Classical music
graham.rickson
Dreams & Fancies – English music for solo guitar Sean Shibe (guitar) (Delphian)This is the best solo guitar disc I've heard. That it comes from a soloist in his twenties makes it all the more astounding. There's a funny quote in Lucy Walker’s sleeve note from the influential Spanish guitarist Francisco Tárrega, who remarked that “the guitar in the hands of an Englishman is almost blasphemy.” Not any more; the British guitarist Julian Bream emerged from nowhere to become one of the 20th century's most important players, and one who inspired a huge range of contemporary composers to write Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Goodness the BBC Philharmonic plays well for John Storgårds. The orchestra’s chief guest conductor has a lovely easy manner on the podium – all curved gestures and loose arms, and the result is a partnership that brings the absolute best out of the BBC’s Manchester-based orchestra. Here, in a programme dominated by the Nordic music in which he excels, they carved glossy, oaken shapes out of Grieg and Sibelius, bringing some sophisticated rusticity to the gilded Royal Albert Hall.It was the solo viola that set the tone, thrusting its way through the orchestra at the start of their sequence of Read more ...
David Nice
The road to hell is paved with brilliant ideas in Berlioz's idiosyncratic take on the Faust legend. John Eliot Gardiner proved better than anyone in last night's Prom that this splendidly lopsided "dramatic legend" can only be weakened by its many stagings; all the drama is in the music, and especially in the orchestra, from rollicking country dances and fanfaring Hungarians through to the shrieking night birds on the ride to the abyss and the six harps dappling the plains of heaven in what for modern tastes is a quite unnecessary "Epilogue in Heaven" for redeemed Marguerite.Gardiner is a Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
A Prom of unrelenting momentum began promisingly with Beethoven, and the false start that opens his First Symphony. On this showing, Kirill Karabits has coached his Bournemouth musicians in the classical repertoire with a dash and flair that brings to mind a golden era for the orchestra under the stewardship of Rudolf Barshai in the 1980s. Metronome-mark tempi even outstripped his Russian predecessor, though diligent observance of accents, and delight in some of Beethoven’s naughty-boy antics, did not fully compensate for a pervasive lack of weight. We didn’t get much beyond the idea of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mompou: Fêtes Lointaines Steffen Schleiermacher (piano) (MDG)“I am not a composer and don't want to be regarded as one… somehow, I always have the feeling that it comes to me from outside.” There is indeed something otherworldly about Federico Mompou’s spare, understated music, and it’s interesting that several pianists who excel in this repertoire also specialise in performing works by other fringe minimalists. Steffen Schleiermacher is one, having previously recorded discs of Feldman and Cage. Not that Mompou’s output is as outré as theirs: you’d place him close to Satie and Poulenc on the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Before reuniting us in high spirits with a pair of much-loved old friends, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante and Brahms's Second Symphony, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi at the Proms took us into a darker, and unexpectedly affecting, place. Written for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Flamma by Järvi’s fellow-Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür evokes the mysterious, and terrifying, power of fire with a nod to its sacred role in Aboriginal culture.In June, just on the other side of Kensington from the Royal Albert Hall, Londoners witnessed and felt that power in the most horrific Read more ...
Michael Volpe
On the morning of the Grenfell Tower disaster, as the news of the fire gathered pace and gravity, our phones were abuzz with concern for our front of house colleague, Debbie Lamprell, who we knew lived in the tower. We all called her number time and again, sought to reassure one another with optimistic scenarios whereby her telephone may have been left at home as she escaped. My telephone rang again. This time it was James Clutton, our Director of Opera, calling from the base of the tower itself; he’d rushed across London, frustrated at the lack of news of our colleague, and was searching Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The title of John Adams’s Naive and Sentimental Music is a bit of a tease. Read literally it promises – or threatens – unsophisticated mawkishness, though that is the last thing it delivers. But maybe it was this title, alongside relatively unfamiliar 20th century repertoire, that kept the audience away. For whatever reason this was the worst attended main Prom I have been to for a long time – and what a shame, as it was also one of the very best.The Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen began with a musical palate-cleanser, the rarely heard Stravinsky arrangement of Bach’s Canonic Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How do you make a venerable warhorse frisk like a coltish show-pony? Hire William Christie as the trainer. In a performance of scintillating drama and crystal-clear definition, the past master of Baroque revival and re-invention coaxed the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its thoroughbred choir across all the tricky fences on Handel’s long and winding course. At the end of Israel in Egypt, with the Egyptians vanquished and the Israelites freed, the voice of Miriam the prophetess – one of the two soprano solo parts – exhorts her people to “Sing ye to the Lord, for he has triumphed Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
As the lights dim the choir turn their backs on the audience. A spotlight picks out a single singer. With one hand aloft he leads the male voices through the “Pater Noster” and “Ave Maria” in a stern and stately plainchant. Then suddenly the full battalion of cornetts and sackbuts, theorbos and recorders burst into the joyful opening of Monteverdi’s Vespers, and we are up and running.The Vespers, like Bach’s B Minor Mass, was not heard complete in the composer’s lifetime, and may indeed not even have been conceived to have been heard in a single sitting. As Bach did later, Monteverdi seems to Read more ...
David Nice
Romantic concerto, contemporary work, classical symphony: it's a common format at the Proms, but not usually in that order. Both David Sawer's 1997 firework The Greatest Happiness Principle and Haydn's ever-radical Symphony No. 99, sharing a light-filled second half, would normally be reserved as what composer Anders Hillborg once told me is known in America as "parking-lot music", taking the opening slot.The idea here was to move from dark and steaky Brahms upwards into Haydn's heaven, but as it turned out there was plenty of dancing radiance in this unusual, often exquisite interpretation Read more ...
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Piano Concertos 1&3, Overture on Hebrew Themes Simon Trpčeski (piano), Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko (Onyx)Good recordings can make you notice things you've never heard before. Like this one: Simon Trpčeski’s balletic, light-footed account of Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No 3 is outstanding. It's one of the swifter performances on disc, Trpčeski matched every step of the way by Vasily Petrenko's pliant Liverpool players. Listen to the way the first movement's second subject is enunciated so crisply, and how often do we get to hear the lower strings Read more ...