Classical music
graham.rickson
Stefano Scodanibbio: Reinventions for string quartet Quartetto Prometeo (ECM)Stefano Scodanibbio (1956-2012) was an Italian double bass player and composer. As a bassist, the likes of Brian Ferneyhough and Iannis Xenakis wrote for him. On this disc we have his Reinventions, a beguiling sequence of sophisticated, highly imaginative arrangements for string quartet. Three Contrapuncti from Bach’s The Art of Fugue punctuate beautifully quirky transcriptions of Spanish guitar music and Mexican popular song. The Bach realisations are extraordinary. They’re played at glacial tempi, full of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Lucy Schaufer has always been one to confound our expectations. As she puts it herself, she’s “an American in London, conceived within the American Dream and living in the Old World.” As an indication of her boundless versatility she’s been seen here in roles as diverse as Claire DeLoone in Bernstein’s On the Town, Thea in Tippett’s The Knot Garden, and Jenny in Knussen’s Higglety Pigglety Pop! She made a huge impression at the Leicester Curve as Margaret in the UK premiere of Adam Guettel’s The Light in the Piazza.Carpentersville is her debut album and in this audio podcast she talks about Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Blake asked the tiger. One might have asked the same question of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, with Mozart’s G major Piano Concerto, K.453, as the lamb, in this hyper-diverse Birmingham concert. The image of divine simplicity was in the delicate hands of Mitsuko Uchida, whose Mozart resisted every striped temptation that Andris Nelsons and the CBSO threw in her path. On their own in Scriabin and, to a lesser extent, Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces, they could emote at will, fearful symmetry and all.Often enjoyable, and with many exquisite moments, Mozart’s Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Vladimir Jurowski deemed this the most challenging of any programme in the Southbank’s year-long The Rest is Noise festival and proceeded to tell us precisely why. That his little preamble lasted almost twice as long as the first piece - Webern’s Variations for Orchestra Op.30 - was an indicator of just how scientific the thinking behind his programme was. Jurowski instinctively understands how and why works impact on each other in the way they do. Intellectually and emotionally speaking this was a classic of its kind - and with one possible exception the accomplishment of its execution was Read more ...
David Nice
Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite capable of tearing at our heartstrings. That they did so unremittingly last night was very largely due to the supernaturally beautiful sounds master conjuror Stéphane Denève drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Yet more than just the icing on the cake was the collective and individual presence of students from the Royal Academy of Music for Ravel's L' Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Les Illuminations, Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge, Serenade Barbara Hannigan (soprano), James Gilchrist (tenor), Jasper de Waal (horn), Amsterdam Sinfonietta/Candida Thompson (Channel Classics)Yet more Britten – the composer’s centenary has unleashed a welcome flood of new recordings and reissues. Candida Thompson’s Amsterdam Sinfonietta disc is pretty special – vibrant, incisive and colourful, reinforcing Britten’s status as a major, international 20th century composer rather than a freakishly talented Englishman. Having a smallish string body pays enormous dividends in the Read more ...
David Nice
Backed up by reasonably adventurous orchestral programming, lucky conductors can forge a strong Stravinsky evening by picking and mixing from his five ancient Greek rituals. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, unintentionally homaging the late Sir Colin Davis who at least in earlier days would have jumped to such a pairing, chose to celebrate his 70th birthday with the extremes of white balletic lyric poem Apollon musagète and hard-hitting blackest tragedy Oedipus Rex.Apollo’s celestial strings and the acerbic mix of brass with woodwind in Oedipus, all superbly aligned, guaranteed further contrasts. But Read more ...
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David Nice
Visiting orchestras and conductors often complain about agents’ insistence that they programme their main national dishes. The request is partly understandable: we all want to hear the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler, the Czechs in Dvořák, the Hungarians in Bartók. On this occasion, it seemed like no bad thing to welcome back the Budapest Festival Orchestra and its febrile, masterly music director Iván Fischer in a work they’ve brought to London before, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. But it was a surprise to some of us to find that this passionate, flexible team’s interpretation had stiffened Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was clear that there was an Italian on the podium. Muted strings invoked an atmosphere so crepuscular that, when one involuntarily closed one’s eyes, the murmur of voices intoning the words “Requiem aeternam” seemed to come from deep inside the cathedral. The theatricality of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem is inescapable but what was also inescapable under Daniele Gatti’s baton was that every phrase, instrumental and vocal, is breathed as a singer might breathe it. Already, as the opening pages of the piece unfolded, one noted Gatti’s way of keeping the line fluent and singable with dovetailed Read more ...