Classical Reviews
Nikolai Demidenko, Wigmore HallMonday, 07 December 2009
Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's Wigmore Hall recital plunge and soar, catch you by the feet and dangle you by the ankles. |
Otello, LSO, Sir Colin Davis, BarbicanSunday, 06 December 2009
Let's suppose that off-centre genius among opera directors Richard Jones had been asked to bring his imagination to bear on Sir Colin Davis's latest Verdi-in-concert. I imagine he might have weighed up leading men, chorus and the conductor's unexpected blend of manicure with flash alongside swathes of masterful beauty, and decided to follow up his 1940s Windsor Falstaff at Glyndebourne with a 1970s Otello set in Surbiton. Read more... |
Total Immersion: George Crumb, BarbicanSaturday, 05 December 2009
To summon spirits from the vasty deep is the ambition of too many overloaded contemporary scores. George Crumb is better than most at getting those spirits to come when he calls, yet even he touches the transcendental more surely the fewer instruments he engages. Read more... |
Pictures Reframed: Leif Ove Andsnes & Robin Rhode, QEHFriday, 04 December 2009
We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical music to a general audience today - he calls the status quo into question, and he may be right. Read more... |
Philippe Jaroussky, Concerto Cologne, BarbicanThursday, 03 December 2009
Nesting gay men and posh female totty by the bucketload in the audience last night. Fill any programme with Baroque opera and that’s what you get. Why? Because the Baroque is aspirational pop. It's grounded in the same musical tricks that drive on the chart-topping hits of Kylie or Madonna: pumping ostinati, unshake-offable tunes and harmonic Häagen-Dazs - obvious harmonic loops that you can't get enough of. Though last night the hook was even simpler: a beddable boy.
Read more...
|
Wolfgang Holzmair, Andreas Haefliger, Wigmore HallSunday, 29 November 2009
There’s something beyond detailed and attentive musicianship that’s needed in Schubert’s last, most desolate song-cycle, Winterreise (“Winter’s journey”). It’s a dramatic arc that unites these 24 songs into a journey, the number of breaths in time and miles in distance that elapse from the first poem to the 24th, and bring you a sense of contact with the person undergoing this terrible suffering. Someone who is not Schubert, the composer, or Müller, the poet, but a third person. Read more... |
Leonidas Kavakos, Camerata Salzburg, QEHSaturday, 28 November 2009
There are many ways of being orchestral. About as many ways, in fact, as there are of organising the body politic. At one extreme there are the fascist orchestral states with their Kim Il-sung-emulating conductor-tyrants (Fritz Reiner's Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for example). At the other you have the right-on, conductorless cooperatives of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Read more... |
Schnittke Festival finale, Jurowski, RFHSaturday, 28 November 2009
Eliot's "time future contained in time past" has been conductor Vladimir Jurowski's unofficial motto throughout a festival which has had to take itself very seriously, and managed miraculously to carry a surprisingly large, loyal audience of all ages and persuasions along with it. Such stringent conditions could hardly be otherwise given the focal point of an uncompromising genius. Read more... |
Messiah, ENOFriday, 27 November 2009
There are so many ways a dramatic production of Messiah can go wrong it is almost unbearable to think about it. Certainly, there was a palpable buzz of nervousness in the Coliseum about last night’s audience as they took their seats. Did English National Opera really think it could pull it off? Could it avoid the pitfalls into triteness that surely lurk at every corner? How would the chorus manage it? And please God, let it be better than Glyndebourne’s 2007 St Matthew Passion. Read more... |
William Christie, Les Arts Florissants, BarbicanFriday, 27 November 2009
Thank God for Les Arts Florissants. Without the assiduous efforts of this pretty, chic French ensemble and its expat American conductor William Christie, one of the great periods in musical history, that of the French high baroque, would still be shrouded in darkness.
Read more...
|
Pages
inside classical music
latest in today
Music Reissues Weekly: Margo Guryan - Words and Music
Late summer 1966. Jazz was Margo Guryan’s thing. She was not interested in pop music. This changed when she was played The Beach Boys’s “God Only...
Bach's Mass in B Minor, Collegium Vocale Gent, Herreweg...
There’s a masterful subtlety to Philippe Herreweghe’s interpretation of Bach’s last great choral work – it shuns blazing transcendence for a sense...
Sorcery review - a tale of shapeshifting revenge
Islands off the coast of southern Chile, to the Spanish and German settlers of the 19th century, represented the edge of the world. To the...
The Moor review - Yorkshire chiller is ambitious but muddled
A number of films in recent years have added a distinctly local flavour to the folk-horror genre. Mark Jenkin was inspired by...
Album: John Moreland - Visitor
The mournful, lonesome voice of John Moreland from Bixby, Oklahoma, will be known by a few, but not many, in this country. The 12 songs on his...
Smashing Pumpkins / Weezer, OVO Hydro, Glasgow review - doub...
The current trend for package tours with two headliners appears to be growing, and this jaunt presented somewhat unlikely bedfellows – the...
Àma Gloria review - small-scale triumph with a big emotional...
In Marie Amachoukeli’s Àma Gloria there’s a remarkable performance by a child actor, Louise...
Susquatch Sunset review - nature red in tooth and claw (albe...
There’s a category of movies that are best seen having read nothing about them. Susquatch Sunset falls into that blood group as...
Jazz Emu, Soho Theatre review - delightfully daft musical sp...
Jazz Emu bounds on to the stage, launching into a song that talks about the importance of team work and how he has no ego. But strangely enough,...
Album: Moby - Always Centered at Night
US electronic perennial Moby has had a good run. He was a rave...