piano

Cooper, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, Royal Festival Hall

Tuesday, 23 April 2013

Visiting orchestras and conductors often complain about agents’ insistence that they programme their main national dishes. The request is partly understandable: we all want to hear the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler, the Czechs in Dvořák, the...

Lamsma, BBCSO, Brabbins, Barbican Hall/ Mei Yi Foo, Kings Place

Saturday, 20 April 2013

Brave old world, that has so much unheard music in it. Not exactly the words of Shakespeare’s Miranda, I know, but that’s how I feel having experienced great things in the concert hall for the first time recently: Tippett’s Second Symphony from...

Newcomers triumph at BBC Music Magazine Awards

Wednesday, 10 April 2013

We had, as presenter James Naughtie so wryly remarked, set aside our mourning weeds for the low-key glamour of celebrating a far from moribund classical recording industry. Movers, shakers and humble BBC Music Magazine contributors all shifted from...

Mitsuko Uchida, Royal Festival Hall

Thursday, 07 March 2013

The magic usually descends quickly in a Mitsuko Uchida recital but the opening Bach of this rescheduled Festival Hall concert - a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Klavier - took a while to draw attention from the farthest...

Schiff, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Tuesday, 26 February 2013

You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the...

10 Questions for Amateur Musician Alan Rusbridger

Monday, 21 January 2013

Had we but world enough and time... A new book by the editor of the Guardian makes it clear quite how many hours in the day it takes to run a national newspaper in the digital age. There is the unyielding nature of 24-hour news, while the internet...

Yevgeny Sudbin, Westminster Cathedral Hall

Monday, 14 January 2013

It was the kind of programme that great pianist Vladimir Horowitz used to pioneer, with the simple balm of Scarlatti offset by Scriabin’s flights of fancy, and a dash of virtuoso fireworks to conclude. Though he is an admirer of the master, and even...

Grosvenor, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Litton, Barbican Hall

Saturday, 12 January 2013

Elgar declared a “massive hope in the future” as the human programme behind his epic First Symphony’s final exultant sprint. That hope was sprinkled like gold dust around the featured artists of this all-English concert. There are good reasons to be...

Loving Miss Hatto, BBC One/ Homeland, Series 2 Finale, Channel 4

Sunday, 23 December 2012

Joyce Hatto achieved a rare kind of immortality for being the pianist at the centre of an audacious classical music fraud, in which her husband faked "Joyce Hatto" CDs from the work of other artists and, for a time, enjoyed considerable success with...

CD: Nils Frahm - Screws

Sunday, 09 December 2012

Although he has been recording since 2005, it was his 2011 album, Felt, which set Nils Frahm apart from the ever-swelling tide of modern classical minimalists. It was so intimate, so subtle, it felt almost like it shouldn’t be shared. The follow up...

Kate Royal, Spira Mirabilis, QEH

Thursday, 06 December 2012

The billing for this all-Schubert concert, "Spira Mirabilis and Kate Royal", was a little misleading, since they did not actually share the stage at any point, the two halves being clearly separate events. First came the hour-long Octet, played by...

Piemontesi, Karnéus, Reiss, Guildhall Symphony Chorus, BBCSO, Bělohlávek, Barbican Hall

Sunday, 02 December 2012

Now the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s second Conductor Laureate, Jiří Bělohlávek was always going to deserve a hero’s welcome for taking his players to the finishing line of their six-year cycle through Mahler’s symphonies. As more superficially...