Classical Reviews
Angela Hewitt, Wigmore HallSunday, 21 November 2010
In 1932 English pianist Harriet Cohen commissioned the best of Britain’s composers – Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Walton, Howells – to produce transcriptions of Bach for piano. The result, A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen, is a true document of its time, no less fascinating for its rather conservative contents. Conservative is not an adjective that could be directed at Angela Hewitt’s 20th-century reinvention of the project however. With composers including Brett Dean and Robin Holloway... Read more... |
Mustonen, London Symphony Orchestra, Gergiev, Barbican HallSaturday, 20 November 2010
Because it was the capricious Finn who got us going and provided us with the evening's only chunks of nourishment. His performance of Rodion Shchedrin's Fourth Piano Concerto was joyous and thrilling. |
Turnage 50th birthday, CBSO Centre, BirminghamMonday, 15 November 2010
Hard to believe that Mark-Anthony Turnage, the bovver-booted, tank-topped composer of Night Dances and Greek in the 1980s, has reached his half-century. The Essex-boy image is still intact, somewhat mellowed perhaps; the boots have gone, the tank top remains, and the music has lost not one iota of its original brilliance and pizzazz. Read more... |
Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Denève, Edinburgh & GlasgowSunday, 14 November 2010
It's always tough sharing a programme with Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Could a promising 21st-century composer and a dream-dance concerto of the early 1930s begin to make the kind of sounds the visionary Frenchman conjured in 1830? Not a chance, especially since Stéphane Denève, who had taken his now fizzing... Read more... |
Steven Isserlis, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Viviane Hagner, Wigmore HallFriday, 12 November 2010
First, an admission. I have a blindspot for the chamber work of Fauré, Saint-Saëns and Ravel. I've tried my best, acquainted myself with the most stirring recordings of the finest pieces, got friends to hold my hand. But I've never been able to shake off the feeling that these French composers are mostly a bit drippy in this genre, a bit Watercolour Challenge, a bit I-eat-yoghurt-vote-Lib-Dem-and-don't-have-much-of-a-pulse. So last night was laser-eye-treatment time. Read more... |
Elgar: The Man Behind the Mask, BBC FourFriday, 12 November 2010
Where is the real Elgar to be found – in his boisterous self-portrait at the end of the Enigma Variations, the warm, feminine sentiment of the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony’s Adagio, or the nightmares of the Second Symphony? No doubt in each of them, and more. John Bridcut’s painfully sensitive documentary hones in on the private, introspective Elgar, the dark knight of "ghosts and shadows", always with the music to the fore. And by getting the good and great, young and old... Read more... |
BBC National Orchestra of Wales, St David's Hall, CardiffFriday, 12 November 2010
How much do you know about centaurs? Probably you know they are horses below the withers, human above. But did you know they were heavy drinkers who once got out of hand at the wedding of the King of the Lapiths, tried to rape the bride and got beaten up for their pains?
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Kafka Fragments, Barbican HallFriday, 12 November 2010
A 70-minute song cycle for soprano and violin, the Kafka Fragments is the magnum opus (the irony of its miniature forms seems entirely deliberate) of György Kurtág, a composer known for the inscrutability of his music. His lines arrive at the ears fully armed, unwilling to surrender their meaning. A performance of the Fragments at the Tanglewood Music Festival in 2008 famously drove a musically literate audience from the room, so can Peter Sellars's staged... Read more... |
Sir Charles Mackerras Memorial Concert, Royal Festival HallFriday, 05 November 2010
In the last year of his life he was, as a colleague noted when we learned of Charles Mackerras’s death, the wise old gamekeeper in the spring forest of Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. No wonder Mackerras, we were told last night by his conductor nephew Alexander Briger, wanted that most ecstatic celebration of... Read more... |
Bostridge, Europa Galante, BarbicanSaturday, 30 October 2010
We have good days and we have bad days. Ian Bostridge, at last night’s concert at the Barbican, was not having one of his better ones. But time and CD releases wait for no man, and so he gamely ploughed through his programme of music written for three great Baroque tenors (no prizes for guessing what the title of the album is – do you think EMI would pass up an opportunity like that?), and by the end appeared a little more comfortable than at what was a rather tentative start. Read more... |
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