Classical music
edward.seckerson
Wigmore Hall does not always take kindly to big voices; it’s an easy hall to over-sing. But when the singer is the American soprano Christine Brewer and the sound so open, so rich and effulgent, hall and voice become one resonance. It’s almost as if Wigmore is selective in its response. It warms to the right voice in the right music. Brewer in Strauss is about as right as it gets. And besides, regardless of the venue, Brewer has never sung to be heard; she sings to be understood.This BBC Lunchtime Concert began at the beginning of Strauss’ life in song with Zueignung, generally sung at the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's Wigmore Hall recital plunge and soar, catch you by the feet and dangle you by the ankles. To cast the right spell, to heave the right ho, you need the right storyteller, one like the ancient Mariner: a glittering eye, a hoary beard, a man of myth and terror. In fact, you need what we got: the towering Paul Bunyan-like Russian, Nikolai Read more ...
David Nice
Let's suppose that off-centre genius among opera directors Richard Jones had been asked to bring his imagination to bear on Sir Colin Davis's latest Verdi-in-concert. I imagine he might have weighed up leading men, chorus and the conductor's unexpected blend of manicure with flash alongside swathes of masterful beauty, and decided to follow up his 1940s Windsor Falstaff at Glyndebourne with a 1970s Otello set in Surbiton.As things rather stiffly stood on the concert platform racial issues, Love thy Neighbour-style or otherwise, could be left behind. There were instead two pressing questions Read more ...
David Nice
To summon spirits from the vasty deep is the ambition of too many overloaded contemporary scores. George Crumb is better than most at getting those spirits to come when he calls, yet even he touches the transcendental more surely the fewer instruments he engages. That, at least, seemed the conclusion to draw from the latest of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's perilous but admirable "Total Immersion" days exposing a curious audience to the style of one composer, and here giving us the chance to compare the grandiose and the intimate. If the intimate won hands down, that's no reason to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical music to a general audience today - he calls the status quo into question, and he may be right. So he turned a concert programme into a video show, focusing on Musorgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Schumann’s Kinderszenen, to which would be set a visual installation around him and his piano.There is already a CD and DVD set out of this, which I Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The charismatic St Petersburg-born Vasily Petrenko has really been turning things around at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra since he took over as Principal Conductor in 2005. With both standards and audiences on the up he has embarked upon his first major recording project – to record all 15 Shostakovich Symphonies for the Naxos label.Two releases are now available and in this exclusive podcast he talks to Edward Seckerson about the project in general and the symphonies in particular. The 11th “The Year 1905” makes extensive use of revolutionary songs and graphically portrays the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Nesting gay men and posh female totty by the bucketload in the audience last night. Fill any programme with Baroque opera and that’s what you get. Why? Because the Baroque is aspirational pop. It's grounded in the same musical tricks that drive on the chart-topping hits of Kylie or Madonna: pumping ostinati, unshake-offable tunes and harmonic Häagen-Dazs - obvious harmonic loops that you can't get enough of. Though last night the hook was even simpler: a beddable boy.Looks weren’t the only or principal draw. French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky is joli-laid: lanky, boyish and chinny. But Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There’s something beyond detailed and attentive musicianship that’s needed in Schubert’s last, most desolate song-cycle, Winterreise (“Winter’s journey”). It’s a dramatic arc that unites these 24 songs into a journey, the number of breaths in time and miles in distance that elapse from the first poem to the 24th, and bring you a sense of contact with the person undergoing this terrible suffering. Someone who is not Schubert, the composer, or Müller, the poet, but a third person.How much biography should we read into it? Schubert was dying slowly from years of syphilis, at the ridiculously Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
George Crumb (b.1929) is one of the great American experimental composers of the 20th century. His delicate scores are characterised by a child-like sense of wonder and an array of instrumentation that appears to have hitched a ride from outer space. Crumb first came to the fore in the 1960s with Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1968), Night of the Four Moons (1969), inspired by and composed during the Apollo 11 space flight, the savage string quartet Black Angels (1970) and Ancient Voices of Children (1970). In 1968 he won a Pulitzer for Echoes of Time and the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are many ways of being orchestral. About as many ways, in fact, as there are of organising the body politic. At one extreme there are the fascist orchestral states with their Kim Il-sung-emulating conductor-tyrants (Fritz Reiner's Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for example). At the other you have the right-on, conductorless cooperatives of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The Camerata Salzburg takes up an Enlightenment middle way, fostering gentlemanly camaraderie and a rotating leadership of the wise. Last night, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, it was the turn of the Greek violinist-cum- Read more ...
David Nice
Eliot's "time future contained in time past" has been conductor Vladimir Jurowski's unofficial motto throughout a festival which has had to take itself very seriously, and managed miraculously to carry a surprisingly large, loyal audience of all ages and persuasions along with it. Such stringent conditions could hardly be otherwise given the focal point of an uncompromising genius.Alfred Schnittke started out by making the whole of musical history his own frenetic stamping ground, earnest in jest and deadly serious even at his most sarcastic. He was no different Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
An ongoing series celebrating musicians' birthdays.
2 December 1982: Britney Spears is 27. There is some resistance to Britney hereabouts, so I thought I'd post a version of "Toxic" sung acoustically by Galia Arad to demonstrate that she does have some terrific songs. If Galia - who with her cousin Lail, should become much better known in 2010 - loves Britney, who are we less cool mortals to resist her?
{youtube width="400" height="300"}9HVJTPtZkWk{/youtube}Of course Britney's production is also first-rate - those Egyptian film strings are awesome, no?
{youtube width="400" height="300"} Read more ...