Southbank Centre
David Nice
An entire evening of Schumann for two would usually cue singer and piano. Not that the majority of Lieder specialists, blessed as naughty Anna Russell once saw it "with tremendous artistry but no voice", could hold the spell for that long. Julia Fischer is one of the half-dozen violinists in the world with the greatest artistry, a golden "voice" and a habit of choosing partners like Martin Helmchen, very much on her level. The only trouble is that Schumann songs can capture a world in 90 minutes, while the three lateish sonatas run a more limited if quirky gamut.
Poor Schumann was already in Read more ...
David Nice
That in itself was enough to tell us that Petrenko isn’t just a supremely elegant conductor, an easy stylist able to make Stravinsky’s fiddly early Scherzo fantastique sound natural and to paper over the cracks of a tottering soloist, Oleg Marshev, in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, but already one with the wow factor, the ability to go beyond merely brilliant music-making to something altogether deeper and more unexpected.For the first three movements of Shostakovich’s hour-long narrative, I went along with all the sonic marvels but I can’t say I felt it in every bone of my body. This is Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A problem child in any number of ways, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail doesn’t always get the professional attention it deserves, certainly not from London companies. The opera’s last outing at the Royal Opera House dates back almost a decade, and you’d have to look even further back to find it in English National Opera’s performing catalogue. If a director manages to get past the knotty Orientalist issues of staging then there are those of the dialogue, not to mention two of Mozart’s most taxing vocal roles in Belmonte and Konstanze. All of which places the focus firmly onto semi- Read more ...
james.woodall
The sense of occasion around flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía’s return to London was palpable. The Royal Festival Hall was heaving. Queues at the bars before the show and during the interval were three or four deep. Spanish was everywhere. And that was good to hear. Paco de Lucía is a hero in his country as much for interesting political reasons as he is for purely musical ones. London-based compatriot fans were not going to miss this.De Lucía emerged as a golden solo talent at the end of the 1960s from the many flamenco competitions that kept the art alive when the garbage put on for Read more ...
David Nice
In the last year of his life he was, as a colleague noted when we learned of Charles Mackerras’s death, the wise old gamekeeper in the spring forest of Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen. No wonder Mackerras, we were told last night by his conductor nephew Alexander Briger, wanted that most ecstatic celebration of the natural order for his memorial, just as Janáček had had it played at his funeral. Was it trivialised by an encore number from Mackerras’s deliciously arranged Sullivan potpourri-ballet, Pineapple Poll? Not a jot, mate.He gave his final unforgettable concerts with the Read more ...
theartsdesk
As arts cuts announced today start to bite, few people are aware that the Royal Opera House pays its two top people more than £630,000 and nearly £400,000 each. Although Covent Garden is refusing to identify them, it is likely that they are chief executive Lord Hall and music director Antonio Pappano. But they are not likely to have to sacrifice their earnings even while smaller arts organisations fold.The salaries are revealed in Covent Garden’s most recent financial report for 2009. Recently in the news for its attempts to wrest lifetime copyright from creative artists whom it commissions, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Helmut Lachenmann is to instrumental technique what The Joy of Sex was to suburban nookie. A conduit to a whole new carnal world. Even those of us supposedly well versed in what a stringed instrument can do watched the Arditti Quartet perform the Lachenmann string quartets at the Queen Elizabeth Hall mouths agape. You can do that? With that! And you're going to stick that where?! We were an audience of gawpers and grimacers, smilers and starers. Who knew that so much could be done with the back of a violin? Or that the metallic screw at the heel of the bow could play little melodies Read more ...
David Nice
Their oaky, cultured and selectively scary-wild playing seemed to cast long autumn shadows over a sparse but intent audience. This is the kind of rare programme top violinist Christian Tetzlaff, his cellist sister Tanja and friends like to work on when they get time to play together. There was Haydn for starters, but not the kind of jolly curtainraiser we're usually given; Dvořák, but not the blithe American; and Sibelius's Voces Intimae, the only great quartet of the 20th century yet to be widely acclaimed as such, with strange, authentic ideas in every bar and a slow movement to match any Read more ...
David Nice
It's now 21 years since I first heard the then-untrumpeted protégés of El Sistema, the Venezuelan phenomenon which has launched a thousand youth-and-music projects worldwide. On that occasion the Royal Festival Hall was less than a quarter full, but we happy few all stood instantaneously for a work I'd never heard before (Estévez's Cantata Criolla, due for a comeback now). Last night it was a packed auditorium of all ages and sizes which gave a standing ovation to a symphony by Chávez - and that was just the end of the first half.It's now 21 years since I first heard the then-untrumpeted Read more ...
kate.connolly
Just seconds into a performance by the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil Teresa Carreño it is immediately clear what Sir Simon Rattle meant when he said, “I have seen the future of music.” The passion and physical and mental energy with which they play, along with the sheer joy they seem to glean from it, is enough to instill hope in even the staunchest cultural pessimist. At the Berliner Philharmonie last week, the orchestra - an even more youthful offshoot, or second generation, of the now world-famous Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra - took the city by storm with their vibrant execution of Beethoven Read more ...
David Nice
"Well, Kissin's the star of the show," opined the fatuous gentleman who rolled in late to my row after the first piece on the programme. Possibly not, I wanted to snap back, in the light of that very fine pianist's current erratic form. But in any case this celebrity-hunter had just missed one of the great conductors working effortless miracles of charm on Josef Suk's Scherzo fantastique, the extended lollipop lilt of which could quickly pall in lesser hands.
In any case, effortlessness and charm are hardly Yevgeny Kissin's strong suits, and both are needed if Chopin's early Second Read more ...
David Nice
Esa-Pekka Salonen and his dauntless band of Philharmonia players have been wrestling with heroes. After a celebration of Wagner's Tristan, the legend-making shifted further north last night. Here was Sibelius first as the plain-singing, well-loved bard of Finnish endurance and then as the startlingly original creator of a musical alter ego in the shape of mythical adventurer Lemminkäinen. Salonen's edge-of-seat interpretation made two things startlingly clear: that the four movements of the misnamed Lemminkäinen Suite can constitute as radical a symphony as any of Sibelius's numbered seven, Read more ...