Bartók
David Nice
Big orchestras to serve the late romantic masterpieces and contemporary blockbusters still aren’t the order of the Covid-era day, even in streamed events, at least not in the UK. The London Symphony Orchestra is so far unique in bigging up the strings as well as bringing on the full brass and percussion thanks to the unique nature of what was previously its rehearsal space and venue for chamber concerts, LSO St Luke’s.Both for Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle the other month under chief conductor Rattle – due to be streamed, but not for free – and for his Dance Suite alongside Hannah Kendall’s The Read more ...
David Nice
One source of advance information told us to expect a reduced version of Bartók’s one-act Bluebeard’s Castle, among the 20th century’s most original and profound operatic masterpieces. Joining 19 other lucky invitees and some of the LSO brass upstairs at St Luke’s, I realized immediately that the sea of comfortably distanced musicians covering the entire floor space, from violins at the east end in front of a conferring Simon Rattle, Karen Cargill and Gerald Finley, to percussion below us at the west, could only mean the real, full thing: the largest gathering of players I’d seen in London Read more ...
David Nice
He may no longer be the Berlin Philharmoniker's Chief Conductor, but by a combination of serendipity and foresight on the orchestra's part, Simon Rattle's last concert in Berlin for the foreseeable future was filmed without an audience and led the way for other, smaller-scale ventures before gatherings of any sort beyond chamber music with players at a distance became an impossibility. The current stopgap is the kind "his" orchestra now, the London Symphony Orchestra, is offering: past films on the nights when a concert would have taken place.The latest, in place of what we would have Read more ...
Richard Bratby
No orchestra wants its conductor to cancel in the week of a concert. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s illness was announced only on Monday, but even in ideal conditions, if you needed to find a last minute replacement maestro for a programme of Bartók and Bruckner, you could hardly do better than Omer Meir Wellber: a conductor with whom the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has built a relationship that predates his recent appointment to the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester. And while it was unquestionably disappointing to be deprived of Gražinytė-Tyla’s first adventure into Bruckner (on these Read more ...
David Nice
Fine-tuning piano sound to Wigmore acoustics can elude even the greatest. Add a second Steinway and a wide range of percussion instruments, and the risks would seem to be hugely increased. So it was amazing to witness what seemed like sonic perfection throughout yesterday's Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert from the back of the hall. Not only that, but a refined imagination from all four players that came as close to perfection as you could ask for. Pavel Kolesnikov, who so often seems to be associated with London’s most original concert programmes, joined up again with partner Samson Tsoy, a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Mozart’s piano concertos often overflow with good humour, but you seldom expect to hear a hearty chuckle from the audience in the middle of a performance of one. Yet something close to a guffaw burst out around King’s Place when soloist Tom Poster, deep into the last-movement cadenza of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, suddenly quoted Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Poster had played the Gershwin before the interval of this typically smart, eclectic and thought-provoking programme from the Aurora Orchestra under Nicholas Collon.Its cheeky echo in the midst of Mozart’s drolly ingenious Read more ...
graham.rickson
Saint-Saëns: Piano Concertos 3, 4 & 5 Alexandre Kantorow (piano), Tapiola Sinfonietta/Jean-Jacques Kantorow (BIS)Saint-Saëns’ five piano concertos are a pleasure no one need feel guilty about indulging in. My current go-to cycle is a scratchy 1950s French set from Jean-Marie Darre, full of fizz and colour. Does Alexandre Kantorow measure up? Definitely: this generously filled CD is electrifying. Why not begin with Concerto No 5, a late work written when the composer's star was in the descendant, upstarts like Debussy and Ravel about to steal Saint-Saëns’ thunder. Subtitled “L’ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Joanna Hogg’s melancholy autobiographical drama The Souvenir cuts too close to the bone. That’s a compliment: like Sally Rooney’s equally unsettling first novel Conversations With Friends, Hogg’s movie almost forces the viewer to relive that shattering early romance, founded on collusion and self-delusion, that reordered her or his universe for all time.Like Conversations With Friends, too, The Souvenir, set in the first half of the 1980s, depicts a young woman’s affair with a withholding older man. Whereas Rooney’s protagonist Frances is a poor Dublin undergraduate enmeshed with a married Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bartók: The Wooden Prince, Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Susanna Mälkki (BIS)Bartók's The Wooden Prince is a one-off in the composer's output, an evocative, expansive ballet score that will surprise anyone who's been intimidated by his more abrasive music. Based on a scenario devised Béla Balácz, with whom Bartók had collaborated on Bluebeard’s Castle, The Wooden Prince is softer-edged, a verdant fairytale following a lovestruck prince’s pursuit of a princess. Frustrated at her disinterest, he creates a puppet substitute which is given life by a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bartók: Complete String Quartets Quatuor Diotima (Näive)Technical infallibility is now a non-negotiable when it comes to Bartók's six fiendishly difficult string quartets. Still, there's much more to these pieces than simply hitting the right notes and ensuring that the pizzicato thwacks ring out in all the right places. An influential early digital set by the Emersons now sounds a little brutal and mechanical in places. It’s easier to love a 1960s DG cycle from the emigré Hungarian Quartet, with hairy moments but plenty of soul. This new set on the revived Näive label comes from the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No 7 Budapest Festival Orchestra/Ivan Fischer (Channel Classics)“It is my best work and it has a cheerful character.” So said Mahler about his Symphony No 7, and on the basis of this exuberant, feisty performance, Ivan Fischer agrees with him (“…may this reading contribute to a revalidation!”). Fischer doesn't see the work as problematic, his love for the symphony expressed without a trace of indulgence. There's so much to enjoy here. The first movement's juddering opening is superbly done, the music's slow awakening rivalling the start of Mahler's 3rd. The jump cuts Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When critics praise a first-rank string quartet, convention demands they claim that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. True enough, maybe, but with the Takács Quartet, each separate element really does blaze with a soloistic, virtuosic flame. From the first bars of last night’s opener at the Wigmore Hall, as Haydn plays pass-the-parcel with an apparently straightforward tune at the start of his G major quartet Op.76 no. 1, the sheer class and distinctive voice of each instrumental contribution grabbed the ear.Remarkably, this group – first mustered in Budapest in 1975 but Read more ...