Rachmaninov
graham.rickson
Antal Doráti in London: The Mercury Masters Vol. 1 (Decca Eloquence)A couple of recent YouTube videos show DG engineers hard at work remastering Karajan’s 1970s Bruckner and Mahler recordings for new vinyl LP pressings. The process looks tortuous, the multitracked master tapes painstakingly examined and reassembled, artificial reverb added using an empty stairwell. Listen, say, to Karajan’s Berlin performances of Mahler 6 and Bruckner 8 and you’re struck by the density of sound, the orchestral sonority almost oppressive in loud tuttis. Yes, the playing is accomplished, but there’s a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Paavo Järvi: The Complete Erato Recordings (Erato)Big box sets celebrating great conductors are piling up thick and fast, and this one, unusually, features an artist who’s very much alive. Paavo Järvi is just 62 (still young for a conductor). These 31 discs contain the albums he released for Virgin Classics, EMI and Erato between 1996 and 2015: classical CDs were still a big thing back in the late 1990s, and it’s remarkable to see how much quirky repertoire Virgin Classics allowed Järvi to record, including Stenhammar, Arvo Pärt, Eduard Tubin and Erkki-Sven Tüür. One of the earliest Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Piano Concertos 1 and 2, Solo piano works Igor Levit (piano), Wiener Philharmoniker/Christian Thielemann (Sony)Who’d have thought that Igor Levit and Christian Thielemann would be such effective partners? Levitt is one of the most cerebral and thoughtful of pianists with a string of excellent Sony albums, and there’s the worry that any collaborator won’t successfully step up to his level. But this set of Brahms Concertos is excellent, the dialogue between the two musicians transcribed in this set’s booklet suggesting that this was a bromance made in heaven. Concerto No. 1’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A programme of less-loved siblings – Shostakovich’s gnarly Second Cello Concerto and Rachmaninov’s “not-the-Second” Symphony No. 1 – gave John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London the chance to do what they do best: force an audience to take a second look.The Shostakovich has benefitted over the past few years from the advocacy of Sheku Kanneh-Mason – an unexpected choice for a young cellist who stormed to victory at the BBC Young Musician competition in 2016 with the more obviously ingratiating Concerto No. 1, whose signature is singing warmth of tone and breadth of melodic line.There’s Read more ...
David Nice
If there was ever a time for the inevitable "Rach Three” (piano concerto, not symphony) in the composer’s 150th anniversary year – and I confess I dodged other occasions – it might as well have come in the fresh and racy shape of Leif Ove Andsnes' interpretation and the equally alert, forward-moving playing of the London Philharmonic Orchestra under a kindred spirit, its principal conductor Edward Gardner.In short, there was no slack either in the concerto or an even greater masterpiece, the Choral Symphony The Bells, and yet no lack of emotional intensity either. Andsnes is usually Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
It takes stiff competition to outshine Yuja Wang, who last night at the Barbican complemented her spangled silver sheath with a disconcerting pair of shades. But the super-heroine pianist, who played Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, turned out to contribute the (comparatively) restrained and low-key element of a London Symphony Orchestra programme that culminated in a wall-shaking performance of Saint-Saëns’ "Organ" Symphony, with Anna Lapwood at the manuals.In this, the third of Sir Antonio Pappano’s opening quartet of the LSO season’s concerts, glittering (or thunderous) panache of Read more ...
David Nice
Not everyone knew what to expect from this fascinating programme. Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, last of his orchestral masterpieces, is nothing like the more familiar aspects of his piano concertos. Nor is Busoni’s nominal attempt at the form, which seems more of a Symphony-Concerto than anything else, and style-wise impossible to pin down. Both works had the fullest care and focus last night.It felt counter-intuitive to have Rachmaninov's very personal swansong in the first half; if some of us couldn't quite tune in to the depths at first, that was no fault of the performance. Edward Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Launching a four-year global project to proclaim the genius of Frederick Ashton might seem unnecessary. His work is the bedrock of what’s widely known as The English Style and rarely absent from any British ballet season, whether at the Royal Ballet (for whom he created much of it), or elsewhere.But the man was prolific, choreographing more than 100 works across half of the last century, and a large number of them deserve rediscovery. No matter that they were made in and for a very different world – a world of evening gloves and Margot Fonteyn and tea with the Queen Mother: today’s audiences Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sir Neville Marriner: The Complete Warner Classics Recordings (Warner)Assembling Sir Neville Marriner’s complete discography would probably require a crate; this weighty but compact box (80 CDs), released to celebrate his centenary, collects just the discs he recorded for EMI between 1970 and 2000 (he also worked extensively with Decca and Philips). Marriner rivalled Herbert Von Karajan as one of the classical industry’s most-recorded conductors and the majority of these performances were made with his own Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The group began life in the late 1950s as a Read more ...
David Nice
Purple patches flourished in the first half of this admirable programme: it could hardly have been otherwise given Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s devotion to a new work in his repertoire, and the current strength of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko. Even so, it was the culmination, Rachmaninov’s multifaceted “Choral Symphony” The Bells, which truly dazzled.It seems so obvious: Petrenko just knows this idiom and is completely at ease with the difficult Rachmaninov rubato. The Philharmonia Chorus was simply electrifying: hard to believe they weren’t professionals with a knockout Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North have a new pairing for Mascagni’s popular but clichéd Cavalleria Rusticana in this double bill: an early Rachmaninov one-acter, written when he was 19. The production of the former is a revival of the one seen in 2017 in their Little Greats season, and its director then, Karolina Sofulak, has returned to create this Aleko alongside it.So interest is inevitably more in what she has done with the new piece, and, intriguingly, how she has used the overlapping casting of the two to find striking resonances in their stories.Both are tragic tales of murder born of infidelity and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
To judge by the post-interval empty seats near me, some of the Cadogan Hall audience had turned up last night solely to hear Nikolai Lugansky play Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. Well, the more fool them. For sure they would have enjoyed their not so-brief encounter with a truly distinguished Russian pianist – noble standard-bearer for a grand tradition – who gave a finely-polished, well-shaped rendition of this beloved old story (on the eve of Valentine’s Day, too). However, any early quitters would have missed the generous panoply of French orchestral showpieces gift-wrapped for us by Read more ...