Classical music
David Nice
How often should a music-lover go to hear Britten’s most layered masterpiece? From personal experience, I’d say not more than once every five years, if you want to keep a sense of occasion fresh. So how often should an orchestra play it? Sir Simon Rattle and his Berlin Philharmonic decided they could manage three nights in a row towards the end of their 2013-14 season. At the first of the performances, it already felt like a lot might have been kept in check. This, alas, was for the most part the kind of workaday performance Shostakovich, who rated the work alongside Mahler’s Das Lied Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Still falls the Rain, The Heart of the matter, Canticle V etc Nicholas Phan (tenor), Myra Huang (piano), Jennifer Montone (horn) Sivan Magen (harp) (Avie)Another well-planned Britten anthology in the composer’s centenary year, made more interesting by its choice of performers – none British, apart from an unexpected, eloquent spoken cameo from Alan Cumming in The Heart of the Matter. Heard here in Peter Pears’ abbreviated version, the song sequence has at its centre Britten’s Canticle III, surrounded by additional Edith Sitwell settings and readings and framed by a haunting prologue Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What rare luxury. A three-concert series from the London Symphony Orchestra and their Principal Guest Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is lure enough, but add three collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma as soloist and you have to rope off a special area in the Barbican for the returns queue. Rarer still – it would be worth every moment of the wait.The concert-triptych has been a meditation on musical friendships and relationships, with long-time colleagues Ma and Tilson Thomas paying homage to the complex network of emotions and influences that existed between Britten, Copland and Shostakovich, three Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
With the Albert Dock just a few hundred yards down the road, and Liverpool the launchpad for two centuries of Atlantic crossings, it’s perhaps not too shocking to hear Wagner’s intercontinental Ride of the Valkyries resound round Philharmonic Hall.Though perhaps that was the problem: in the first half of this Scouse tribute to the bicentennial Saxon, under an (initially) slightly deferential Vasily Petrenko, the first half somehow failed to shock. One problem is those naffly abrupt cut-offs, which even Stokowski couldn’t sidestep: common chords snatched at, like rounding off Read more ...
Gareth Davies
As we approach the end of what feels like a long season of concerts, I cannot think of a more satisfying way to finish than with Bernard Haitink on the podium. All conductors have different styles, whether dancelike, quivering, rude, tormented genius, or extended baton (others are available). Bernard is one of a precious few who don’t really seem to do anything much when they stand in front of an orchestra.Let me clarify that straight away: less is more. I am positive that as Haitink has grown older, as with Sir Colin, economy of effort has influenced his conducting style; but with an Read more ...
Gareth Davies
New York City, the movie star, is so familiar now even to those who have never visited that it’s difficult to imagine the impact on the LSO players of arriving there for the first time. As they stood on the deck of the Baltic, the Statue of Liberty must have been a welcome sight after 10 days at sea. First impressions of the city were not entirely favourable: before they could get to their hotel, the entire orchestra with its baggage, instruments, and music had to be checked through customs. The timpanist Charles Turner notes:Awake about 3 or 4 am. Still dark. The engines are stopping and it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Elgar: Symphony no 2, Sospiri, Elegy Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra/Sakari Oramo (BIS)Hearing such authentic Elgarian sounds from a Swedish orchestra under a Finnish conductor may surprise, but Sakari Oramo specialized in British music while leading the CBSO so you’d expect nothing less. This is a spectacular performance of Elgar’s 2nd Symphony, so good that one’s only niggles concern the work itself, and how the first three movements lead to a finale which so conspicuously fails to wrap up what’s gone before. Oramo’s performance is nicely paced. Timings reveal that this isn’t a swift Read more ...
edward.seckerson
In Bergen’s Grieg Hall (one is tempted to say the Hall of the Mountain King) the 2013 Bergen Festival concludes with the mournful tolling of bells. A consonant “Amen”, like a healing benediction, is the last word and with it comes perhaps a glimmer of hope. But the mood is sombre not celebratory. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, for all its theatricality, would be an unlikely choice to close a festival in any year but this - Britten's hundredth anniversary. Its effect on an audience has been tried and tested the world over and those who have vilified it (they still do) for being overly emotive Read more ...
David Nice
On most of her London visits, Elisabeth Leonskaja has been an unassuming high priestess of the mysteries and depths in core sonatas by Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert. This time she applied her Russian-school style of orchestral pianism, tempered as always by absolute clarity, to burning the mists off Ravel, Debussy and the French-inspired Romanian, Enescu. She went on to give us colossal enlightenment in what must be the greatest work ever composed by a 19-year-old, Brahms’s Third Piano Sonata in F minor.If Brahms was the last of the titans, Leonskaja embodies the twilight of the gods. We Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Sitting in the concert hall in Dresden’s Albertinum – the city’s modern art gallery – is a paradoxical experience. You are indoors, but faced on all sides by external walls, framed by Dresden’s typical bourgeois 19th-century architecture but looking up to a giddyingly contemporary, asymmetric ceiling. Neon-lit signs cover one wall, while the other gives way to a gallery of classical sculpture. Confrontations between old and new, history layered so tightly that you can barely peer between the levels – that’s the essence of Dresden, a palimpsest-city at the political and cultural heart of Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Adams: Nixon in China Peter Sellars (director), Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Chorus and Ballet/John Adams (Nonesuch)If, like me, you prefer your opera recordings to be heard and not seen, make an exception for this DVD of Peter Sellars’s remarkably lucid staging of John Adams’s Nixon in China. A work which, as David Nice pointed out when watching the live relay of this production, is probably the only opera composed since Britten’s death to gain a secure place in the repertoire. It’s hard to imagine the piece looking better, the vast Met stage perfectly suited to the work’s quasi- Read more ...
David Nice
Down Whitehall, the English Defence League had been making ripples, and at 7.40pm some of its packs were still roaring round Trafalgar Square. At that moment, Berlioz’s March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie fantastique drowned them out in one big va t’en which you could have translated into a hundred languages.For here was the music of a Frenchman conducted by a Russian, played by an orchestra of many nationalities to a packed-out crowd of many more and every creed, made up of adults, children, babies and dogs. As in last week’s horrific murder, for every minus, however gross, more than a Read more ...