Stravinsky
Peter Quantrill
Looking past the ballets for Diaghilev, there are still many superb scores by Stravinsky honoured more in scholarship than performance. In Myths and Rituals, the Philharmonia addresses that lack of wider appreciation with five concerts from May to September. The series got off to a promising start last night with the tiny fanfare for three trumpets – Monteverdi with attitude and wrong notes – from 1955, which was one of Stravinsky’s first thoughts for his last ballet, Agon.The Symphonies of Wind Instruments are often played and heard as a Cubist funeral rite, moving in discontinuous blocks of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Maurice Greene: Overtures Baroque Band/Garry Clarke (Cedille)Maurice Greene. Who? No worries: conductor Garry Clarke's notes fill in all the useful gaps. Greene was a prominent 18th century English composer, remembered by the well-educated for his choral music and for holding down several plum jobs, including Master of the King's Music and a professorship at Cambridge. As a young musician he was a close friend and admirer of Handel, the pair falling out over an unfortunate case of plagiarism on the part of one of Greene's colleagues. Greene didn't leave behind much instrumental Read more ...
David Nice
On the panel to judge a competition between 14 Dutch school orchestras in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw last month, I couldn't resist using my speech to compare their state-school provenance with our own divisive musical education. I was thinking of two figures I'd been given – that when the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain started, only five per cent of its young musicians were from private and public schools, whereas now it was 85 per cent.Last week I learned the latter figure was wrong: current CEO and Artistic Director Sarah Alexander has got it down to 50/50, working on the notion Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Charles Dutoit gets the best from the Royal Philharmonic. He conducts with broad, sweeping gestures, and the orchestra responds with dramatic immediacy and vivid colours. This concert’s programme was well chosen to play to their shared strengths, and the results were impressive: colourful Respighi, muscular Dvořák and taut, compelling Stravinsky.Respighi’s Fountains of Rome opens and closes with evocations of dawn and dusk. Dutoit has little interest in miniature, fragile textures, and never ventures into the quietest dynamics. But he and the orchestra compensate with luminous colours and Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night’s concert at the Barbican focused on the theme of dreams and night-time, centred around the UK premiere of Dream of the Song by George Benjamin. But the one piece on the programme that did not fit with the theme stole the show. Stravinsky’s American-period masterpiece Symphony in Three Movements supplied the energy and rhythmic impetus lacking elsewhere.George Benjamin’s Dream of the Song combined arrestingly beautiful poems translated from medieval Spanish with fragments of Lorca, scored for solo countertenor (Iestyn Davies) accompanied by a small orchestra and women’s chorus (the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The French Suites Peter Hill (piano) (Delphian)Start trying to explain exactly why this latest instalment in Peter Hill’s Bach series is so good and it might seem as if you’re dismissing the very things which make it great. This is pianism completely devoid of ego and flash; Hill is a superb technician but never draws undue attention to himself. You forget he’s even there: what we’re hearing is Bach. In all his guises – the earlier, minor key French Suites typically open with introspective Allemandes before the mood lifts. Hill’s way with the opening of Suite No. 1 is typical: Bach’s Read more ...
geoff brown
In the deep recesses of my brain lies a distant memory of an early lesson in musical appreciation in primary school. Excerpts from Beethoven’s "Pastoral" Symphony were being played. The teacher asked us what images came to mind. The answers came fairly quickly, prodded by the music’s title: a babbling brook, a thunderstorm, twittering birds. I was on my way.That childhood scene suddenly popped up during this spotty BBC Symphony Orchestra concert. It featured the latest manifestation of a burgeoning trend to do the audience’s visual imagining for them by commissioning a film-maker and dangling Read more ...
David Nice
So much black and red ink has been spilled about the infamous 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring that it’s easy to underestimate how radical the orchestration, at least, of its predecessor Petrushka must have sounded. It still usually comes up as fresh as poster paint. The chance to hear both scores in a single concert is rare indeed, but one thing we certainly didn’t get from Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela at the start of their latest Southbank mini-residency was the shock of the new.Now a mostly middle-aged band, the Simón Bolívars have for the Read more ...
David Nice
Don’t blame the players: they did their considerable best. But what could they hope to achieve with a programme in which six of the seven pieces were on a hiding to nowhere, or too short to have much of an impact? A sequence, what's more, in which platform rearrangements took longer than two of the pieces in the first half?Worse, the end sank the whole. Milhaud’s La création du monde, the penultimate offering, might have sent us out smiling. Instead the world premiere of Simon Bainbridge’s Counterpoints, for the indisputable jazz king of the double bass Eddie Gomez, was a throwback to the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“The first section, following a short introduction, places a rhythmic sequence on its retrograde. The two layers are transposed independently (one going up, the other down) as the music progresses, and points of symmetry are highlighted when they occur”. No, me neither. Apparently Patrick Brennan’s Polly Roe also features a brief rhythmic quotation from Birtwistle’s Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum. More erudite ears may have been able to detect it.What anyone could hear, however, was that this fantastic little moto perpetuo is something special, beginning in shadowy half-tones to the Read more ...
David Nice
Missionary angel or twelve-tone devil? Musical figures like Poulenc, perhaps too much attached to the diabolical element in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, were inclined to see the incursion of Robert Craft into Stravinsky’s Hollywood life in 1948 in demonic terms. The persistent 24-year-old New Yorker was, it’s true, an advocate for the serial works of Webern and Schoenberg, whom he was to get to know during the last year of the composer’s life – Schoenberg, after all, lived just down the road from Stravinsky in Los Angeles – and for many other musicians that system was indeed the very Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What dancemaker wouldn't want to tackle Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) at some point? Just as the Stravinsky score changed music, the original Ballets Russes production changed dance - and was then, conveniently, so completely forgotten that no master-text exists. Everyone is free to take the Stravinsky and run. Or rather, dance: as Michael Clark has observed, one of Sacre's gifts to a choreographer is the in-built necessity of dance to the scenario, in which a victim is chosen by a crowd and forced to dance to his or her death.Yet Sasha Waltz, one of Germany's foremost Read more ...