Wigmore Hall
igor.toronyilalic
There are some recitals where you think only about the abstracted music - the harmonic arguments, the structural cleverness, the textural ingenuity - and there are others where you are forced to confront the presence of a set of living, breathing, leering musical beasts. Last night's stunning Wigmore Hall debut by Sarajevan-born pianist Ivana Gavrić - to a sellout crowd - was a very compelling example of the latter: a performance where the musical storytelling was being so well communicated that it was almost as if she was speaking to the audience or rolling a projector. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Ian Bostridge is one of those artists – Andreas Scholl is another – whose technique is so suited to the recording studio, his recordings so ubiquitously loved and lived-with, that the opportunity to see him perform live has become one of conflict. Suffering from the same malaise as successful pop artists, concert performances inevitably become processed by over-exposed ears as acts of mimicry; studied verisimilitude to a recorded original jostles for validity alongside live creative re-imagining.Last night’s performance of Schubert’s late songs – the programme released on CD by Bostridge Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Chamber music is a highly motivational experience - here is a group of instruments of quite different qualities parading, fighting, ganging up, inviting each other’s new ideas, dialoguing, and all this variety heightening the build-up to the moment when all instruments proclaim unanimity in a grand finish, or (even better) huddle up in mutual creative conspiracy and conjure a mysterious little spell that makes the outsider long to be part of it. All of which was present last night in both the performance and the music of Robert Schumann’s third Piano Trio, played by the Tetzlaff siblings, Read more ...
David Nice
Poland's most imaginative composer after Chopin, and his natural heir in the realm of sensual reverie, certainly knew how to yoke a full orchestra to his dreams and fantasies. Yet the work by Szymanowski I've most longed to hear in concert is the three-movement Mythes for violin and piano. A recording of it by Kaja Danczowska and the great Krystian Zimerman quickly acquired cult status in the 1980s. So it seemed like a heaven-sent gift to hear it live in the hands of an even more rounded violinist, young Norwegian Henning Kraggerud, and another maverick Polish pianist, Piotr Anderszewski. Read more ...
David Nice
He may not be the most famous musical Swede - in terms of name-recognition that would be Benny of Abba fame rather than Bengt the long-term recital partner of the divine Anne Sofie von Otter - but everyone in the business seems to adore Forsberg, a true musicians' pianist (and the only one I've ever seen unostentatiously to shake hands with his page turner). His boundless curiosity has always contributed to the repertoire of the great artists he works with; last night he stepped into the limelight - modest in presentation, infinitely tender in slow movements but tough as a top virtuoso needs Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It’s tempting to say that if Martin Fröst didn’t play the clarinet then he’d be an actor or a dancer. But he is an actor and a dancer and at one point during this scintillating recital he even sang, too – whilst playing the clarinet at the same time, of course. That’s a given. It’s an extension of his lissom body, and in his shiny grey silk suit and untucked shirt he looked decidedly feline. Ever heard a clarinet purr? Ever heard it yowl, scamper, hiss, scratch? Has anyone ever pulled so many colours from the old liquorice stick?His programme with pianist Roland Pöntinen – adhering to Fröst Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Is there a greater singleton's soundtrack than Bach's restless, tormented Three Partitas for Solo Violin? The works represent the extraordinary pinnacle of the violin repertoire and also the summit of Bach at his most chromatically and psychologically screwy. Snuggling up to these intensely fragile works, as so many Valentines couples were preparing to do last night at Wigmore Hall, is about as fun as curling up to a slice of Von Trier's cinematic clitoridectomy. And the intensity, fragility and bitterness was never so clear as in Julia Fischer's nimble hands. Her sound was shockingly, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Two very different lessons on love this week. From the Aphrodite-like Joyce DiDonato at the Wigmore Hall, there emerged a correct, wise, honest way to achieve an enamoured state; from the familiarly fickle cast of Così fan tutte - an almost unwatchably faulty bunch of emotional primitives in Jonathan Miller's production for the Royal Opera - very much the wrong way.Miller is absolutely right to press home the point about the unattractiveness of Così fan tutte's group of solipsists. A mirror is the star of the show as a result. No one can escape it. Fiordiligi (Sally Matthews) falls for Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Had a dastardly dirty bomb gone off in the Wigmore Hall last night and turned us all to dust, the contemporary British classical music scene would, in one fell swoop, have been wiped off the map. No more Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, George Benjamin, Julian Anderson, Simon Bainbridge or Oliver Knussen, all of whom were gathered for the inaugural concert of the year-long residency at the hall of rising compositional star Luke Bedford (above) . This was a fascinating programme, delivered without fault by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and Knussen. Most fascinating Read more ...
David Nice
Just to contemplate the shifting talent pool of this chamber co-operative can be giddying. Last night 10 great ensemble players, from top violin soloist Alexander Sitkovetsky to three London orchestral principals who must have jumped at the chance to be part of the Razumovsky experience, had their work cut out. Schoenberg and Schubert ask each musician to run the full gamut of Viennese angst and joy. The result was an unrepeatable experience in the spiritual as well as the literal sense.Both Schubert's Octet and Schoenberg's early string sextet Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) can Read more ...
David Nice
They're still bringing Beethoven and Shostakovich to London, enriching the mix a little with the cross-referencing of Alfred Schnittke, but the personnel of the Borodin Quartet have changed again. Patriarch cellist Valentin Berlinsky, there at the start over 60 years ago, passed on his bow to Vladimir Balshin before he died. Balshin is a worthy successor, especially since Berlinsky's tone had become translucent to the point of dematerialising and his successor's is rich indeed, but is "Borodin Quartet" now more a brand name than a vital entity?Well, continuity Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The term “accompanist” is no longer acceptable, no longer “politically correct” in musical circles, not least Lieder. It’s hard to imagine now that the relationship between a singer and his or her pianist was ever regarded as anything other than an equal partnership. But 26 years ago, when Julius Drake first stepped out on to the Wigmore Hall platform to play Poulenc with “friends”, the rarefied world of chamber music and song was a very different place. Even Gerald Moore, the most venerated of Lieder pianists, called his autobiography Am I Too Loud? – a title more than a little suggestive of Read more ...