Classical Reviews
Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher, London Symphony Orchestra, Alsop, Barbican HallSaturday, 05 November 2011
Honegger's gaudy 1935 meditation on the life of Joan of Arc - which we witnessed in concert last night at the Barbican - is an untidy flea market of meretricious musical ideas. The work's only value lies in it being able to make one understand why the likes of Pierre Boulez felt forced to make their postwar musical revolutions so sweeping and so violent.
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Duke Bluebeard's Castle, Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen, Royal Festival HallFriday, 04 November 2011
Sometimes the most disturbing images exist only in our imaginations - and so the questions posed in the preface to Bartók’s operatic masterpiece Duke Bluebeard’s Castle become especially pertinent: “Where did this happen - outside or within? Where is the stage - outside or within?” The answers, surely, lie “within”, making the prospect of a “semi-staged” climax to Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia Bartók series, Infernal Dance, a potentially troubling one. Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Dvořák, De Falla, Music Makes a City (DVD)Saturday, 29 October 2011
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Komsi, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Oramo, Barbican HallSaturday, 29 October 2011
With Riccardo Chailly's Leipzig Beethoven series well into its capacious stride, another cycle of symphonies keeping unusual company begins. This one featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra will take longer and features six conductors, four of them known masters of their subject, chimerical Sibelius. Read more... |
WNO Orchestra, Koenigs, St David's Hall, CardiffSaturday, 29 October 2011
“Blessed are the dead”, sings Brahms in the final movement of his German Requiem. And as far as the rest of this concert was concerned it was perhaps just as well. In Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the children are all dead; and in Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw everyone else has passed on except, of course, the survivor. The audience was not so much dead as largely absent, frightened off, I suppose, by the dreaded Arnold. Read more... |
Holland Panorama, Hoddinott Hall, CardiffThursday, 27 October 2011
Isn’t it strange how national talent goes by subject? Put on a blockbuster exhibition of Dutch painting and the queue will stretch to the Embankment. But can you imagine a festival of Dutch music? Sweelinck (d 1652) and Andriessen (b 1939) more or less sums it up. The BBC brought together three living Dutch composers for this Portrait concert, and one of them wasn’t after all Dutch (“I’ve kept my Swedish passport,” he insisted rather unchivalrously in the pre-concert interview). Read more... |
Beethoven Cycle, Concert 2: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Chailly, Barbican HallWednesday, 26 October 2011
Of all the Beethoven symphonies the Seventh is the one that can seem to whizz along under its own steam. At any rate, the impression Riccardo Chailly gave last night was of having fine-tuned his sleek Leipzig machine, turning on the engine and letting it fly. Only the extra stops I like to think a great conductor would usually have pulled out remained untouched. Read more... |
Beethoven Cycle, Concert 1: Leipzig Gewandhaus, Chailly, Barbican HallTuesday, 25 October 2011
There are many ways of breathing new life into Beethoven. Carlos Kleiber used to do it through imagery. He once famously asked his Viennese double basses to play like monkeys during a rehearsal of Beethoven's Seventh. Riccardo Chailly's tactic for his Barbican Beethoven cycle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra appears to have been to become, if not monkeyish, then at least a bit of a mischievous teenager. Read more... |
Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Ivari Ilja, Barbican HallSaturday, 22 October 2011
Tchaikovsky songs, the most obvious missing link in Olga Borodina's all-Russian programme a couple of Fridays back, formed a spare but unforgettable apex to this second recital in the Barbican's Great Performers series. That in itself, and unusual repertoire - Sviridov the other week, Tchaikovsky's rigorous protégé Taneyev last night - gave the sense of a mini-festival in two concerts. Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Schumann, Stravinsky, XenakisSaturday, 22 October 2011
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Dvořák: Symphony No 9, Czech Suite, Two Slavonic Dances Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics)
Schumann: Geistervariationen András Schiff (ECM)Pages
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