Stravinsky
edward.seckerson
The Russians were coming - and the prospect of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, even without the added attraction of hearing it in Igor Buketoff’s questionable choral arrangement where the Tsarist hymn is taken at its word and does a Boris Godunov on us, had the promenade queue fast stretching towards South Kensington. And if ever music replicated the excited buzz of something in the air Stravinsky’s Scherzo fantastique did, raising the curtain almost imperceptively through the scurrying of muted strings and surprised woodwind punctuations.Here is music that redefines the idea of airborne until, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This was the most eagerly anticipated programme of the Mariinsky visit - something old, something borrowed and something new. The old, that colourful fairytale of Stravinsky’s lush, melodious youth, The Firebird; the new, a recent acquisition by the Londoners’ favourite Russian, Alexei Ratmansky; and the borrowed, something from English ballet legend, Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, once kept under glass with the Fonteyn and Nureyev myths, but eventually released from the museum by Sylvie Guillem and Nicolas Le Riche a decade ago.The Ashton has now suffered the fate its Read more ...
David Nice
After the European Union Youth Orchestra hit unsurpassable heights last week, the Proms plateau of excellence remained available to another youth carnival of weird and wonderful 20th century monsters. If the EUYO showed us that Shostakovich’s bewildering Fourth Symphony, for all its grim trajectory and ultimate annihilation, is also an orchestral showpiece, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain demonstrated that the same could be said, with freedom and character encouraged by conductor Edward Gardner, for Stravinsky’s Petrushka before Lutosławski, following Bartok’s example, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jorge Grundman: A Mortuis Resurgere Susana Cordón (soprano), Brodsky Quartet (Chandos)Spanish composer Jorge Grundman was a vocalist and keyboard player in two bands in his teens, and he’s now a professor of audio engineering at a Madrid university. His website includes this disarming statement: “I consider myself a writer of music more than a composer. I just try to tell stories through the music narrative. I do this in the simplest, almost naive way possible. I want people to find my music sentimental and moving and also, as far as possible, to fancy listening to it again.” I read Read more ...
edward.seckerson
All kinds of narratives were at play in this Prom from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Sakari Oramo - and perhaps the truly adventurous programmer might have double-deployed Rory Kinnear, dispassionately chronicling Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, and taken us beyond the Overture and into the melodramas of Beethoven’s Incidental Music to Egmont. Mind you, that overture will more than suffice as a self-contained drama when it is as boldly drawn as it was here with a daring expansiveness in the lowering F minor Introduction and equally impulsive and defiant allegro with John Read more ...
David Nice
A voluptuous dream in sequined silver, the nearly-27-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili sat down at the keyboard and instantly transcendentalised her mermaid look as Ravel’s Ondine. Even Brahms took to the life aquatic of her recital’s first half. For the second, though, there should have been a costume change into a clown suit with a tatty tutu pulled over it. Never have I witnessed a crazier trip through the distorting mirror – and if even Stravinsky’s mad puppet Petrushka couldn’t take the relentless onslaught, what about the poor old Chopin Second Scherzo and the Ravel La Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring captures the pulsing terror of seasonal change, the relentless onward drive of nature that brings death closer even as life burns at its most ferocious. The 1913 première of the ballet created by Vaslav Nijinsky infamously caused a riot in its Parisian audience. Michael Keegan-Dolan’s version for his company Fabulous Beast has terrifying dog heads and men furiously humping the ground. So if you were tripping merrily through London on a mild evening, heart lifted by the April light and the work-week’s end, you might well think that your mood would be better matched Read more ...
David Nice
With tickets only a couple of pounds more than screenings in the Ciné Lumière, back-to-back – sometimes overlapping - concerts by world-class pianists of all ages, and a lively roster of weekend events around the recitals, what more could you ask from the French Institute’s two-and-a-half day festival? Well, perhaps a better and bigger Steinway. The one that can now transform the cinema into a concert hall, and instigated the first It's All About Piano! weekend last year needed bags of restoration, and given the obstinately dull middle register you have to ask, was it worth it? But then again Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Taken together, the memorial accoutrements of the First World War are probably this country's most highly developed, and widely experienced, discourse of public history. Through two-minute silences, poppies, public monuments, and near-univeral school exposure we still, four generations later, honour in the texture of our national public life the desperate need of the war generation not to forget the horror they had been through. Though subsequent conflicts have been included in the commemoration – Armistice Day becoming Remembrance Day – it is still the war called Great that shaped it: the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Stravinsky: L'Histoire du Soldat, Octet Eastman Wind Ensemble, Eastman Virtuosi/Mark Scatterday, with Jan Opalach (narrator) (Avie)Stravinsky's idiomatic brass and woodwind writing still surprises. Dedicated bassoonists can even purchase a hefty volume of fiendish Stravinsky orchestral excerpts. Lucky them. This performance of the neo-classical Octet features some stunning ensemble work, captured close-up in a very dry acoustic. You can hear absolutely everything, and the rapid clattering of bassoon keys adds an enjoyable textural layer; listen to them chuntering away at the start of Read more ...
David Nice
There were two strong reasons, I reckoned, for struggling to the Wigmore Hall during the interstitial last week of the year. One was an ascetic wish to be harrowed by a mind and soul of winter, both within and without, in Prokofiev’s towering D minor Violin Sonata, after so much Christmas sweetness and light. The other was the memory of Ukrainian-Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman’s 2008 Tchaikovsky Concerto performance with Neeme Järvi and the London Philharmonic Orchestra – not just a great performance, of which there are plenty every year, but a great partnership, one of half a dozen that Read more ...
Sarah Kent
This triple bill is of works commissioned for the Royal Ballet: Kenneth MacMillan’s The Rite of Spring was first performed in 1962, Wayne McGregor’s Chroma had its debut in 2006 while this is the world premiere of David Dawson’s first ballet for Covent Garden, The Human Seasons.McGregor’s Chroma (pictured below right) is an oddly pallid affair, given that its name refers to the saturation of pure colour, free from admixtures of white or black. The set by minimalist architect John Pawson is characteristically sparse. Dancers step onto the stage through a rectangular opening; clever lighting Read more ...