the gaps between each note with any of those which may have been encountered on the path to the next. Once that’s done, ensure that the playing is constant with... Read more... |
Uchida, CBSO, Nelsons, Symphony Hall, BirminghamFriday, 03 May 2013
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Blake asked the tiger. One might have asked the same question of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, with Mozart’s G major Piano Concerto, K.453, as the lamb, in this hyper-diverse Birmingham concert. The image of... Read more... |
Cooper, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, Royal Festival HallTuesday, 23 April 2013
Visiting orchestras and conductors often complain about agents’ insistence that they programme their main national dishes. The request is partly understandable: we all want to hear the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler, the Czechs in Dvořák, the... Read more... |
Lamsma, BBCSO, Brabbins, Barbican Hall/ Mei Yi Foo, Kings PlaceSaturday, 20 April 2013
Brave old world, that has so much unheard music in it. Not exactly the words of Shakespeare’s Miranda, I know, but that’s how I feel having experienced great things in the concert hall for the first time recently: Tippett’s Second Symphony from... Read more... |
Newcomers triumph at BBC Music Magazine AwardsWednesday, 10 April 2013
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... Read more... |
Mitsuko Uchida, Royal Festival HallThursday, 07 March 2013
The magic usually descends quickly in a Mitsuko Uchida recital but the opening Bach of this rescheduled Festival Hall concert - a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Klavier - took a while to draw attention from the farthest... Read more... |
Schiff, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Queen Elizabeth HallTuesday, 26 February 2013
You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the... Read more... |
10 Questions for Amateur Musician Alan RusbridgerMonday, 21 January 2013
Had we but world enough and time... A new book by the editor of the Guardian makes it clear quite how many hours in the day it takes to run a national newspaper in the digital age. There is the unyielding nature of 24-hour news, while the internet... Read more... |
Yevgeny Sudbin, Westminster Cathedral HallMonday, 14 January 2013
It was the kind of programme that great pianist Vladimir Horowitz used to pioneer, with the simple balm of Scarlatti offset by Scriabin’s flights of fancy, and a dash of virtuoso fireworks to conclude. Though he is an admirer of the master, and even... Read more... |
Grosvenor, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Litton, Barbican HallSaturday, 12 January 2013
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... Read more... |
Loving Miss Hatto, BBC One/ Homeland, Series 2 Finale, Channel 4Sunday, 23 December 2012
Joyce Hatto achieved a rare kind of immortality for being the pianist at the centre of an audacious classical music fraud, in which her husband faked "Joyce Hatto" CDs from the work of other artists and, for a time, enjoyed considerable success with... Read more... |
