Stravinsky
David Nice
You get a lot of notes for your money in a two-piano recital - especially when seven pianists share the honours for two and a half hours' worth of playing time. Well, they did call it a marathon, crowning the London Piano Festival so shiningly planned by Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, and the baton passed seamlessly from two pairs of hands to the next. All the more remarkable when nothing seemed likely to surpass the infinite poetry of the opening couple, young Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in Debussy's arrangement of Schumann's Six Pieces in Canonic Form. Nothing did, but there were Read more ...
graham.rickson
Stravinsky: Petrushka, Agon (arranged for piano duet and two pianos by the composer) Bugallo-Williams Piano Duo (Wergo)Stravinsky's long career is traversed in black and white here, with ballet scores early and late accompanying a pair of shorter works. Petrushka and Agon are both masterpieces of orchestral colour, but the composer's piano duo reductions are so skilfully wrought that you never feel short-changed. Helen Bugallo and Amy Williams give us Stravinsky's piano duet transcription of the fuller textured 1911 score. It's as tight a performance as you'd expect from two players Read more ...
David Nice
So it's been sellouts for half-baked if well-cast productions of The Rake's Progress and now Britten's Paul Bunyan at Wilton's Music Hall, while British Youth Opera's classy Stravinsky in the admittedly larger Peacock Theatre, several hundred yards away from the Hogarth Rake paintings in Sir John Soane's Museum, played to a half-empty house, last night, at least. Why is this, as Auden and Kallman's great creation Baba the Turk, bearded lady of St Giles' Fair, asks of her feckless husband Tom Rakewell? No idea, but I urge you to catch the last performance on Saturday to see what youth and Read more ...
David Nice
Who is the greatest British conductor in charge of a major orchestra? It's subjective, but my answer is not what you might expect. Jonathan Nott has done all his major work so far on the continent. He left the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra in excellent shape to another of the world's best, Jakub Hrůša; and now he is, as we learned from two long-term players in the Proms Plus talk, liked and respected across the board at the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Continuity with the first major Swiss orchestra founded by Ernest Ansermet 100 years ago was underlined last night in Debussy, Ravel and Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Beguiling echoes, patterns and symmetries accompanied the Hallé on this Proms journey through the enchanted forests of orchestral sound. Those mellow but irresistible horns that began the evening with the ethereal chug of the pilgrim’s hymn from the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser returned at the very end to celebrate victory over an evil sorcerer in a glorious finale to Stravinsky’s third Firebird suite. Neatly, the “Dresden” version of Wagner’s overture (which we heard) dates from 1845, whereas Stravinsky finished his final iteration of the music for Diaghilev’s 1910 ballet a century later Read more ...
David Nice
Once the Proms season is under way, you soon regret dissing the prospectus. Connections become apparent, long-term programming a merit, especially this weekend just gone, which took us from elegies and meditations on two world wars heavenwards at the halfway point - Britten's cautious but still cathartic optimism at the end of the masterly Sinfonia da Requiem - and up to the heights of Beethoven's "Choral" finale and Mahler's Eighth. It was also a fabulous demonstration of how a world can be captured as much in a five-minute piece as a 90-minute so-called “Symphony of a Thousand”.We began Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sverre Indris Joner: Con cierto toque de tango Henning Kraggerud (violin), Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Sverre Indris Joner, with Tango for 3 (Lawo Classics)Sverre Indris Joner is described in this disc’s notes as “the doyen of Latin American music in Norway”. Besides composing, playing, teaching and researching, he’s also found the time to act, illustrate and write plays. The Finnish love for Argentinian tango is well-documented; presumably Norwegians are also getting in on the act. Joner himself writes about the challenges of orchestrating and arranging tangos, and his solutions are Read more ...
David Nice
There is a tide in the best-planned festivals that comes in and out almost imperceptibly, bringing with it changes as the days move on. Put it down to the kind of perfect planning that discards any one rigid theme, and to forging long-term links with performers who don't just pop in for one concert. That in this case has been the work of East Neuk Festival mastermind Svend-Einar McEwan-Brown, who not only ensures artists of a uniquely high quality over the years, but also introduces themes and mini-residencies with impressive subtlety.In the two and a half days I was there this year, Bach, Read more ...
David Nice
Kudos, as ever, to Vladimir Jurowski for making epic connections. Not only did he bookend a rich LPO concert with two very different symphonies from the late 1930s by Stravinsky and Shostakovich; he also masterminded and attended the early evening special event, another variegated shell in the cornucopia of the Changing Faces: Stravinsky's Journey festival.Featuring the young players of the orchestra's Foyle Future Firsts programme and their mentors, it started with a lovable performance of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto - exactly contemporary with the Symphony in C heard later - Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
A new William Forsythe ballet is quite a coup for English National Ballet; the choreographer hasn't made a piece in Britain in 20 years. Premiered last night as part of ENB's Voices of America triple bill at Sadler's Wells, Forsythe's Playlist (Track 1, 2) makes a rousing finale to a punchy programme of contemporary ballet delivered with the style we've now come to expect from this classy, confident company.Playlist (Track 1,2) is bravura neo-classical ballet and it shows off the chops of ENB's superb crop of male soloists. Forsythe was convinced to make it after seeing the company perform Le Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The London Philharmonic, conductor Vasily Petrenko and cellist Andreas Brantelid are just back from a tour of China, so they’ve had plenty of time to get to know each other. That affinity is apparent in the ease with which Petrenko (pictured below by Chris Christodoulou) marshals the orchestral forces, directly transmitting his trademark energy to every section. But the highlight of this concert turned out to be the Elgar Cello Concerto, given a far more intimate and low-key reading than we might expect from Petrenko himself. No doubt, Brantelid was the inspiration here, but Petrenko adapted Read more ...
David Nice
"You have to start somewhere," Debussy is reported to have said at the 1910 premiere of The Firebird. Which, at least, is a very good "somewhere" for Stravinsky, shot through with flashes of the personality to come. The Symphony in E flat of two years earlier, however, is little more than a theme park of all the ingredients amassed in Russian music since Glinka forged its identity less than a century earlier. It's fun to have on CD - and to play the opening in a "guess the composer" quiz (the reasonable answer would be Glazunov). To work in concert, it needs companions with more than the Read more ...