Classical Reviews

theartsdesk in York: York Early Music Festival

Jonathan Wikeley Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Early music of all shapes and sizes: Fretwork performs at the York Early Music Festival

York is a bit like Oxford, I’ve always thought: that perplexing contrast between the central squares and marketplaces, in all their twee glory – all aimless, besatchelled French students and anoraked tourists queuing for tea at Betty’s – and the simply glorious architecture and hidden back streets, from the ever-breathtaking splendour of the Minster to the endless succession of tiny hidden churches that inhabit every other corner. You could, potentially, hate it, but you always come...

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Petrenko, Royal Albert Hall

Jonathan Wikeley Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Hats off, gentlemen: a thoroughly enjoyable banquet of Romanticism from Petrenko and the RLPO

What a thrilling sound the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra can make when it chooses! What a grippingly deep tone, from a lower strings section that sounds like you’ve got the bass on your car stereo turned up daringly high, what clinical precision (in the best sense of the word) in the wind section, what power in the brass. At times you could almost see the surges of energy shooting off into the auditorium. You could certainly hear it.

First Night of the 2010 Proms

David Nice Friday, 16 July 2010

Numerologists may have been fretting over whether Proms forces could match the apocryphal thousand of the mightiest Eighth Symphony's 1910 world premiere, which Mahler feared would turn into a "catastrophic Barnum and Bailey show". With nothing like 350 in the children's chorus, for a start, not a chance.

Comment

Ivana Gavrić, Wigmore Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Thursday, 15 July 2010

There are some recitals where you think only about the abstracted music - the harmonic arguments, the structural cleverness, the textural ingenuity - and there are others where you are forced to confront the presence of a set of living, breathing, leering musical beasts.

Chopin Unwrapped, Martino Tirimo, Kings Place

David Nice Wednesday, 14 July 2010

So most of us blinked and missed Martha Argerich gliding into Kings Place's Argentine celebrations last week. Yet here I am writing again about this liveliest of venues' Chopin marathon, and like a would-be Prommer who joins the last night party without having been to the Albert Hall more than once in the season I'm culpable of marking the grand finale after...

The Bernstein Project - Mass, Royal Festival Hall

David Nice Monday, 12 July 2010

Marin Alsop and the electric guitars, tip of the 500-strong iceberg in Bernstein's 'Mass'

It's been quite a week for youth and the vernacular in the world of so-called “classical” music. Multiply by four the seven fledgling stage animals currently firing up John Adams’s “earthquake-romance” in London's East End, add an orchestra of 13-to-24-year-olds from four continents, student dancers,...

Comment

LPO, David Murphy, Royal Festival Hall

alexandra Coghlan Friday, 02 July 2010

Anoushka Shankar brings humour, humanity and uncomplicated directness to her performance

A packed Festival Hall and a cheering, stamping, standing ovation – hardly the usual welcome for an evening of contemporary music. Sitting, wizened and waistcoat-clad, at the centre of the front row was the reason: Ravi Shankar. Framed by the mathematical minimalism of John Adams’ Shaker Loops and Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Shankar’s first-ever symphony was last night given its world premiere by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Comment

Philharmonia Orchestra, Temirkanov, Royal Festival Hall

David Nice Friday, 25 June 2010

Perhaps we'd better get the Prokofiev part of the opening concert out of the way first. I have a real problem with Russian whizz pianist of the moment Denis Matsuev. His iron-clad technique and heavyweight thunder still leave some room for quieter playing, but where were the atmosphere or the bright nimbleness in the tour de force of the Third Piano Concerto?

Comment

Pollini, London Symphony Orchestra, Eötvös, Barbican Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Monday, 21 June 2010

Helmut Lachenmann is a sort of George Bush of contemporary classical composition, a bogeyman, a warrior, an ideologue.

Thomas Adès, London Symphony Orchestra, Barbican Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Sunday, 06 June 2010

If the second half of the 20th century saw opera throttled by existential crises, and left composers wondering whether the only future for the art form was for it to be hung out to dry, or to become an arcane intellectualised annex for the musical games then in vogue, Gerald Barry's one-act opera, La plus forte (2006) - receiving its UK premiere in a concert performance last night - marks the end of hostilities. So effortlessly does Barry seem to rise above the tangled,...