Classical music
Ismene Brown
Who cares about the Classical Brits? Should we be carrying you the news? Should the seriously serious conductor Antonio Pappano and his Accademia di Santa Cecilia be trumpeting their double win yesterday for his Verdi Requiem (Critics' Choice - the top "serious" award) and his Madama Butterfly, for which the soprano Angela Gheorghiu won Female Artist of the Year?These are moot points and tricky questions, since the Classical Brits were established in 2000 by the record labels' trade association the British Phonographic Industry to boost CD sales rather than live performance, and its Read more ...
David Nice
"There is not one idea," wrote that intemperate critic Eduard Hanslick about Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, "that does not get its neck broken by the speed with which the next lands on its head." Rather a compliment, I've always thought, and certainly so as applied to James MacMillan's new Violin Concerto. As soloist Vadim Repin and conductor Valery Gergiev whirled us tumultuously through its hyperactive songs and dances, there was so much I wanted to savour, to hear again. That won't be a problem. So long as there are violinists of Repin's calibre able to play it, the work is here to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The announcement by the Royal Philharmonic Society's keynote speaker Grayson Perry that the Queen had sent for David Cameron last night was met with audible groans from the great and the good of the classical music world at their Awards ceremony. Speaker after speaker made it perfectly clear that the Lib Dems (though almost certainly not the economically liberal, pro-nuclear, immigration-capping, Tory-serving Lib Dems that they have now woken up to) were the choice of the majority here and one after the other they pleaded that the Government ring-fence arts funding.None of this is Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Chamber music is a highly motivational experience - here is a group of instruments of quite different qualities parading, fighting, ganging up, inviting each other’s new ideas, dialoguing, and all this variety heightening the build-up to the moment when all instruments proclaim unanimity in a grand finish, or (even better) huddle up in mutual creative conspiracy and conjure a mysterious little spell that makes the outsider long to be part of it. All of which was present last night in both the performance and the music of Robert Schumann’s third Piano Trio, played by the Tetzlaff siblings, Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Performing on the organ is, if you will, a lofty pursuit. Its repertoire calls for devotional focus. And then there’s this bloke.Cameron Carpenter (pictured), who is not yet 30, is unlike other organists. He designs his own clothes, for example, including the flamboyant stack heels that skitter across the pedals. He wears eyeliner. He expands the repertoire as far and wide as transcriptions of Chopin, Mahler and movie music. No wonder his debut release was called Revolutionary. And, in a notable departure from other classical musicians trained at the Juilliard in New York, he does rockstar Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's an admirable project: to recast the interiors of stately homes as immersive artworks, a musical recital combined with sound installations designed to make the viewer look anew at their surroundings. Certainly as I entered the hallway of Hertford House in Marylebone, where the Wallace Collection is housed, the rich, shifting tones of Simon Fisher Turner's electronic sound manipulations filled the air like perfume, amplifying the opulence of the surroundings and making me – and others – linger on the grand staircase. This was ambient music in the truest sense, deep subliminal bass notes Read more ...
David Nice
...So who says classical music is dead, apart from that critic on the grisly Late Review a couple of years ago (re Birtwistle's The Minotaur - to be precise, "If you think classical music is dead, go to Covent Garden and see the corpse")? Of course, it would be even better if the Proms's wow factor could spread to the rest of the season. But let's not complain. Many have, though, about the new online system, which allowed newcomers to book on a blank-cheque basis; and last night I met an outraged old-timer who'd failed on Day One to get a seat for the first night performance of Mahler's Read more ...
David Nice
Fantasies in apparent freefall, though in fact ruthlessly organised and blindingly well executed, were the name of last night's game - an endgame, as it happened, to the BBC Symphony Orchestra's hardest-working Barbican season before the marathon of the Proms. Buzzing, fluttering myriads of notes by Tippett and Martinů swarmed around a very necessary still centre in the majestic personage of Elisabeth Leonskaja, that great Minerva of the keyboard holding us spellbound in Schumann and Chopin.Leonskaja's encore, the Chopin E flat Nocturne, might seem like an odd place to start. But it was very Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Communists had taken over the Acropolis, Britain faced a hung parliament and in the 20 minutes it took me to get down to the Barbican by bus the US stock market had fallen more sharply than at any time since 1987. In the face of global and political madness, it was nice to have a concert awaiting that seemed to offer a sense of cosy familiarity and unfashionability and monarchical approval. Sir Colin Davis and Dame Mitsuko Uchida were our guides, an unfussy programme our fate. Yet the concert unfolded with about as much good grace as the political day, the second half spinning almost Read more ...
David Nice
Poland's most imaginative composer after Chopin, and his natural heir in the realm of sensual reverie, certainly knew how to yoke a full orchestra to his dreams and fantasies. Yet the work by Szymanowski I've most longed to hear in concert is the three-movement Mythes for violin and piano. A recording of it by Kaja Danczowska and the great Krystian Zimerman quickly acquired cult status in the 1980s. So it seemed like a heaven-sent gift to hear it live in the hands of an even more rounded violinist, young Norwegian Henning Kraggerud, and another maverick Polish pianist, Piotr Anderszewski. Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Since the passing of Luciano Pavarotti, there’s been a gigantic hole for a tenor of gold-plated opera chops and the gift of communication, and Rolando Villazón - young as he is, at only 38 - already appears to have sealed that gap up effortlessly. His stint as judge on the lamentable Popstar to Operastar on ITV recently left everyone tarnished but him. Villazón not only has a dazzling voice and uniquely electric hair, but sports about on the platform with a puppyish vivacity that brings dead places to life around him and endears him widely. Roger Federer meets Groucho Marx, said my companion Read more ...