Mozart
Boyd Tonkin
Great conductors, like efficient auto engines, apply a lot of torque – they can use a little energy to achieve great surges of movement. Now aged 91, the American-born Swedish maestro Herbert Blomstedt sometimes hardly seems to raise his baton-free hands. His feet, meanwhile, remain more or less immobile. Yet, like some highly-geared sports car, last night the Philharmonia zoomed, boomed or swerved at the merest distant kiss of his fingertips.Quietly but completely in command for the second of his Royal Festival Hall Concerts with the orchestra, Blomstedt shares with his fellow- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mozart: The String Quintets Klenke Quartet (with Harald Schoneweg, viola) (Accentus Music)The viola was Mozart's instrument of choice when playing chamber music, his fondness for the instrument's warm timbre prompting him to add a second viola to the quartet line-up when composing his six string quintets. Listen to this set through good headphones and it's as if you’ve turned up the bass a notch or two. The augmented Klenke Quartet make a superbly sonorous, rich sound, one so fulsome that you could mistake their sound in the denser passages for that of a small chamber orchestra. They Read more ...
David Nice
So this is how Bruckner's Fourth Symphony should go. It's taken a master conductor just past his 90th birthday and an orchestra on top form to teach me. No doubt Claudio Abbado and Brucknermeister Gunter Wand could have done so, too, but I never heard them live in this, the "Romantic", and they are no longer with us. Bernard Haitink - he eschews the "Sir" with a typically self-deprecating shrug - evinced a tearful semi-secret rapture in performances of Schumann's Second and Beethoven's "Pastoral" with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe; that he should do it in three-quarters of this Bruckner Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Selfish, cunning, cynical, the older generation has screwed up the world with aggression abroad and dishonesty at home. Can their children make it good again? This family drama of transgression and reparation threads through Idomeneo, the opera that Mozart – who had his own troublesome issues with both biological fathers and father-figure patrons – premiered in Munich in 1781. As it lifts the (by then) somewhat musty conventions of opera seria to formerly unimagined heights in a plot about returnees from the Trojan War and the cost their offspring pay for the elders’ bloodstained vanity, Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
There are those who say, somewhat cynically, that a way for new music to get an audience is to present it carefully packaged up with standard repertoire that will draw a larger crowd. How true that may be is open to debate, but composer Stephen Johnson did introduce his new piece – which was sandwiched between Brahms’s and Mozart’s clarinet quintets, as "the moment you’ve all been dreading".The work – Angel’s Arc – is a beautiful, contemplative piece of music that explores sorrow, loss and gratitude from memories of Johnson’s own life. It is named after an area of the West Pennine Moors Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Give hope to all, says Despina: play-act. Così fan tutte has always been a piece about four young and silly people being appalling to one another without much need for encouragement from a cynical old manipulator and a confused maid who, in the main, is the one character capable of arousing real sympathy. The big reveal in Jan Philipp Gloger’s production for the Royal Opera is that there is no big reveal. We’re all in on the act, and we’re all as bad as each other.It’s a point made literally in lights towards the close with the kind of sledgehammer obviousness that seems to have made for a Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Time was when the BBC Symphony Orchestra played austerely wholesome programmes of modern and romantic classics to third-full houses. Now on a more varied diet – such as the collaboration with Neil Gaiman and Alwyn's Miss Julie in concert announced this week for their forthcoming season – they pull in respectable audiences, though last night’s concert of classical, romantic and contemporary Austrians had a reassuringly old-fashioned feel about it.The orchestra itself has also been transformed under Sakari Oramo’s leadership, into one of the most flexible, up-for-anything large ensembles in the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Vyacheslav Artyomov: In Memoriam, Lamentations, Pietà, Tristia I (Divine Art)Born in 1940, Vyacheslav Artyomov trained as a physicist before switching to music. He joined forces with fellow composers Sofia Gubaidlina and Viktor Suslin in the mid-1970s to form a group specialising in improvisation with unconventional instruments. Like Shostakovich and Prokofiev before him, Artyomov fell foul of the Soviet authorities, his music effectively banned for several years. Though Tikhon Khrennikov, the famously cantankerous chief of the Composers’ Union, performed a volte-face a decade later and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
I last saw this Magic Flute, directed by Dominic Cooke, when it was new, some 14 years ago, and I remember it mainly, I’m afraid, for its lack of visual charm. Nothing much has changed: the relentless box sets (designer Julian Crouch), not a leaf or a blade of grass to be seen; the ridiculous, glaring orange suitings, bowler hats and umbrellas for Sarastro’s men (Orangemen, naturally); the dullness alleviated only by some witty animal costumes (Kevin Pollard), and the three charming boys – one of them actually a girl – in sailor suits, riding an aerial bike made out of a fish.Of course, the Read more ...
Robert Howarth
I’m here in Leeds at the end of five weeks of quite intense rehearsals for Opera North's new production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. Our director James Brining and his amazing team (including assistant director Deborah Cohen, set and costume designer Colin Richmond, and choreographer Tim Claydon) are putting it on the stage, and I’m ably assisted by George Jackson and Philip Voldman. Together we’re all unpicking and stitching the piece back together.What’s fascinating to me is that James and I are coming at this piece from quite different perspectives. He has worked with Opera North Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Most classical concert reviews focus on prominent orchestras and opera companies at major venues. But beyond the likes of the Barbican and the Royal Opera House, there are whole strata of musical life where smaller scale ensembles and amateur choirs provide a vital live music experience in less exalted venues.The Conway Hall in London is one such venue, whose offering goes beyond music – it embraces art, lectures, community events and even monthly atheist "services" – but whose main hall has a pleasant acoustic for its regular Sunday concerts.Last Sunday’s was given by the Fibonacci Sequence Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Think Glastonbury, not Salzburg. It struck me at Milton Court last night that the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s ebullient, rock’n’roll Mozart would go down a storm at the sort of music festival renowned for canvas more than canapes. As listeners now expect from the ensemble that director-leader Richard Tognetti has steered since 1990, the ACO shook the Barbican’s junior venue with an electrifying account of the three great symphonies – numbers 39, 40 and 41 – with which Mozart said his revolutionary farewell to the form in 1788. But if the ACO – all of them (sparing cellos) on their Read more ...