piano
philip radcliffe
It is nearly 50 years since Martha Argerich played in Manchester. She performed with the Hallé Orchestra and the conductor was Claudio Abbado, making his UK debut. That was in 1965 and a year later they repeated their double act. Thanks to the Manchester International Festival and her special working relationship with conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, music director of the Manchester Camerata, she bridged that gap last night.I must admit to a sense of some disappointment when she decided to replace the work advertised, Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, with Beethoven’s First. However, she gave Read more ...
David Nice
On most of her London visits, Elisabeth Leonskaja has been an unassuming high priestess of the mysteries and depths in core sonatas by Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert. This time she applied her Russian-school style of orchestral pianism, tempered as always by absolute clarity, to burning the mists off Ravel, Debussy and the French-inspired Romanian, Enescu. She went on to give us colossal enlightenment in what must be the greatest work ever composed by a 19-year-old, Brahms’s Third Piano Sonata in F minor.If Brahms was the last of the titans, Leonskaja embodies the twilight of the gods. We Read more ...
David Nice
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 encores, Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten by one Arvo Pärt. Thirty three years later Neeme Järvi, now indisputably one of the great master conductors and at the helm of a Swiss orchestra rather than the Swedes he’d then conducted (the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra), not only began with a work by fellow Estonian Pärt but also ended Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 each note bleeding into the next. Mesh the result with a similar composition played at the same time and you have some idea of how Lubomyr Melnyk’s “Windmills”, his final piece last night, sounds.Melnyk’s precise music – what he calls “continuous music” – bears some relation to a few minimalist pianists: Charlemagne Palestine comes to mind. But Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“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 divine simplicity was in the delicate hands of Mitsuko Uchida, whose Mozart resisted every striped temptation that Andris Nelsons and the CBSO threw in her path. On their own in Scriabin and, to a lesser extent, Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces, they could emote at will, fearful symmetry and all.Often enjoyable, and with many exquisite moments, Mozart’s Read more ...
David Nice
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 Hungarians in Bartók. On this occasion, it seemed like no bad thing to welcome back the Budapest Festival Orchestra and its febrile, masterly music director Iván Fischer in a work they’ve brought to London before, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. But it was a surprise to some of us to find that this passionate, flexible team’s interpretation had stiffened Read more ...
David Nice
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 Martyn Brabbins and the BBC Symphony Orchestra last night, and earlier in the week more self-styled “musical toys” from overnight sensation as Newcomer of the Year at the BBC Music Magazine 2013 Awards Mei Yi Foo: a gallimaufry of piano miniatures by Bartók, Benjamin, Fujikura, Lachenmann and Unsuk Chin.You’ll note no inclusion there for the London Read more ...
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 ...
edward.seckerson
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 reaches of this unfriendly recital space. Could it be that the Prelude of the C major Prelude and Fugue was too assertive, strident even (not a word one normally ever associates with Uchida), or that the, to my mind, inappropriate rubato somehow disturbed the perfect equilibrium of the music? The opening of the F sharp minor Prelude settled the Read more ...
David Nice
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 OAE’s publicity didn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, by advertising this concert with Alfred’s tag at its head, the intention was surely to highlight the shock of the new in all three works played and/or conducted by András Schiff.As it happened, Schiff made it all sound unshockingly natural on one level within the charmed circle of equally Read more ...
Jasper Rees
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 relentlessly asks grave questions of print media’s business model. Some editors respond to the job's demands by keeping obsessively fit, and then there is Rusbridger’s alternative guide to stress-busting: the piano.Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible, written in diary form, is the story of Rusbridger’s attempt to grapple with Chopin’s Read more ...
David Nice
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 featured Horowitz’s hyperintensification of an already extravagant Liszt transcription in this recital, Yevgeny Sudbin is very much his own man: a thinker verging on the visionary who always seems to know exactly where the more extreme fantasists among his chosen composers are heading.What a good idea to make a centred start with pensive Scarlatti Read more ...