Stravinsky
Joe Muggs
Herbie Hancock has never stood still. He hit the ground running, joining Miles Davis's second great quintet on piano in 1963 at the age of just 23, and from that moment on demonstrated a Stakhanovite work ethic and appetite for the new which saw him on the crest of wave after wave of revolutionary music.From bop and soul-inflected grooves of the 1960s, through jazz fusion in the early 1970s, the solid funk of his band the Headhunters later in the decade to his engagement with electro and hip hop going into the 1980s, he continuously produced music that appealed to both the intellect and the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Medtner: Arabesques, Dithyrambs, Elegies and other short piano works Hamish Milne (Hyperion)The title is already intriguing; enough to send you running to the dictionary to find out what a dithyramb is. Nikolai Medtner’s three examples are fun to listen to, the second finishing with a flamboyant coda. Born in Moscow in 1880, poor Medtner eventually pitched up in a Golders Green semi, dying there in 1951. He had his champions – Rachmaninov respected him highly, and Horowitz believed that he was “a wonderful composer”. His music is lyrical, highly melodic and beautifully constructed. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Is it my imagination, or are we getting more Wagner in concert than we used to? It could be a welcome development. How marvellous not to have to tremble at the thought of the latest flight of directorial fantasy: Isolde pregnant, Siegfried as an airline pilot, the Grail temple transformed into the Reichstag (no prizes for guessing which of these is a real case). Instead you can enjoy what Stravinsky called “the great art of Wagner from the direct source of that greatness and not through the medium of pygmies swarming around the stage”.This was a level-headed, well-prepared, if not always Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Just a typical night at the ballet. The sun god rises with his goddesses, people play tennis and flirt in a garden, a handsome young chap struts his considerable stuff on a Twenties beach, and an array of white-tutu’d ballerinas perform deliciously difficult and exultantly accelerating steps. So many stories flit by in an evening of ballet, so many ideas and fancies, so many dancers skim through your vision. Debussy caresses your ear, majestic Stravinsky, teasing Milhaud, Lalo like a large stuffed brocade sofa. How is it that this kind of evening is not typical of the ballet?
English National Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Two amazing things in one evening from a company totally at sixes and sevens artistically - it could only be English National Ballet. First amazing thing: the uncovering of a confident and stylish young choreographer straight from school. Second amazing thing: the radical redesign of a modern classic with stunning flair and a performance that’s got to be one of the shows of the year, whatever else happens.While the fights between ENB’s Board and its artistic directors are one of those dependable balletic traditions, like Nutcracker at Christmas, and their firings inevitable (bye-bye, Mr Wayne Read more ...
David Nice
Praise be, or slava if you prefer, to Valery Gergiev for honouring new Russian music alongside his hallmark interpretations - ever evolving or dangerously volatile according to taste – of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. Last LSO season featured some of the less than inspired recent works Rodion Shchedrin has been dredging by the yard. Yet few would begrudge the palm of deep and original musical thought to this past week’s heroine, Sofia Gubaidulina. Gergiev riveted a quarter-full Albert Hall with her stunning St John Passion and Resurrection at the 2001 Proms, and last night he had a Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
The Nikolai Ge retrospective at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery marks the 180th anniversary of the artist’s birth – not the kind of round centenary or bicentenary landmark that often brings such projects to fruition. But the show is literally a revelation – at its centre are the religious works from the last years of his life, many of which returned only this year to Russia from abroad. A series of pencil drawings based on the Crucifixion show the artist working in a style that seems astonishingly ahead of his time.The last time I visited these exhibition halls, part of the Tretyakov’s “new” Read more ...
graham.rickson
Schumann: Geistervariationen András Schiff (ECM)Hungarian pianist András Schiff has been revisiting some of the core repertoire with which he first made his name. This ECM two-disc set offers a revelatory Schumann recital – this label’s typically dour cover art giving little hint of the vibrancy and colour of Schiff’s playing. Papillons and the Kinderszenen are both performed with unshowy sincerity – Schiff’s lightness of touch in the miniatures which make up Papillons is a delight, and Kinderszenen never sounds clichéd – this is the sweetest, sincerest Träumerai I’ve heard. Schiff also gives Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The clips as you load the DVD show women in extremis - women tied to the end of a rope, women being assaulted by mass male groping, women dancing on pointe with bleeding chunks of meat stuffed into their ballet shoes. Pina Bausch’s commentaries on women make her ballets disquieting viewing. Wim Wenders’ film, released as a 3D version in cinemas earlier this year, takes you into those deep, confused questions that Bausch’s dance works put.He had planned to make this film with Bausch, but her sudden death left him bereft. This film therefore became an elegy to her and her company, Tanztheater Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On six more occasions you can have an ideal experience of dance by visiting the Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy and then going to see Balanchine’s Jewels at the Opera House. The first part of this trio of abstract ballet gems, Emeralds, evokes the French dancing style of the Paris Opéra where Degas’s deliciously intense dancing girls were employed, and it would do the Royal Ballet troupe good too to be bussed en masse to the RA to absorb the wistfulness of those girls in dawn-pink or sea-blue tutus, endlessly checking their shoes, endlessly waiting, endlessly longing.Last night opened Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The spectacle of an orchestra named after Mahler playing Stravinsky irresistibly calls to mind Stravinsky’s report of a performance of the Eighth Symphony in Zurich in 1913. “Imagine”, he wrote to Maurice Delage, “that for two hours you are made to understand that two times two makes four.” Oddly enough, repetition is the lifeblood of Stravinsky’s own music, though he rarely makes two times two equal four, and his symphonies don’t last two hours (nor, incidentally, do Mahler’s).Sir Colin Davis did, it’s true, make the Symphony in Three Movements last longer than Stravinsky thought it should. Read more ...