thu 28/03/2024

Classical Reviews

Prom 52: Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer

Sebastian Scotney

The first of this year's two Proms by the Budapest Festival Orchestra had looked like a rather strange confection, on paper at least. With eleven scheduled contributions, and only two of them destined to make it into double figures, its timings had even given it a passing resemblance to a short but eventful cricket innings (there were also three unprogrammed extra items, but more of those later). 

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Prom 50: Weilerstein, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Bělohlávek

Edward Seckerson

Even as orchestras began to sound more and more alike, there was the Czech Philharmonic. And many of its notable characteristics remain to this day: a modest, homespun quality, warm and engaging and full of bright-eyed distinction in the woodwinds.

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Prom 47: Britten War Requiem, CBSO, BBC Proms Youth Choir, Nelsons

Edward Seckerson

Nothing has resonated through the unfolding First World War commemorations more than the poetry of Wilfred Owen; and in terms of its grim immediacy and enduring heartbreak nothing ever could. Benjamin Britten knew that when he set down his War Requiem for posterity, counterpointing religious posturing with Owen’s indisputable truths.

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Wall, Mørk, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Davis, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Christopher Lambton

The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Edinburgh Festival debut was the most telling example yet of the 2014 festival’s disregard for conventional concert programming. A programme that began with Strauss’ Don Juan and Four Last Songs could easily have settled into a comfortable evening of large scale late romantics, but instead turned on its heel to dip into Schumann’s Cello Concerto before concluding with Percy Grainger’s riotous The Warriors.

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Prom 46: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Barenboim

David Nice

By the time we got to the end of this Prom, with four of the five encores – the whole of Bizet’s Carmen Suite – cannily crafted to bolster the short official programme, most of the rightly euphoric audience had forgotten the most unsatisfying first half so far this season. Perhaps I start from an ungenerous standpoint.

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Prom 43: Skride, BBCSO, Gardner

Edward Seckerson

The Russians were coming - and the prospect of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, even without the added attraction of hearing it in Igor Buketoff’s questionable choral arrangement where the Tsarist hymn is taken at its word and does a Boris Godunov on us, had the promenade queue fast stretching towards South Kensington.

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I, CULTURE Orchestra, Karabits, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Christopher Lambton

It is easy to be blinded by the sensational history of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad”. We cannot forget the famous performance by a starving makeshift orchestra in August 1942, at the height of the siege of Leningrad, or the dramatic way in which the Soviet authorities spirited the microfilmed score out of Russia to America via Tehran.

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Lemper, SCO, Foster, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Christopher Lambton

Twenty years ago Ute Lemper came to the Usher Hall to sing Kurt Weill. The young pretender to the Lotte Lenya throne performed then on a bare stage with little more than a piano as accompaniment. Last night, she swept onto a platform crammed with a massively augmented Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with saxophone, guitar, banjo, rhythm section, accordion, grand piano, and a squadron of percussion. Microphones, foldback, and towers of gently whirring loudspeakers filled any remaining space.

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Gerhardt, Osborne, Queen's Hall/Keyrouz, Ensemble de la Paix, Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh

David Nice

“Ah now, I can’t promise you sun,” says a Scots lady-in-waiting of her native weather to a novice Englishwoman near the start of Rona Munro’s masterly James Plays. It’s the first of many references to make the audience laugh knowingly. Well, after four days of the worst weather Edinburgh Festivalgoers can remember, the sun came out yesterday morning.

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Prom 34: Piemontesi, BBCNOW, Søndergård

Geoff Brown

Some things that spread like wildfire, like ebola and wildfire itself, are not good news at all. But performing Nielsen’s symphonies? That’s another matter entirely. In the next concert season, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia both begin Nielsen symphony programmes, while the LSO several years ago cycled through one of their own with Sir Colin Davis. Yesterday, the BBC National Symphony of Wales and their current Danish conductor – will it ever be someone Welsh?

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