Bernstein
Robert Beale
The Buxton International Festival this year was lavish in its smaller-scale productions in addition to Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, the heavyweight offer of the opera programme. And outstanding among them was the combination of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine: seen by director Daisy Evans not just as a double bill with an overlapping need for telephones on set, but as two sides of the same story.She took Bernstein’s picture of an American middle-aged couple whose marriage is on the rocks, and Poulenc’s of a woman on the verge of committing suicide after her lover Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
George Gershwin called one of his early classic songs, first created by Fred and Adele Astaire, “Fascinating Rhythm”. It was that mesmeric pull that propelled last night’s Royal Festival Hall Concert from the Philharmonia and its principal guest conductor, Marin Alsop.Every item might fit under the rubric of “dance-derived music of the Americas”, but beneath that broad-brimmed hat multiple genres leapt, strutted and twirled. As a special Valentine’s Day treat, we even enjoyed some onstage moves when tango champions Adrien Bariki-Alaoui and Iro Davlanti-Lo rounded off the evening with two, Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps all great music counterpoints and comments on the times, but Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra have been searingly congruent. Before he took up his post as Chief Conductor, there were the extinction whispers of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony the night before lockdown and the fury of VW’s Fourth on the eve of Boris Johnson’s election. Now the aggressive dynamism of Walton’s First raised us out of that sinking feeling as the USA worsens by the day.George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5. “Visions” (the composer pictured below by Frank Schramm), could have been charged, too, Read more ...
David Nice
Most of us have been there: an impasse in a marriage, a bereavement in a dysfunctional family. Leonard Bernstein certainly had when he composed Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, basing the unhappy couple on his own parents and even the incipient problems in his own relationship with Felicia Montealegre (see the superb film Maestro), and 30 years later the sequel, A Quiet Place, when Felicia’s early death from cancer had left him unhappy and guilty.Odd, then, that both works keep us emotionally at arm's length, either by stylisation (the one-acter, with the libretto by Bernstein in verse) or by going Read more ...
David Nice
The only seriously false note about Maestro is its title. Yes, Bernstein was masterly as a conductor, and Bradley Cooper gives it his best shot. But he was no master of his life as a whole. Maybe the title should have been something like Lenny and Felicia (you think of something better).Broadway actor Felicia Montealegre, the woman he married after an on-off four-year relationship, is depicted as the shrewdest, harshest critic of the man rather than the artist, and though the music is brilliantly handled, Carey Mulligan is the real heart and soul of what Cooper as director and co-writer (with Read more ...
David Nice
Promising on paper, dazzling in practice: with a superlative soloist and conductor, this programme just soared on wings of philosophy-into-music. The spotlighting of NSO co-leader Elaine Clark provided another thread, from the opening chant of Linda Buckley‘s Fall Approaches through the keen dialogues with collegial Baiba Skride in Bernstein’s dazzling Serenade to the Viennese-waltz Dance Song of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra.Clark's fellow strings joined her – the violinist pictured below – in a flight brilliantly marshalled and focused by Diego Matheuz, due to conduct next Friday's Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If you read the synopsis of Candide - which I strongly advise if you plan a visit to this new WNO production - you may well wonder how it will be possible to get through so much in so short a time. Voltaire’s novella is itself fairly short, but opera takes more time and songs are songs, not action.It can’t be said that everything in James Bonas’s staging of Leonard Bernstein’s operetta is ideally clear; but somehow it manages to chart the eponymous hero’s progress from his Westphalian birthplace, via Lisbon at the time of the 1755 earthquake, Spain of the Inquisition, Montevideo, Eldorado, Read more ...
David Nice
Anna Clyne’s engaging First Person here led me to two of her works in a Philharmonia rainbow. She curated a woodwind-based gem of a 6pm programme of works by four women composers, herself included, and her Clarinet Concerto could only gain from two other live wires, soloist Martin Fröst and conductor Pekka Kuusisto, the first time I've encountered the violinist in that role. Ultimately it was his way with two masterpieces by Tchaikovsky and Bernstein that stole the show.The main Philharmonia programme looked odd in prospect. There was no connection at all between the concerto, Weathered, and Read more ...
Robert Beale
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass has something of the nature of what might have been called a “happening” at the time he wrote it. It was 1971, and it was created for and premiered at the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington.It’s set for very large forces: three choruses, two orchestras including a rock band and a blues band, a virtuosic baritone soloist (the “Celebrant”) around whom the whole drama of the piece is built, and at least 20 other soloists from a group designated “Street Musicians”.So it’s a happening that doesn’t happen very often – at least so far as 100 per cent professional Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jacqueline du Pré: The Complete Warner Recordings (Warner Classics)There’s something both humbling and miraculous that a great musician’s recorded output can be squeezed into a neat box. Most of the material in Warner Classics’ latest Jacqueline du Pré collection has been reissued before, but one suspects that this will be its final appearance in CD format. Multiple sclerosis ended du Pré's playing career in 1973; 50 years on, one wonders whether her stellar reputation was justified, and whether these recordings stand up. Asking a couple of string playing contacts and trawling Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection (Warner Classics)The words of dedication in Gidon Kremer’s autobiography, Between Worlds (2003) are chosen with care. The book is, he wrote, for “all those who are seeking their way”. The Latvian-born violinist’s own path through music has been as wide-ranging as it has been radical. With his 75th birthday (27 February) imminent, this new 21-CD box from Warner shows his presence and influence through the scope and the breadth of an extensive anthology of recordings for three labels, EMI, Erato and Teldec.Kremer has never limited himself to standard Read more ...
graham.rickson
Leonard Bernstein’s one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti enjoyed a relatively trouble-free gestation, at least compared to his other stage works. Its seven short scenes last around 50 minutes, Bernstein providing his own libretto and completing much of this acerbic, occasionally bitter study of a marriage in crisis whilst on his own honeymoon in 1951.The edginess is reflected in the music, Bernstein perpetually on the cusp of giving us a jazzy showstopper, only to pull back at the last minute. The big numbers, when they come, are as affecting as anything Bernstein ever wrote – especially a Satie- Read more ...