Mozart
David Nice
Rumour machines have been thrumming to the tune of “Rattle as next LSO Principal Conductor”. Sir Simon would, it’s true, be as good for generating publicity as the current incumbent, the ever more alarming Valery Gergiev. But if the orchestra wanted to do something fresh and daring, it would be better advised to take the plunge with Robin Ticciati, a disarming mix of youth - he’s still only 30 - and mastery; his romantic rubato, the freedom with the phrases, already strikes me as more convincing than Rattle’s has ever been, as last night's Dvořák testified.If that more interesting Read more ...
David Nice
Revivals, especially at Covent Garden, too often wrong-foot high expectations. This one should have shone, with two known treasures among the cast (Lucy Crowe and Luca Pisaroni), an experienced Mozart conductor in John Eliot Gardiner and a handsome-enough David McVicar production supervised by its original director (sorry, “Sir John” might slip off the tongue, "Sir David" does not; but when was the honours system ever logical?) Yet while Michael Grandage’s profoundly human Glyndebourne Figaro dazzled as well on tour as at its opening and, by all accounts, in this year’s festival, too much of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Timo Andres: Home Stretch Timo Andres (piano), Metropolis Ensemble/Andrew Cyr (Nonesuch)Begin with Timo Andres’s realisation of Mozart’s Coronation piano concerto. Mozart omitted to write down the soloist’s left hand part, so Andres provides his own. Andrew Cyr’s Metropolis Ensemble go out of their way to provide an introductory tutti of rare poise and grace. Within a few minutes of the soloist’s entry, you’ll either skip round the room in delight or storm out in disgust. This is the musical equivalent of drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. You sense that the playfulness and anarchy Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Retrieving buried rarities, many even by famous composers, is the cornerstone of the Buxton Festival, now in its 35th year. This time around, artistic director Stephen Barlow has plucked out a pair of 19th-century French comic operas by Saint-Saëns and Gounod, coupling them in a double bill to kick-start the Festival.Under Francis Matthews’s direction, aided by Lez Brotherston’s inspired design (brilliantly lit as usual by John Bishop), the two are cleverly yoked together on stage by placing them in adjacent apartments, one beneath the other, in 1890s Paris. And the stories do both concern Read more ...
David Nice
Once in a blue moon, the judges would seem to have got it wrong. I can think only of 2001, when stunning Latvian mezzo Elina Garanča failed to win the coveted goblet but has since gone on to deserved fame as one of the top half-dozen singers on the international stage today. This year, though, it was business as usual: the panel lit up by a gracious Dame Kiri, three of the singers who didn’t make it to the final,sound telly opera trouper Mary King and I all agreed that regal American with a twinkle Jamie Barton deserved the palm.How so, given that all five finalists – not to mention the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Marriage of Figaro is so much a part of Glyndebourne’s history that it’s sometimes hard to recall the details of this or that production. Michael Grandage’s current staging, though, will be easily remembered for its strong characteristics, both good and bad: for Christopher Oram’s marvellous Alhambra sets, for the brilliance and occasional vulgarity of Grandage’s direction, for its perfection of movement and timing and its almost total obliteration of the social distinctions on which the plot hinges. Saturday’s revival was a fine example of how a spectacular misconception can be validated Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
In sunshineand bright blue skies there can be few places more green and pleasant than Wormsley Park. Garsington Opera has found a happy home there, with this being its third season in its sleekly rectilinear big top at the Getty family’s Buckinghamshire estate.Daniel Slater, the director of this production of Die Entführung, has taken all sorts of witty liberties with the libretto – at least the spoken part – and brought the story right up to date. Selim is an expatriate Russian oligarch and proud owner of a football club. Osmin is his black-suited chief henchman. Pedrillo is a cockney Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Blake asked the tiger. One might have asked the same question of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, with Mozart’s G major Piano Concerto, K.453, as the lamb, in this hyper-diverse Birmingham concert. The image of divine simplicity was in the delicate hands of Mitsuko Uchida, whose Mozart resisted every striped temptation that Andris Nelsons and the CBSO threw in her path. On their own in Scriabin and, to a lesser extent, Webern’s Six Orchestral Pieces, they could emote at will, fearful symmetry and all.Often enjoyable, and with many exquisite moments, Mozart’s Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In its ebbs, flows and final grand flourishing, the career of Sir Colin Davis was reminiscent of some of the great musical masterpieces with which he became closely identified. From Mozart to Tippett, Berlioz to Beethoven and Sibelius, Davis proved himself one of the major international conductors of the post-war era. If in his earlier years he acquired a reputation for being fractious and confrontational with his musicians, the Davis of the last three decades was wise and unruffled, finding in music an almost transcendental refuge. "It amounts to an alternative reality," he told Tom Service Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony no 9 Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra/Gustavo Dudamel (DG)This new, live, Mahler 9 sounds impressive – microphones are closely placed and you really feel in the thick of things. Dudamel’s intakes of breath are clearly audible but not intrusive. His first movement is outstanding. The timings are expansive, but the pace doesn’t slacken. Each precipitous climax is paced with mature skill, the tension cannily ratcheted up. There are moments when you genuinely think that it’ll all end happily, making the third, funereal crisis a shocker, Dudamel’s raucous trombones putting Read more ...
David Nice
You’d not expect Einstein to have daubed Amadeus’s Ninth Piano Concerto with the label “Mozart’s Eroica”. The really famous one didn’t : that piece of punditry came not from Albert the Great but Alfred the (musicologist) Lesser. Embarrassingly, the OAE’s publicity didn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, by advertising this concert with Alfred’s tag at its head, the intention was surely to highlight the shock of the new in all three works played and/or conducted by András Schiff.As it happened, Schiff made it all sound unshockingly natural on one level within the charmed circle of equally Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not that Bernard Haitink’s tempos are universally slow, it’s just that they often feel that way. When it works the music can be magisterial, immense, but when it doesn’t you find yourself chafing against such unyielding allegiance to restraint. Last night we saw both sides of the veteran conductor, but a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K453 like the one he conjured with Maria João Pires and the London Symphony Orchestra can banish the memory of any orchestral strife with the merest rococo flourish of its wrist.Pires is a transformative pianist – so familiar, so innately right, yet Read more ...