Ravel
David Nice
How do you go about co-ordinating a spectacular like this, the first ever BBC Young Musicians' Prom? With 23 brilliant soloists from clarinettist Michael Collins, not even the winner of the first event 40 years ago, to 16-year-old Lauren Zhang, who stunned us all with her fleet interpretation of Prokofiev's monster Second Piano Concerto this year, commissions or reworkings dealing with batches were the best idea. And all of them worked superbly. It was only towards the end that the idea of giving the spotlight purely to the wonderful young conductor Andrew Gourlay and a BBC Concert Orchestra Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
What has 12 hands, 18 legs, 176 keys and two page-turners? Party night at the London Piano Festival, of course. The six-pianist, two-piano marathon on Saturday evening was a high point of this delectable four-day event – though far from the only one.Now in its second year, the London Piano Festival is the brainchild of the well-established piano duo Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva. It’s a welcome addition to the London scene. We’re all used to piano recitals, but don’t always delve so deeply into the instrument’s galaxy of repertoire and the range of personalities among those who play it. Read more ...
Robert Beale
The first two one-acters in Opera North’s season called The Little Greats were unveiled on Saturday. There are six in all, scheduled on a mix-and-match basis so Leeds opera-goers can choose their own tapas menu: grab one show, choose from various pairs, or even try three on a Saturday (including a matinee) if you want to.Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges were both originally slated to be conducted by Aleksandar Markovic when he was the company’s music director. But the entire enterprise is the most thoroughgoing example yet of its ensemble philosophy, with Read more ...
Annabel Arden
The first day of rehearsals for The Little Greats was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure: the casts of six shows, the whole chorus, all the creative teams and management milling around and talking nineteen to the dozen in the big, reverberant Linacre Studio at Opera North. Old friends, new colleagues – it was like a mixture of freshers’ week and a first night party. The noise was stupendous.As I write, I’m in Leeds directing two out of the six short operas making up Opera North’s varied and exciting new season. Opera does not come in only two flavours, comic or tragic. As in any Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Sibelius: Finlandia Chineke! Orchestra/Kevin John Edusei (Signum)These live performances mark the recording debut of the Chineke! Orchestra, an ensemble created by bassist Chi-chi Nwanoku to provide opportunities for BME orchestral musicians in the UK and Europe. The only reservations have to concern the programme; releasing a disc of music by dead white Europeans is surely a missed opportunity. Still, Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 does make a lot of sense in this context, a product of the composer's years spent in New York as director of the now defunct National Conservatory Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The title of John Adams’s Naive and Sentimental Music is a bit of a tease. Read literally it promises – or threatens – unsophisticated mawkishness, though that is the last thing it delivers. But maybe it was this title, alongside relatively unfamiliar 20th century repertoire, that kept the audience away. For whatever reason this was the worst attended main Prom I have been to for a long time – and what a shame, as it was also one of the very best.The Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen began with a musical palate-cleanser, the rarely heard Stravinsky arrangement of Bach’s Canonic Read more ...
graham.rickson
Falla: Nights in the Garden of Spain, Ravel: Piano Concertos Steven Osborne (piano), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ludovic Morlot (Hyperion)Steven Osborne's solo Ravel anthology is among the best available, and it's good that he's now tackling the composer's two very different piano concertos. Not all pianists succeed in both. Osborne does, understanding each one's distinct character. His Concerto in G major is sharp-witted and joyous in the outer movements, the pounding Gershwinesque writing urging the music forward. Any hint of brittleness is offset by Osborne’s delight in Ravel’s Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Paris-based Ensemble InterContemporain brought a wide-ranging programme to the Wigmore Hall. They are known as new music specialists – the group was founded by Pierre Boulez as the house band for the IRCAM electronic music studio – so Ravel and Debussy are early music for them. In fact, those venerable names were included to give context to more recent French and Italian compositions. Leading mid-century modernists were also included – Messiaen, Maderna and Berio – but the real substance was provided by two living composers, Philippe Schoeller and Matteo Franceschini, both offering Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eisler: Hangmen Also Die and other film scores Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin/Johannes Kalitzke (Capriccio)Holed up in Los Angeles, Schoenberg never wrote a Hollywood film score. Unlike his pupil and fellow exile Hanns Eisler, whose music for Fritz Lang’s 1944 film Hangmen Also Die (with a screenplay by Brecht) was nominated for an Oscar. What was used in the film totals barely 15 minutes, but it’s vintage Eisler, a pragmatic, practical blend of late-romanticism and strict dodecaphony. The Main Title and a brief Love Scene are ripely enjoyable cheese; far more striking are a very Bergian Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A new work by Igor Stravinsky is always going to be a major event, so Sunday evening’s UK premiere of his rediscovered Funeral Song was hotly anticipated. The score disappeared after its first performance and was thought lost in the Russian Revolution, but the orchestral parts were rediscovered at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 2015, and, after a modern premiere at the Mariinsky in December last year, the work is now being performed around the world.Funeral Song is an early work, dating from 1908, but it’s not juvenilia. Written as a memorial to Stravinsky’s teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, the Read more ...
David Nice
To catch the searing desolation of a lover scorned, you need to be the complete artist, with temperament and technique in perfect equilibrium. Mezzo Christine Rice has taken us from Berlioz's Marguerite and Mozart's Donna Elvira at English National Opera via Birtwistle's Ariadne to Haydn's, and - most taxing of all - the end of an affair by telephone in Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. The abandoned heroines of Haydn and Poulenc found themselves in the most exposed surroundings possible, the intimacy of a song recital in the giving acoustics of Middle Temple Hall, with only a superlative pianist, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Colin Matthews’s arrangements for orchestra of the 24 Debussy Préludes (originally commissioned by the Hallé) have been widely admired. The BBC Philharmonic’s concert, conducted by Nicholas Collon, at the Bridgewater Hall on Friday night began with three of Ravel’s five piano Miroirs, two of them orchestrated by Matthews (one a world premiere) and one by the late Steven Stucky.The Matthews approach to Debussy has been compared in places to Ravel’s own orchestral technique (though a direct claim that he transcribed Debussy as Ravel might have done seems over-egging the pudding somewhat). His Read more ...