| |
|
piano
We should lie down to listen to music much more often. Gravity pulls away the thought and frown lines, smoothes the intellectual tracks and folds on the face, while you feel the blood in your head pumping lushly to dreamier parts of your brain. Joanna McGregor’s If-A-Tree festival at the Royal Opera House this weekend may well be hitting some fey bases along its way, but Earthrise: The Lying Down Concert - was a spectacularly enjoyable opening event.
Australia has many fine exports – wine, women, gap year anecdotes – but increasingly it is her orchestras that are setting the standard. With a magnificent Proms performance from the Australian Youth Orchestra still fresh in the ears (as well as a significantly reinvigorated Sydney Symphony courtesy of Ashkenazy), last night it was the turn of the smaller and still-deadlier Australian Chamber Orchestra to fly the national flag, in what may well prove to be the finest concert of the summer.
Since winning the Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka Concerto Competition at the tender (and record-setting) age of 16, Tanya Ekanayaka has become one of Sri Lanka’s pre-eminent concert pianists. Last month she was the first from her country ever to appear in the long-running Pianists of the World series at St Martin-in-the-Fields, with a programme featuring Bach, Beethoven, Ravel and her own improvised composition, Adahas: of Wings of Roots.
To be interestingly disappointed isn’t bad - it’s being uninterestingly disappointed that is. This was an intriguing Prom with a full house, possibly because of Hélène Grimaud’s presence in the Ravel piano concerto, as well as Vladimir Ashkenazy on the podium. Surely it wasn’t for Scriabin’s Third Symphony, unheard here for almost 80 years? Or perhaps Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier is so well beloved that even a dubious orchestral suite made from it lures the thousands?
Russians can often get away with murder in concert. It's so ingrained within our Western psyche to believe that the Slav has culture, musicality, an innate aesthetic sensitivity pouring out of every toe that you could get a Russian to do the chicken dance and we'd all be ooh-ing and ah-ing about the passion of each wing flap, the brooding darkness of each wiggle, the searing, sarcastic quality of each clap. Not all Russians have a Russian soul. And some, like pianist Nikolai Lugansky at last night's Prom, display little sign of any soul at all.
Nobody can remember seeing a film about a piano tuner before. Happily, Pianomania isn’t merely unique; it’s a riveting documentary into the bargain. It takes as its subject the micro-detailed and nit-pickingly demanding routine of Stefan Knüpfer, Master Tuner for that Rolls-Royce of the piano industry, Steinway & Sons. Among Knüpfer’s celebrated clients are such titans of the keyboard as Lang Lang, Alfred Brendel, Till Fellner and Julius Drake, all of whom appear in the film’s 93-minute span. The main driver of the narrative is the ongoing account of how Knüpfer helps Pierre-Laurent Aimard to record Bach’s Art of Fugue.
It was a huge irony that the focus of last night's Proms programme was the musical duet: the concerto, the waltz, the visual-aural duet of a Ravel tone poem. For the one duet that really mattered - the dance of necessity between conductor, Jonathan Nott, and orchestra, the BBC Symphony - was of the two-left-feet variety.
When the words "commercial" and "art" come together - as they do with the Bolshoi season currently at the Royal Opera House - odds are the glue between them is a three-word phrase "Victor Hochhauser presents". Victor and Lilian Hochhauser are the impresarios behind most Russian ballet seasons UK-wide, and they have a reputation for solid box-office commercial taste, which is easily dismissed as the safe option. But they are in their eighties now, and conservatism is forgivable. In younger, bolder, Cold War days, these cultural buccaneers brought Britain Richter, Oistrakh, Rostropovich, Gilels, Mravinsky, the Borodin Quartet and the UK debut of the Kirov Ballet (the one Nureyev defected from). In fact, without the Hochhausers, British cultural life for the past half-century cannot easily be imagined.
The Proms listings are full of concerts a bit like the one last night that seem to offer up, on paper, little of real burning interest: no big names, no star foreign orchestras, no intriguing rarities, no new works, nothing beyond one hard-working BBC orchestra and a few staple classics (a Strauss family waltz-medley and some Schumann) that could be rattled off by any professional orchestra blindfold. Be warned: these are the concerts that are most likely to transfigure your evening, stir your soul and leave you reeling.
"Well, that's going straight onto my iPod!" declared my friend at the interval. Introduce anyone to Scriabin's lush Piano Concerto in F sharp minor - a real concert rarity - and the response is always the same: love at first sight. The tunes, the tenderness, the surging passion are all there in Rachmaninov-like abundance. And even if these qualities often come at the price of structural elegance, there is no denying the romantic potency of the work. I bet there was a surge of downloading activity last night after Nelson Goerner's classy performance at the Proms.
|
|
|
Subscribe to the newsletter from The Arts Desk
New articles
-
Mad Men, Series 4, BBC Four
That sobbing musical theme resumes, so does that hospital-white dreamlike cartoon of a male figure tumbling in a Hitchcockian fall from grace past huge ads of poster girls. Actually it’s almost as much Milton as it is Hitchcock. I say that to be deliberately pretentious, because the secret of Mad Men’s addictive draw is the human profundity you try to…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 01:33
Read more...
-
Janelle Monáe, KOKO
The video for this Kansas fantasist’s new single shows Monáe in harshly lit close-up singing the adrenalin-charged “Cold War” directly to camera. But then halfway through the song her concentration goes and she starts laughing and then crying, leaving one wondering what the thinking was behind its release. Perhaps this “artist and business woman” (as she describes herself) deduced that…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 01:33
Read more...
-
What I'm Reading: Conductor Peter Phillips
Next to choose some favourite books is conductor Peter Phillips, whose touring lifestyle can make "summer reading" something of a year-round phenomenon. When Phillips founded the vocal ensemble the Tallis Scholars in 1973 it was a hobby among university friends – a “haphazard” group, as the director himself describes it. Decades later, with more than 1,000 concerts and 50 disks…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 00:20
Read more...
-
Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, Victoria & Albert Museum
To mark Pope Benedict’s controversial visit to Britain next week, the V&A have mounted an exhibition devoted to four of the 10 tapestries Raphael designed for the Sistine Chapel – the first time they’ve ever been seen in this country. Depicting the Acts of St Peter and St Paul, these bright, vivid works were made to hang on the lower…
Written on Thursday, 09 September 2010 00:00
Read more...
 
Browse by date
| « |
September 2010 |
» |
| Mon |
Tue |
Wed |
Thu |
Fri |
Sat |
Sun |
| |
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
| 6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
| 13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
| 20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
| 27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
