violin
Simon Thompson
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra punches well above its weight when it comes to guest artists, and it was a big thing for them to have someone of the status of Alina Ibragimova as both soloist and guest director for this concert.She directed Haydn’s Drumroll Symphony (No. 103) from the leader’s chair, and wisely adopted a less-is-more approach, letting the opening drumroll (terrifically assertive from timpanist Louise Lewis Goodwin) and wind theme unfold without her observably moving a muscle. This then spilt over into a main allegro that was as bright as a button, which nonetheless allowed for Read more ...
David Nice
Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra last seared us in Britten’s amazing Violin Concerto, with Vilde Frang as soloist, on the very eve of lockdown in 2020. The work’s dying fall then was echoed by the spectral drift ending Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony. This time Frang’s equal as the greatest of violinists, Janine Jansen, faced the daunting solo role fearlessly, and the riproaring end of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony proved that this team is here to stay. There were telling links with Thursday’s concert, too. Britten’s emotional demands are as challenging as Read more ...
Robert Beale
Concerts need to have themes, it seems, today, and the BBC Philharmonic’s publicity suggested two contrasting ideas for the opening of its 2025-26 season at the Bridgewater Hall. One was “Fountain of Youth” (the programme title and also that of Julia Wolfe’s nine-minute work that began its orchestral content) and the other “Grasping pain, embracing fate” (used as a kind of strapline).Given that the latter phrase must have been meant to reflect something in the music, I was wondering – and still am – where pain came into it. Perhaps it was actually a reference to the pre-concert show: Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Does the orchestra that sways together play together? Quite apart from their (reliably gorgeous) sound, the tight-packed strings of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig made quite a sight at the Proms as they collectively surged through key passages of Dvořák and Sibelius as if staging a succession of seated Mexican waves. That, of course, was merely the visible token of the seamless integration that their music director, Andris Nelsons (pictured below), sought and found in this concert that brought the Leipzigers’ legendary focus, density and polish to the Royal Albert Hall. All that fabled Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Right from the bracing brass fanfare that began this Sea Symphony, you know exactly where you were: right in the midst of the deck, with the spray in your face and the wind in your hair. The London Symphony Orchestra is midway through a residency at the Edinburgh International Festival. They’ve been the classiest musical act to grace the Usher Hall stage so far this festival, and this bracing performance of Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony has been the best thing they’ve done, not least because they fully grasped the scale of the piece and the many moods it goes through. This Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a spectrum of pieces which brim with wit and inventiveness. This lunchtime concert with violinist Anthony Marwood was a sheer joy, as they together traversed a range of style and tone, richly entertaining a very decent Bank Holiday crowd in the Wigmore Hall.The starting point was an obvious one: the tangos of Astor Piazzolla. This sequence of three run together had a reassuring familiarity, and a strong whiff of the Parisian café. The swooning violin melody Read more ...
David Nice
Three live, very alive Symphonie fantastiques in a year may seem a lot. But such is Berlioz’s precise, unique and somehow modern imagination that you can always discover something new, especially given the intense hard work on detail of Antonio Pappano and what is now very much “his” London Symphony Orchestra. They and Lisa Batiashvili also helped to keep Szymanowski’s hothouse First Violin Concerto in focus, too.There can’t be a more exhilarating curtain-up to a concert than Berlioz’s equally fertile Le Corsaire Overture. The whiplash timpani, the unison helter-skelters of strings later meet Read more ...
David Nice
A lot hung upon the delivery last night of Henning Kraggerud, whom I last witnessed leading performances of Strauss’s Metamorphosen and some of his own music at the head of a mine in Svalbard: he was announced at the beginning of the concert as the Irish Chamber Orchestra’s new artistic partner, following the likes of another instrumentalist-composer, Jörg Widmann, and fellow violinist Thomas Zehetmair. So did he triumph? Beyond wildest expectations.You could even have called this performance of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons a concert staging. Introducing each concerto with a charming mixture of Read more ...
David Nice
When Vladimir Jurowski returns to what used to be “his” London Philharmonic Orchestra, you’d better jump. I would have done on Wednesday had I been able to get to his heady mix of Russian and Ukrainian rarities; luckily I could on Saturday night, because an outwardly standard programme of early 19th century works proved perfect, raising Schumann’s much-denigrated Violin Concerto to the level of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony.Vilde Frang (pictured below) was the ideal match for Jurowski and the LPO here. Her double-stopping entry, startlingly resonant, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It was the sonically adventurous, shiveringly atmospheric cello piece by Latvian composer Preteris Vasks that proved to be the first showstopper of this enjoyably esoteric evening. Dutch cellist Hadewych van Gent began the pianissimo movement of Vasks’ Gramata Cellam by creating a build-up of whistling harmonic effects on the A string, followed by a yearning feather-light improvisation in the cello’s upper registers that suddenly plunged vertiginously bass-wards.The rich, velvety chordal sequence that ensued was accompanied by Gent’s wordless soprano, as clear and piercing as a shaft of light Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps all great music counterpoints and comments on the times, but Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra have been searingly congruent. Before he took up his post as Chief Conductor, there were the extinction whispers of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony the night before lockdown and the fury of VW’s Fourth on the eve of Boris Johnson’s election. Now the aggressive dynamism of Walton’s First raised us out of that sinking feeling as the USA worsens by the day.George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5. “Visions” (the composer pictured below by Frank Schramm), could have been charged, too, Read more ...
Irène Duval
"I always enjoy seeing sunlight play on the rocks, the water, the trees and plains. What variety of effects, what brilliance and what softness... I wish my music could show as much diversity." Gabriel Fauré, who wrote those words and is indisputably one of the greatest of French composers, died 100 years ago, on 4 November 1924. His avowed aim was to elevate his listeners “as far as possible above what is.”In recent times of hardship, playing his music felt like a true gift, bringing solace to my heart. It is so moving and yet so comforting. No matter how profound, even dark, the emotions it Read more ...