sat 04/01/2025

Prokofiev

Prom 30: Bavouzet, BBC Philharmonic, Noseda

It was mostly Russian night at the Proms, and mostly music you could dance to, as a hand jiving Arena Prommer rather distractingly proved in the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony. Even Prokofiev’s elephantine Second Piano Concerto was...

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Prom 21: Hope, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Søndergård

The “Turning Point” in Colin Matthews’ so-named orchestral piece is a change of attitude, a sudden seriousness of purpose, a great effort of will to stop moving and take stock of where it - whatever it is - is going. That Matthews did actually stop...

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Wang, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Dausgaard, Barbican Hall

Orchestral volcanoes were erupting all over Europe around the year 1915. It was courageous enough to make a mountain chain out of three of them in a single concert. I was less prepared for the white-heat focus applied by that stalwart Dane Thomas...

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Alexander Nevsky, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Brabbins, Barbican Hall

Is Prokofiev’s 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky the greatest film music ever written? Not quite, if only for the fact that Sergei Eisenstein’s second sound-picture glorifying historical role models for the ever more tsar-like Stalin, Ivan the...

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Classical CDs Weekly: Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Eight Strings

 Prokofiev: Works for Violin Janine Jansen, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski, Boris Brovtsyn (violin) and Itamar Golan (piano) (Decca)Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto no 2 was completed just before the composer’s return to...

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War and Peace: Russian National Orchestra, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

Can two half-orchestras playing together ever be better than one well-established organism? The second and third concerts in yet another special project masterminded by Vladimir Jurowski, drawing together British and Russian perspectives on war and...

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Yuja Wang, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Let no one tell you that Chinese pianists can't play with passion. Yuja Wang ran the full gamut of emotions in last night's Queen Elizabeth Hall recital from the tender to the rhapsodic. But mostly she channelled her energies to delivering some of...

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Vengerov, St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Temirkanov, Barbican Hall

Originally, this concert was to open with that mercurial wonder Martha Argerich playing an unspecified piano concerto. Then its first item became Martha Argerich not playing anything, for the good lady, almost as rare a visitor to Britain as the Man...

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Romeo and Juliet, Royal Ballet

Better late than never. It took till Act 3 for a new Juliet to fledge her wings and shed the nervous caution, but Melissa Hamilton, debuting yesterday afternoon in probably the Royal Ballet’s most coveted ballerina role, suddenly did what we all...

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Classical CDs Weekly: James MacMillan, American String Quartets and Music from the Machine Age

 Miserere: Choral Music by James MacMillan The Sixteen/Christophers (Choro)Scots composer James MacMillan’s orchestral music has never convinced me, but this collection of a capella choral music is astonishingly accomplished. You can’t help...

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Jansen, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Nézet-Séguin, Royal Festival Hall

At last, a bag of sweets! In earlier concerts from Vladimir Jurowski’s LPO series Prokofiev: Man of the People? much time was spent  consuming the composer’s flat soufflés, experimental rock cakes, or the fancy dish that was really haddock....

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Blaumane, Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra, Jurowski, Royal College of Music

How do you solve a problem like Prokofiev? Not with a TV talent hunt promoted by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Not even, I’m beginning to think, with the current London Philharmonic concert series, Prokofiev: Man of the People?, devised by Vladimir Jurowski...

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