Classical Reviews
Prom 17, Kozhukhin, RPO, Petrenko review - four tripartite masterpiecesFriday, 02 August 2024
Under its master music director, the once-torpid Royal Philharmonic Orchestra has given us some of the most brilliant concerts of the 2023-4 season. Their Prom together changed course from the Elgar/Rachmaninov theme and dared even more, placing together four works in three parts each – two with atmospheric outer sections flanking vivid ceremonials (Ives, Debussy), two placing the lyricism at the dead centre (Ravel, Tchaikovsky). Read more... |
Prom 10, Van der Heijden, BBCSSO, Ryan Wigglesworth review - an engaging and esoteric delightSaturday, 27 July 2024
What is Englishness? Over the last century the answer has changed substantially. Yet last night’s Prom, which – according to the programme – set itself the task of celebrating “all things English” had a very particular answer. Read more... |
Prom 6, Verdi's Requiem, BBCNOW, Bancroft review - running the emotional gamutWednesday, 24 July 2024
Returning after ten months to the unique vasts of Albert’s colosseum, especially for a Verdi Requiem as powerful as this and a packed hall, felt like a rebirth. There was immediate purging in the focused whispers of the first “Requiem aeternam”s, BBC National Orchestra of Wales Principal Conductor Ryan Bancroft instilling a confidence you knew would last the evening, and instant thrills in the clarion “Kyrie”s of all four world-class soloists. Read more... |
Prom 5, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Bancroft review - a luxury orchestral cruiseTuesday, 23 July 2024
This looked like a classic Prom in the grand old BBC tradition: two big but lesser-known pieces by pivotal figures (Schoenberg and Zemlinsky) played by a major non-metropolitan ensemble, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. And so it proved, with powerful, refined and meatily satisfying versions of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s The Mermaid conducted by the NOW’s chief, Ryan Bancroft. Read more... |
First Night of the Proms, BBCSO, Chan review - from the sublime to the mischievously meticulousSaturday, 20 July 2024
The first night of the BBC’s 2024 Proms season was illuminated by the blazing brilliance of Isata Kanneh-Mason’s performance of Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto and the world premiere of Ben Nobuto’s witty video-game-inspired Hallelujah Sim. Hong Kong born conductor Elim Chan presided over a vibrant, joyful evening in which apparent crowd-pleasers like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony were balanced by pieces that ranged from the sublime to the mischievously meticulous. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Pärnu Music Festival 2024 - youth, experience and old mastery on the highest levelThursday, 18 July 2024
"The world meets in Pärnu", slogan for the 14th festival in Estonia's summer seaside capital, has held good ever since Paavo Järvi gathered native musicians and key players from the international teams he inspires to form what's now the Estonian Festival Orchestra. Buzz about the youngsters formerly serving just the conductors’ course is new; 2024's Järvi Academy Youth Symphony Orchestra embraces 30 countries. Read more... |
NMC Recordings at 35, Dutch Church, London review - a fitting celebrationThursday, 04 July 2024
NMC Recordings has spent 35 years promoting contemporary music by British composers, and this commitment to both emerging and established voices was represented at this birthday concert in London last night, part of the Spitalfields Festival. From their emergence in 1989 in a different musical and technological world (“NMC” standing for “New Music Cassettes”) my early days of CD buying were guided by NMC’s developing catalogue and they are still a go-to for finding interesting new things. Read more... |
Concert Theatre DSCH, Norwegian CO, QEH review - visually stunning, viscerally thrilling ShostakovichMonday, 01 July 2024
This luminously persuasive, radically inventive performance of Shostakovich’s music begins – quite literally – at the end. Beneath a slowly revolving monochrome moon, a lone musician delivers a plangent rendition of the Moderato and Allegretto from the final viola sonata the composer wrote before dying of cancer in 1975. Read more... |
Nardus Williams, Elizabeth Kenny, Spitalfields Music Festival review - layers behind a sweet Tower hourFriday, 28 June 2024
Behind this poignant, simple-seeming hour of music for soprano and lute(s) lay a spider-web of connections between outsiders in the City: rebels, prisoners, immigrants, Black Londoners. Elizabeth Kenny’s programme note wove it all together brilliantly; we could have heard even more of her talking during the concert. Most of us could have done with seeing more than 15 minutes of the wonderful Nardus Williams, too. Read more... |
Bartlett, Fantasia Orchestra, Fetherstonhaugh, Proms at St Jude's review - Americana both fun and fierceTuesday, 25 June 2024
Any programme featuring Gershwin’s top large-scale works might tend to the “pops” side. Bernstein’s West Side Story Overture and even the sweet dream of Florence Price’s Adoration fit that bill. But An American in Paris sounded completely different from usual, its radical side highlighted, following Ives’s Three Places in New England and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Andante for Strings. Read more... |
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