Tchaikovsky
graham.rickson
Holst: The Planets; Nielsen: Helios Overture Mythos (Bjarke Mogensen and Rasmus Schjaerff Kjøller, accordions) (Mythos)Pairing Nielsen’s Helios Overture with Holst’s The Planets makes total sense, and one’s surprised that it’s not been done before. Nielsen’s musical depiction of the sun, which “wanders its golden way” before sinking slowly back in the sea, never quite lives up to its magical opening and close, the central faster section wandering just a bit too much for comfort. It’s still good to hear though, Bjarke Mogensen and Rasmus Schjaerff Kjøller’s ingenious transcription for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Liberated from Pushkin’s salons, ballrooms and bedrooms, Barrie Kosky’s Eugene Onegin bursts out into nature. Tatyana and Olga lounge in the long grass stealing heavy fingerfuls of jam straight from the jar; party-guests run through the trees with flaming torches, dancing wildly, barefoot; after the harvest groups gather on the lawn with picnics and games. This is a world apart, the hot, hazy, endless summer of first love – an intense, but unreliable memory.First seen at Berlin’s Komische Oper in 2016, and later at the Edinburgh Festival, this turn-of-the-century Onegin with its echoes of DH Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Christmas Oratorio Thomanerchor Leipzig, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig/Gotthold Schwarz (Accentus)Another year, another new Bach Christmas Oratorio. This one is happily among the best, its plus points including a slimmed down Leipzig Gewandhausorchester as backing band, and the city's Thomanerchor, a group tracing its history as far back as 1212. The choir's bright, clear timbre sits very nicely against modern orchestral instruments, and Gotthold Schwarz’s flowing speeds invariably hit the mark. Patrick Grahl gives us a very human Evangelist, and there's sterling work from soprano Read more ...
graham.rickson
Josquin: Missa Mater Patris, Bauldeweyn: Missa Da pacem The Tallis Scholars/Peter Philips (Gimmell)Josquin's Missa Mater Patris is a late work, the composer's florid style pared down and clarified to the extent that some commentators suggested it was written by someone else. Peter Phillips rightly stresses that clarifying and simplifying ones musical language shouldn't be mistaken for a sign of fading gifts, and listening to The Tallis Scholars’ version is an electrifying, visceral experience. Lean, open textures dominate, giving the music a tremendous sense of space and light, the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Everyone’s doing Weinberg now, or so it seems. The Polish-born composer who became a close friend of Shostakovich was born 100 years ago, and there’s plenty of his music to go round. Raphael Wallfisch gave the UK premiere of his Cello Concertino (Opus 43B), with the Northern Chamber Orchestra in Manchester last night. The “B” is not insignificant – it’s a reworked and shortened version of his Cello Concerto of 1948, scored for string orchestra accompaniment only, and wasn’t published until two years ago.At 16 minutes in length but still with four movements, the piece is certainly an Read more ...
graham.rickson
Floating Islands: Guitar music by Axel Borup-Jørgensen Frederik Munk Larsen (guitar) (OUR Recordings)Carl Nielsen cast a long shadow over the generation of Danish composers who succeeded him, and there's mention here of post-war musicians trying to reconcile “Danishness” with modernity. One of them was Axel Borup-Jørgensen, a maverick modernist who ploughed a very individual furrow from the late 1940s until his death in 2012. I’d urge anyone curious to seek out the OUR label’s glorious Marin, a lavish visual take on one of Borup-Jørgensen’s more extravagant orchestral pieces. Then buy Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Semyon Bychkov was a surprising choice to take over the Czech Philharmonic last year, a conductor with few obvious connections to Czech music. But on the strength of this visit to the Proms, they make a good team. Bychkov communicates fluently with the players, conveying power and passion, and detail too, but without any overt theatrics at the podium.The Czech Philharmonic has a burnished tone, well projected and filling the Albert Hall, but more with colour than with weight. There is an elegant and lyrical flow to everything the strings play, which Bychkov is able to harness and shape. The Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Returning to Edinburgh International Festival, Berlin's Komische Oper brought Barrie Kosky’s sumptuous production of Eugene Onegin to the Edinburgh Festival Theatre. It’s a production that isn’t trying to do anything overly clever or convey a layered meaning; it’s simple in its grandeur in that it looks beautiful, sounds beautiful, and is faithful to Tchaikovsky’s music and Pushkin’s story.The curtain comes up to reveal a lush green stage, complete with grassy carpet and a rich forest behind, designed by Rebecca Ringst. It is the garden of sisters Olga and Tatyana’s house, and the two girls, Read more ...
David Nice
Little has changed about Pärnu, with its concentric rings of eight-mile sandy beach and dunes, wooded gardens and wooden old town, in the five years I've been going there. It came as a bit of a shock to find that voters in the region favoured the far right, which now has an unwelcome white-supremacist father and son in an otherwise progressive parliament; but the town in July is full of Tallinn folk heading south to Estonia's "summer capital". It's still a calm background for the intense creative work of the music festival dominated by the Järvi family: Paavo, "Artistic Leader" with his Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps those who came for the Argerich touch and left at the interval of this instant-sellout Prom were satisfied. After all, the legendary Argentinian pianist gave us some vintage minutes of her silk-spinning mercurialism. Yet it was in the midst of a performance that wasn't exactly an ideal concerto partnership with long-term colleague Daniel Barenboim and the young players of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, who deserved better from her. Had the pianomanes stayed, they might have discovered that Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra is a scintillating masterpiece, though its colossal last Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra marked the first performance of composer Mieczysław Weinberg at the Proms, an important milestone in the recent surge of interest of his music. When Weinberg, a Russian composer of Jewish descent and Polish birth, died in 1996, he was little known in the West, and had fallen from favour in a post-Communist Russia that associated his music with its Soviet past. But a staging of his opera The Passenger at Bregenz in 2010, sparked a huge revival of interest, especially in Germany, Poland and Russia. This year marks the centenary of his birth, the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Ben Gernon is only 30 (and looks about ten years younger) but has been Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic since 2017. He really impressed in last night’s Prom but, after an exciting overture, things fell away a bit with an under-nourished Rachmaninov concerto and an enjoyable if not faultless second half of Tchaikovsky.The first item augured very well. Malcolm Arnold’s Overture Peterloo is an odd piece, but gripping. Written in 1967 it shows two sides to the composer at once: first an effortless melodist but also a musical experimenter. The first two minutes have a filmic, Read more ...