Classical music
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas 8, 21 and 32 Boris Giltburg (Naxos)These three piano sonatas neatly sum up Beethoven’s early, middle and late style. Each one is in the key of C, and they’re dispatched with some intelligence by the young Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg. Beethoven in growly mood can all too easily sound muddy and inarticulate. Giltburg has the necessary weight, but the faster passages have a dazzling clarity. There are superb things in the first movement of his Pathétique – every chromatic run is immaculate, and the very vocal banter between left and right hands a few minutes in is as Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
Four years ago, Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic embarked on a two-year project to play all the Mahler symphonic works over a couple of seasons. It was an ambitious project but it was one which, then, had hall staff dusting down the House Full signs and the queues for returns forming well before the first note was due to played.There was an air of that at the most recent performance – a shattering interpretation of the Sixth Symphony – where a full house was clearly moved: the long silence at the pitiful ending after so much chaotic emotional wrangling said it all. The Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Christian Gerhaher is a classy recitalist. His stage manner is debonair, his tailoring immaculate (although his hair can be unruly). His artistry focuses on key vocal virtues: directness of expression and beauty of tone. In this evening’s recital, an adventurous programme that switched between the Classical era and the Modern, that proved as valuable a combination in Schoenberg as it did in Beethoven.There is a husky quality to Gerhaher’s voice, an attractive burr that appears around mezzo-forte and defines all of the louder music that he sings. It is less apparent in quiet music, but even Read more ...
David Nice
Not many people write conspicuously brilliant tweets, but Elizabeth Watts is someone who does. Working on the most demanding aria on her stunning new CD of operatic numbers and cantatas by the lesser-known of the two Scarlattis, father Alessandro rather than son Domenico, she tweeted: “Good news – I can sing 88 notes without a breath. Bad news – Scarlatti wrote 89.”The sheer hard work behind that achievement, which Watts discusses below, reminds one that the best singing isn’t something that’s just a gift. And when she went to the Royal College of Music as a postgrad student at the age Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
It was rather like a trip home to see long-lost relatives. Ton Koopman took to the stage at the Liverpool Philharmonic with a broad smile. That smile both greeted the audience and, from what the audience could see, told the orchestra that they were on form. Or, on the other hand, it might have been encouraging them to try harder.The latter was hardly necessary. There have been times when the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra reduced its ranks to become a Baroque ensemble and, in so doing, failed to realise that it needed to leave behind the 19th century bluster and become that bit more Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A full house for a premiere performance: Wynton Marsalis bucks the trend in contemporary music. He’s an established name, more for his jazz than his classical work. But in recent years he has produced a substantial body of orchestral music, so the flocking crowds know what to expect. His new Violin Concerto continues the trend. Popular American idioms – mainly jazz and blues – are integrated into a classically oriented orchestral style with an impressive craftsmanship that hides all the joins. Despite the generally conservative style, it is an ambitious work, its sheer length tending towards Read more ...
graham.rickson
Alessandro Scarlatti: Con eco d'amore – Arias from operas and cantatas Elizabeth Watts (soprano), The English Concert/Laurence Cummings (director and continuo) (Harmonia Mundi)Scarlatti? He of keyboard sonata fame? That's actually Domenico; this recital disc collects soprano arias by his father Alessandro (1660-1725), whose star has been eclipsed by his son. Scarlatti senior didn't write much instrumental music, but was amazingly prolific in other areas. He composed 600 cantatas, 30 oratorios, and claimed to have written over 100 operas during a 40-year career. So you worry that his music Read more ...
Richard Bratby
If Omer Meir Wellber is making a bid for Andris Nelsons’s old music directorship in Birmingham, he could hardly have signalled his intentions more audaciously. This concert began with Wagner’s Lohengrin Prelude and ended with Brahms’s First Symphony – basically a surgical strike into the heartlands of Nelsons’s repertoire. And as soloist, he had the Latvian violinist Baiba Skride – an artist who was introduced to Birmingham by Nelsons and who appeared with the CBSO on disc and in concert throughout Nelsons’s tenure.Skride was there to play Schumann’s late Violin Concerto, and she found an Read more ...
David Nice
London foists hard choices on concertgoers. Over at St John's Smith Square last night Nikolai Demidenko was giving a high-profile recital of Brahms and Prokofiev. But since the Prokofiev CD which has had the most impact in recent years has been Freddy Kempf’s, of the Second and Third Piano Concertos with the Bergen Philharmonic and Andrew Litton, a half-full Cadogan Hall seemed like the right place to be, even without Prokofiev on the programme.Kempf, the British-born boy wonder of the 1990s, has been slightly overshadowed lately by the next sensation, Benjamin Grosvenor, but he’s a different Read more ...
David Nice
“People think when a person becomes old, he has to become serene,” declared that great pianist Claudio Arrau in his mid-seventies. “That’s absurd. The expressive intensity is, I feel, much stronger, much more concentrated in my playing than years ago.” You could argue the same for Stephen Kovacevich at his 75th birthday concert, though in the case of Schubert’s final, B flat Piano Sonata, was it entirely intensity that had him racing through a work that, back in 1982, he took about 10 minutes longer over, albeit with repeats?Without the promised BBC Radio 3 broadcast, pulled on Sunday, giving Read more ...
Jasper Rees
He’s an American jazz giant; she’s a Scottish doyenne of the classical violin. Anyone familiar with one more than the other – and that’s more or less everyone – would do a double take to see their names on the same bill. But this week at Barbican Hall, a new concerto by Wynton Marsalis will be premiered by Nicola Benedetti and the London Symphony Orchestra.What they have in common is a tireless commitment to promoting music education. Jazz at Lincoln Center of which Marsalis is both founder and artistic director has an educational programme, and he is also director of the Juilliard’s jazz Read more ...
Mark Bowden
"Helo, ti yw Mark?" A friendly-looking woman on the tiny plane asks me my name. She is a teacher from a Welsh-speaking school in Patagonia, Ysgol yr Hendre, escorting her pupils home from a trip to Cardiff. "I was told to look out for you on the plane. Come and sit with us!" she continues. I am heading to Trelew in the Chubut Province of Argentina to research ideas and gather texts for my BBC National Chorus of Wales commission, part of the 150th anniversary events marking Y Wladfa, the Welsh settlement in Patagonia.I spend the rest the journey chatting to the teachers and schoolchildren Read more ...