violin
Simon Thompson
Violinist Jonas Ilias-Kadesha was placed front and centre of the publicity for this concert. This is his first season concert with the SCO, though back in 2019 he stood in for an indisposed soloist at short notice for one of their European tours. Inviting him back is a vote of confidence, so I was looking forward to hearing him as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Ravel’s Tzigane.His Mozart turned out to be a very mixed bag, however. It began well, with clipped, precise playing from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the opening tutti, and an improvisatory opening flourish from Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
For the first half of this spellbinding recital, Maxim Vengerov chose three works framed by one of Romantic music’s most infamous and turbulent stories.In 1853 the violinist Joseph Joachim became close friends with Robert and Clara Schumann – and as a result introduced them to the then unknown 20-year-old Johannes Brahms. The precise dynamics of what precisely happened then has been subject to much speculation. Yet Vengerov’s repertoire bore vivid testament to the fact that it proved as stirring a time creatively as it did personally for all three composers.He opened with Clara Schumann’s Read more ...
David Nice
Poetry came an honourable second to sharp rhythms and lurid definition in this choreographic poem of a concert. You don’t get more tumultuous applause after an opener than with Ravel’s La Valse played like this. Vienna may have nearly collapsed after World War One, but the Scheherazade of Fazil Say’s 1001 Nights Violin Concerto lives to see a bright dawn, and Rachmaninov cries “Alliluya’ to whirling demons in his swansong Symphonic Dances.Once again, there’s no doubt that the London Symphony Orchestra has made the right choice in Antonio Pappano, this season titled its Music Director Read more ...
David Nice
Promising on paper, dazzling in practice: with a superlative soloist and conductor, this programme just soared on wings of philosophy-into-music. The spotlighting of NSO co-leader Elaine Clark provided another thread, from the opening chant of Linda Buckley‘s Fall Approaches through the keen dialogues with collegial Baiba Skride in Bernstein’s dazzling Serenade to the Viennese-waltz Dance Song of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra.Clark's fellow strings joined her – the violinist pictured below – in a flight brilliantly marshalled and focused by Diego Matheuz, due to conduct next Friday's Read more ...
Simon Thompson
When a publication as venerable as Gramophone features an artist on its front cover, it’s a surefire sign that they’ve hit the big time. This month that honour fell to young American violinist Randall Goosby and, coincidentally, he was the soloist for this week’s concerts with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. I hadn’t come across him before this double encounter but, if his Usher Hall performance is anything to go by, then the hype around him is justified.The beauty, poetry and sheer confidence of his performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto was a marvellous thing to witness. Partly Read more ...
David Nice
There’s life in the old overture-concerto-symphony format yet – especially if the conductor not only shapes every phrase but takes care over the number of string players needed for each work, the soloist lives every bar of a concerto you thought you knew inside out, and the symphony is a relatively rare neighbour to another regularly on concert programmes.It would be foolhardy to claim that Prokofiev’s Sixth, his symphony of suffering, is better than the ever-fascinating Fifth, no straightforward warhorse, but it’s certainly more consistently dark and deep. The London Symphony Orchestra has Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Sibelius and Mahler so often figure as the irreconcilable chalk and cheese of turn-of-the-century orchestral writing that it can be a salutary experience to hear them together on one bill.For sure, the Finn – whose Violin Concerto Lisa Batiashvili played at the Royal Festival Hall last night – could never have conceived anything like the ecstatic, catastrophic epic of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, which the Philharmonia under Lahav Shani brought home in grand style during this concert’s prolonged second half.Yet both partners in this odd coupling of works written within the same few years (1903-05 Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the penultimate concert in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s residency at the Edinburgh Festival, the chosen repertoire was evidently considered so obscure that the box office managers didn’t even try to sell any tickets in the Usher Hall’s cavernous upper circle. To shut off nearly half the concert hall for a world class orchestra that has crossed the Atlantic shows either a healthy disregard for the fickleness of audience taste, or a near suicidal disinterest in box office revenue.That, you could say, is what festivals are all about, an approach that might have found some justification in a Read more ...
Ian Julier
Although the composer singled out as the flagship promotional hook for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s concert was the “Brilliant Mendelssohn”, the programme also highlighted Mozart, Schubert and Britten to complete a quartet of musical child prodigies.Nurtured in Vienna via choral, orchestral and operatic work as well as studying the violin, the Austrian-Spanish conductor Teresa Riveiro Böhm has recently been Leverhulme Conducting Fellow in partnership at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with the BBC Scottish SO, as well as working towards a Specialised Master’s Degree in conducting Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
More than half a century has passed since John Eliot Gardiner’s choir and orchestras first won their historically-informed licence to thrill. A feverish Saturday night at St Martin-in-the-Fields proved that Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists can still quicken the pulse and rinse the ears of the most jaded concert-goer. In James Gibbs’s elegant temple, a programme of top-drawer Haydn and Mozart symphonies interspersed with a brace of Mozart violin concertos might sound like a recipe for low-key polish and politesse. In the event, Gardiner – who turned 79 last week – and his band Read more ...
David Nice
Dublin is feted as the city of the word, peaking on Bloomsday, 16 June, in celebration of Ulysses’ centenary. Yet its concert and opera scene is broadening in brilliance. Had I known before yesterday that the vivacious Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra were performing Bach’s B minor Mass in Christ Church Cathedral, I might not have chosen to hear what until recently was called the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland – and wouldn’t have known what I’d missed.As it happened I got almost the best of both worlds, admitted to the late afternoon rehearsal of the Bach, further Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Mark Wigglesworth is a semi-regular guest with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and he’s hugely experienced in the opera world, which might explain why my expectations were so high for his Wagner in this concert. In the event, though, I didn’t love his take on Tristan’s Prelude and Liebestod.The sound from the orchestra was right, with tortured lower strings and clean, clear winds, but entries often sounded a little too “approximate”, and the overall sound only occasionally gelled. Admittedly, that’s a risk baked into performing this piece with its tortuous world of unfulfillable longing Read more ...