Classical Reviews
Goldberg Variations, Fretwork, St George's BristolSaturday, 05 March 2011
There are few more beautiful sounds on this planet than a consort of viols well played. Like a quiet conversation overheard from across the room, it combines intimacy and secrecy, together with a kind of conspiratorial subtlety of feeling – intellect and passion fused but disguised. And the sound has a delicacy and refinement hardly matched in any music I know.
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Faust, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Yamada, Barbican HallFriday, 04 March 2011
It's rare for demanding though not, I think, unduly cynical orchestral musicians to wax unanimously lyrical about a new conducting kid on the block. But that's what happened at the 2009 Besançon International Conducting Competition when BBC Symphony players in residence placed their bets on the obvious winner, 30-year-old Kazuki Yamada. Read more... |
Players of the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Pappano, Cadogan HallSunday, 27 February 2011
What a versatile master is the Royal Opera’s resident dynamo Antonio Pappano. On Saturday night, he was in the Covent Garden pit getting big-band sounds and tender elegies from the whole orchestra in Turnage’s Anna Nicole. And here he was again, moving from a surprisingly fine score to a great one, the shadow-of-mortality approach to Chinese... Read more... |
Brian Ferneyhough Day, Barbican CentreSunday, 27 February 2011
Earlier this month something happened to me that's never happened before. Brian Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet roughed-up my critical faculties and left them for dead. I couldn't tell you what had happened, why, in what order, when. As it finished, small birds circled my head. So I entered Brian Ferneyhough Day yesterday at the Barbican as one would an egg-beater, knees a-knocking. Read more... |
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Rattle, Royal Festival HallThursday, 24 February 2011
So the Berlin Phiharmonic’s high-profile five-day residency staked its ultimate curtain-calls on one of the most spiritual adagio-finales in the symphonic repertoire (most of the others, like this one to the Third Symphony, are by Mahler). We knew the masterful Sir Simon's micromanagement and the Berlin beauty of tone would look to the first five movements of the Third's world-embracing epic. But would the sixth flame, as it must, with pulsing inner light and strength of long-term line? Read more... |
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Rattle, Barbican HallTuesday, 22 February 2011
Sir Simon Rattle's clever programming struck again last night, showing us that musical neoclassicism - for want of a better word, which would be something like neo-everything - didn't begin with Stravinsky, whose Apollo ballet is surely his most elevated set of gestures to the past. Read more... |
Penguin Cafe/Portico Quartet, Usher Hall, EdinburghMonday, 21 February 2011
It’s the convention to review concerts on the first night of a tour rather than the last, but in this case it transpired it was rather wise to make an exception. These two groups may make very different kinds of music, but in their questing desire to escape classification last night they seemed to share a certain esprit de corps which added to the sense of occasion. Read more... |
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Rattle, Queen Elizabeth HallMonday, 21 February 2011
Anything anyone else can do, we can do better, seemed the mantra last night. It's probably a bit churlish to accuse the finest orchestra in the world of arrogance - surely that's their job? Read more... |
Celebrating Grainger, Kings PlaceFriday, 18 February 2011
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