LPO
geoff brown
Barbara Hannigan, we all know, is game for anything. This Canadian soprano with the pearliest tones and the dramatic instincts of a Sarah Bernhardt can find beauty and meaning in almost every contemporary composer’s barbed wire. Recently she’s been cavorting on stage as Alban Berg’s Lulu; earlier this month, for a sliver of Ligeti, she paraded herself on the Barbican platform as a gum-chewing schoolgirl in a naughty micro-skirt.There was nothing like that at Vladimir Jurowski’s London Philharmonic concert at the Festival Hall. Her dress code was conventional: a stylish but demure white dress Read more ...
Matthew Wright
To pair Rachmaninov’s brooding and little-performed The Miserly Knight with Wagner's brooding but much-performed Das Rheingold is an audacious piece of programming. The operas share an interest in the mortal power of money, and Rachmaninov’s score has a more distinctly Wagnerian colour than much of his later work. To do so in a single evening, requiring substantial cuts to the score of Rheingold, and to stage them in the Royal Festival Hall, shows boldness verging on the reckless.Both the programme, and the editing of Das Rheingold, were the work of Vladimir Jurowski: the first, a brilliant Read more ...
David Nice
Offshoots of the Venezuelan El Sistema’s worldwide dissemination as well as other youth and music projects continued to bloom and grow in 2014. The morning after what was the orchestral concert of the year for many who caught it, Alexandra Coghlan (see below) and myself included, players of the European Union Youth Orchestra reconvened in the Albert Hall to workshop three classics with musicians from nine British youth orchestras and London schools.How proud the EUYO's founding music director Claudio Abbado would have been of this ongoing good work (he died, as if we could forget, this year Read more ...
geoff brown
In words and music Harrison Birtwistle isn’t always as gruff as he’s been painted. Interviewed over the summer during one of his 80th birthday Prom concerts, the composer tossed off enough humorous remarks to suggest that a new career could almost beckon as a stand-up comedian touring the northern clubs. A lightness of touch, even bonhomie, was also apparent in the UK premiere of his wondrous Piano Concerto, unveiled last night in the course of the kind of head-expanding concert that regularly puts Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra ahead of its local competition. Read more ...
David Nice
If Brahms’s First Symphony has long been dubbed “Beethoven’s Tenth”, then the 23-year-old Rachmaninov’s First merits the label of “Tchaikovsky’s Seventh” (a genuine candidate for that title, incidentally, turns out to be a poor reconstruction from Tchaikovsky’s sketches by one Bogatryryev). Yet unlike the other near-contemporary works in last night’s programme, Szymanowski’s Concert Overture and Scriabin’s Piano Concerto, it has a disturbing individuality, a heavy heart that is truly worn “inside out”, as Vladimir Jurowski’s season-long Rachmaninov festival with his London Philharmonic Read more ...
graham.rickson
Malcolm Arnold: Four Scottish Dances, Symphony no 3 London Philharmonic Orchestra/Malcolm Arnold (Everest)“Carefully wipe surface with soft damp cloth. Return to wrapper after each play.” So reads this disc's booklet. Everest Records was one of several companies in the late 1950s specialising in audiophile sound, recording the majority of their sessions straight onto magnetic film. The label didn't last long, and their LPs have since been reissued sporadically by various CD labels, most recently remastered by Hamburg's Countdown Media. They're available as high quality downloads, but Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Music lovers invariably divide into two factions over the Brahms piano concertos: those who thrill to the elemental D minor and those who prefer to bask in the more reflective charms of the sumptuous B flat Second Concerto. I’m a D minor man myself, secretly convinced that the four-movement Second would prove a far more startling piece if it began with the second movement. But then again it depends who plays it and Lars Vogt with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the London Philharmonic Orchestra seemed to find new dimensions in its extravagant elaborations. It had to do with variety and atmosphere Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Even the cold breeze along the Thames played its part in conjuring the chilly, epic Finnish landscapes of Jean Sibelius last night, though Finnish maestro Osmo Vänskä and the perfectly weighted phrasing of the London Philharmonic Orchestra can take primary credit. It’s unusual to have a single-composer programme these days, but Vänskä justified his repertoire with a performance of taut, lyrical and evocative power, which connected and illuminated different areas, historical and generic, of Sibelius’ career.From Smetana to Shostakovich, a school of broadly Romantic composers created musical Read more ...
David Nice
Comparisons, even on paper, between two season openers from London orchestras could hardly have been more instructive. I didn’t attend Valery Gergiev’s London Symphony Orchestra concert last week, for reasons several times outlined on theartsdesk. But quite apart from the fact that Gergiev and his court pianist Denis Matsuev are active supporters of Putin's “Might is Right” campaign in the Ukraine – a situation which tens of thousands of Muscovites are beginning to challenge – Matsuev is also the worst of barnstormers. Last night, on the other hand, we had mercurial pianist Jean-Efflam Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, chief conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, heads its major new series devoted to the music of Sergei Rachmaninov, in context with his forerunners and successors. This is to be the largest celebration of Rachmaninov ever undertaken in a single season, with 11 concerts to include all the composer’s key works for orchestra, including some in rarely heard early versions, placed in context with music by his inspirations, contemporaries and successors including Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Szymanowski, Scriabin and Vaughan Williams.Here Jurowski tells Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
If last year’s Ring cycle triumphantly proved that world-class opera can be done at the Albert Hall, this Rosenkavalier suggests that the less epic end of the repertoire isn’t such a sure thing. That is not to say that this performance was dud, far from it; rather that its few problems were venue related. Balance was the main issue, though Robin Ticciati did a great job of whipping the London Philharmonic Orchestra into a passionate frenzy in the Prelude and then taking things down a notch and keeping them there to avoid engulfing the voices. The audience will have had a different experience Read more ...
David Nice
Vladimir Jurowski is a master of the through-composed programme. Yet at first this looked like a more standard format: explosive contemporary work (if 1966 can still be called “contemporary”) followed by popular concerto and symphony. On reflection, though - and there was space enough for that - it turned out to be a back-to-front journey through German musical history, from Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s atom bomb of light to classical-romantic Beethoven and late-romantic Brahms ending in a homage to Bach The sequence of works was executed with the sometimes blinding clarity we’ve come to expect Read more ...