Classical music
Hanna Weibye
On the back wall of Birmingham Symphony Hall’s great oval space, two musicians are poised on a glass balcony that gives the illusion of not being there at all. A small square of warm light picks them out, vivid against the hall’s darkness. So framed, Saint-Saëns’ gentle Prière for cello and organ keeps its intimacy even in that large space, the two instruments blending into one equal sound that is clear, golden, and not too sweet.The dancing promised us by the concert’s title was nowhere in evidence, but this opening nonetheless set the tone for the rest of the evening, which was Read more ...
David Nice
She is now the world’s leading interpreter of Richard Strauss’s Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, the aristocratic thirtysomething once forced into marriage with a far from ideal husband and determined not to let it happen to the sweet girl who falls for her own much younger lover on first sight. As a happily married woman, Anne Schwanewilms has no need of 17-year-old boys, and in her vocal prime she can have no regrets about ageing beautifully, but she shares both the Marschallin’s wit, with a wicked line in impersonating certain conductors, and her natural charm.Schwanewilms first beguiled Read more ...
Roger Montgomery
Horn concertos don't make frequent appearances in the standard concert repertory and when they do it will usually be a work by Mozart or Richard Strauss. It wouldn't be entirely true to say that horn players feel keenly the lack of a serious core of works such as that available to pianists, string players and singers. This is partly because of the wealth of sumptuous orchestral writing which allows the horn to shine from the back of the orchestra at key moments without requiring it to carry the entire performance, and also owing to the small number of significant solo works by some great Read more ...
graham.rickson
Miraculous Metamorphoses: Music by Hindemith, Prokofiev and Bartók Kansas City Symphony/Michael Stern (Reference Recordings)There's still some debate about the proper title for what's usually referred to as Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber. One of the piece's jokes is that music of real zest and exuberance has a dry-as-dust moniker. If you're not familiar with the piece, start here.This is an unashamedly populist work, one of the Hindemith's first commissions after arriving in the USA in 1940. He was a meticulous musician, and Michael Stern's Kansas Read more ...
David Nice
Under what circumstances can Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, the most (over)played of the 15, sound both as harrowing as it possibly can be and absolutely fresh? Well, the context helps: hearing it at the breaking heart of the fourth concert in the Jerusalem Quartet’s Shostakovich cycle gave it extra resonance with the works on either side of it. But above all this is a team that plays with a degree of nuance, weight, beauty and commitment that I’ve never heard even the composer’s preferred foursome, the Borodin Quartet, surpass either live or in their numerous recordings. Even if I Read more ...
Matthew Sharp
Shakespeare's ubiquitous “planetary influence” is well-documented. As Stephen Marche points out in How Shakespeare Changed Everything, not much from our sex lives to the assassination of Lincoln remains untouched. And, of course, there's the language. You may think that what you are reading has more rhyme than reason, be madness (though there is method in it) or amount to nothing more than a wild goose chase. It may be Greek to you, make your hair stand on end or set your teeth on edge. It goes without saying that brevity is the soul of wit and that comparisons are odious, so why does he lay Read more ...
David Nice
For those of us who’d held fast to the generalisation that Michael Tippett went awry after 1962, it seemed emblematic that pianist Steven Osborne and the Heath Quartet were never to meet in a concert of two halves. After all, didn’t Tippett’s music split and splinter into a thousand, often iridescent atoms after his second opera, King Priam? Its satellite piece, the Second Piano Sonata, seems to sit restlessly, and quite deliberately, on the fault line. Yet I take at least some of it back when confronted live, for the first time, with the drive and visions of the Third Sonata composed in the Read more ...
theartsdesk
The first bit of the annual Proms ritual is now out of the way, with the publication of the brochure. The next step is at 9am on Saturday 17 May when thousands of people prepare to do simultaneous battle with the Royal Albert Hall's online booking system. We can't help you jump the queue but we can help you make your mind up. Avoiding the events which are mainly there to grab headlines and which will sell out all too easily anyway – the War Horse Prom, announced a week after the National Theatre sacked the musicians who had been playing the theatre show, the Military Wives Choir and the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Arensky: Piano Trios Leonore Piano Trio (Hyperion)Lesser-known composers are often defined in relation to their better-known contemporaries. Anton Arensky (1861-1906) tends to be associated with his friend and mentor Tchaikovsky. Arensky became a professor at the Moscow Conservatoire at the age of 21, where his pupils included Rachmaninov and Scriabin. He died of tuberculosis in a Finnish sanatorium at the age of 46; alcohol and an addiction to gambling hastening his demise. So you'd be forgiven for expecting a disc coupling his two minor key piano trios to be a bit of a downer. But no Read more ...
David Nice
Take a cushion or two among the beautiful young people gathered around the players – no Proms Arena crowd, this - pull up a chair or find your standing place; sit bolt upright, lie back, stretch your legs, tweet during the music if you like (an invitation thankfully declined). CLoSer’s latest concert in the friendly Village Underground is a rather far cry from the 1941 premiere of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps given before 400 of his fellow prisoners and guards, outside in the rain, in Stalag VIII-A, Görlitz (now Zgorzelec in Poland). Not in one crucial respect, though. Messiaen Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Miklós Perényi makes the listener re-think how a cello should sound. Forget the huge tone of the Russians - think Rostropovich or Natalia Gutman, or the attention-grabbing of Americans or even the flamboyance of the French. No floppy hair, no vanity or mannerisms here. Perényi plays with simplicity and accuracy, but with phenomenal craft and musicality. He dosn't force the tone, yet knows exactly how to project right to the back row of the hall. Technique, which is there in abundance, always seems to serve musical ends.Perényi has been a cello teacher at the Liszt Academy in Budapest since Read more ...
David Nice
In a near-perfect, outward-looking Swiss city sharing borders with France and Germany, on a series of cloudless April days that felt more like balmy June than capricious April, anything seemed possible. The doors of perception which had slammed, I thought, irrevocably shut for me 45 minutes and four chords into the first act of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha could well open again in two concerts – London is to get three on a UK tour this week - around the musical Minimalist theme from Dennis Russell Davies and the excellent Basel Symphony Orchestra. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if the Read more ...