Classical music
David Nice
Would Verdi and Puccini have composed more non-operatic music, had they thrived in a musical culture different to Italy's? Hard to say. What we do know is that they both became absolute masters of orchestration – Puccini rather quicker than Verdi, living as he did in an entirely post-Wagnerian era. Verdi left us one great mass, the Requiem, Puccini a youthful and honest expression of the liturgy as well as other early pieces he mined for Manon Lescaut and La bohème. It made a pretty, occasionally stirring climax to an evening which could have done with an absolute masterpiece.One such, even Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
A day devoted entirely to the life and work of György Ligeti celebrated this composer’s remarkable oeuvre through a sequence programme of film, talks and concerts of his music. The final two of these performances were a short recital of his choral works, given by the BBC Singers in St Giles’ Cripplegate, and a concert from the BBC Symphony Orchestra of some of Ligeti’s orchestral masterpieces in the Barbican Hall.Under their chief conductor Sofi Jeannin – who led with style, clarity and precision – the BBC Singers (female members, picured below at the later event) opened their concert with Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just as our brief, premature spring collapsed into the bluster of Storm Freya, the Enlightenment certainties of Haydn’s more dependable cycle of nature blew into the Royal Festival Hall. Perhaps because its lovely but (for the most part) serene music tends to occupy the sunlit uplands, The Seasons has never quite secured the automatic respect accorded to the cosmic and human drama of its immediate forerunner, The Creation. Sprinkled from first to last with imitative bird calls, hunting horns, babbling brooks, croaking frogs and an entire meteorology of weather-effects, the second great Read more ...
David Nice
In a way, he was a second Bernstein. Only 11 years Lenny's junior, and living to the much riper age of 89 – his 90th birthday would have been on 6 April – André Previn was a film composer and arranger at the start of his 70-plus-year career, a jazz pianist in a class of his own, and another fine conductor who also took his mission to educate seriously (and to entertain not so seriously, as underlined by that appearance on The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, destined to be endlessly recycled now).Something of the fire had gone out of his conducting by the time I met him in his Reigate Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
There are those who say, somewhat cynically, that a way for new music to get an audience is to present it carefully packaged up with standard repertoire that will draw a larger crowd. How true that may be is open to debate, but composer Stephen Johnson did introduce his new piece – which was sandwiched between Brahms’s and Mozart’s clarinet quintets, as "the moment you’ve all been dreading".The work – Angel’s Arc – is a beautiful, contemplative piece of music that explores sorrow, loss and gratitude from memories of Johnson’s own life. It is named after an area of the West Pennine Moors Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphony No 4, Dvořák: Symphony No 9 Bamberg Symphony Orchestra/Jakub Hrůša (Tudor)Brahms became a close friend and mentor to Dvořák, the two men first meeting in 1877 after Brahms had helped the younger composer win a scholarship. Dvořák was described as “a talented individual”, who was pleased to take on Brahms's advice in replacing “the many bad notes“ in his D minor string quartet with better ones. Brahms soon came to value his friend as an equal, admiring his melodic invention, while his own “high degree of skill” was envied by Dvořák. Coupling Brahms's 4th with Dvořák’s Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How often do two contemporary women composers get to take a stage bow during a solo recital of no more than modest length? Last night at Kings Place, within an eclectic bill of fare dubbed “Soul of a Woman” as part of the venue’s Venus Unwrapped season, Joanna MacGregor performed a brace of piano pieces by members of the audience: the Jamaican composer Eleanor Alberga and, as her unscheduled encore, Freya Waley-Cohen’s “Southern Leaves”. In the latter, the prolific and versatile Waley-Cohen channels the spirit and the struggle of Nina Simone with a lyricism striated by sorrow. And, in the Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic and its chief guest conductor John Storgårds introduced their Manchester audience to two new things – possibly three – in this concert. One was a world premiere, and you can’t get much newer than that. The other big item was a symphony that’s already nearly 40 years old, yet having only its third performance in Britain.The first piece was Schumann’s Overture, Scherzo and Finale, which is hardly new, but still rarely heard. It dates from soon after the "Spring" Symphony, though the finale was re-written some time later, and is in reality a symphony without a slow movement Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Time was when the BBC Symphony Orchestra played austerely wholesome programmes of modern and romantic classics to third-full houses. Now on a more varied diet – such as the collaboration with Neil Gaiman and Alwyn's Miss Julie in concert announced this week for their forthcoming season – they pull in respectable audiences, though last night’s concert of classical, romantic and contemporary Austrians had a reassuringly old-fashioned feel about it.The orchestra itself has also been transformed under Sakari Oramo’s leadership, into one of the most flexible, up-for-anything large ensembles in the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Vyacheslav Artyomov: In Memoriam, Lamentations, Pietà, Tristia I (Divine Art)Born in 1940, Vyacheslav Artyomov trained as a physicist before switching to music. He joined forces with fellow composers Sofia Gubaidlina and Viktor Suslin in the mid-1970s to form a group specialising in improvisation with unconventional instruments. Like Shostakovich and Prokofiev before him, Artyomov fell foul of the Soviet authorities, his music effectively banned for several years. Though Tikhon Khrennikov, the famously cantankerous chief of the Composers’ Union, performed a volte-face a decade later and Read more ...
David Nice
Give me some air! Stop screaming at me! Those are not exclamations I'd have anticipated from the prospect of a Vienna Philharmonic Mahler Ninth Symphony, least of all under the purposeful control of Ádám Fischer. Less well known here than his younger brother Iván - both have been admirably outspoken critics of Orbán's regime - Ádám has impressed with his stunning Budapest Wagner and his masterful Mahler cycle as chief conductor of the little-known Düsseldorf Symphony. Maybe if he'd brought the Düsseldorfers here, there would have been more of a sense of inner feeling; maybe the Viennese are Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For its first ever performance in this country, the Symphony Orchestra of India - formed in only 2006 - kicked off its UK tour in spectacular style at Symphony Hall, Birmingham yesterday evening. Based at the National Centre of Performing Arts in Mumbai, the SOI is India’s first and only professional symphony orchestra. Founded by NCPA chairman Khushroo Suntook and Khazak violinist Marat Bisengaliev - who’ll join the orchestra as a soloist for some of the tour’s later dates - this is a group that’s achieved a remarkable amount in its 13 years of existence. They’ve worked with a host of world- Read more ...