Classical music
theartsdesk
So maybe there’s a bigger quota of popular Proms, leading Stephen Walsh to lambast what he sees as "junk" to avoid. It surely doesn’t matter. Among the 89 concerts, some of them beyond the Royal Albert Hall, the mix of old and new, middle-of-the-road and deeply serious, is as strong as ever. There’s no dumbing-down.A recent online article for a paper which should know better posits well-known classics as “lowbrow”. When it comes to Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini or Holst’s The Planets, there’s no such thing: these masterpieces are popular for a reason. Many Prommers will be Read more ...
David Nice
"The world meets in Pärnu", slogan for the 14th festival in Estonia's summer seaside capital, has held good ever since Paavo Järvi gathered native musicians and key players from the international teams he inspires to form what's now the Estonian Festival Orchestra. Buzz about the youngsters formerly serving just the conductors’ course is new; 2024's Järvi Academy Youth Symphony Orchestra embraces 30 countries.So it was that the youngest member, 11-year-old Armenian cellist Aren Toplaghaltsian, got to play his first Beethoven symphony under 87-year old Neeme Järvi, a living legend (young Aren Read more ...
graham.rickson
Fauré: Complete Music for Solo Piano Lucas Debargue (Sony)In lots of ways I was ready to like this boxset of the complete Fauré music for solo piano, having long seen it as an extraordinary strand of the piano’s literature. But also perhaps I am also more likely to be critical, as “I know what I like” – such as Marc-André Hamelin’s brilliant Hyperion disc from 2023. Lucas Debargue’s detailed sleeve note also carries an air of ambivalence. He had rejected Fauré from his repertoire early on, finding the music “sleek, mechanical and occasionally opaque.” But during lockdown he reassessed, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
NMC Recordings has spent 35 years promoting contemporary music by British composers, and this commitment to both emerging and established voices was represented at this birthday concert in London last night, part of the Spitalfields Festival. From their emergence in 1989 in a different musical and technological world (“NMC” standing for “New Music Cassettes”) my early days of CD buying were guided by NMC’s developing catalogue and they are still a go-to for finding interesting new things. The audience at the Dutch Church in the City of London was garlanded with composer royalty of all Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This luminously persuasive, radically inventive performance of Shostakovich’s music begins – quite literally – at the end. Beneath a slowly revolving monochrome moon, a lone musician delivers a plangent rendition of the Moderato and Allegretto from the final viola sonata the composer wrote before dying of cancer in 1975. From the shadows an accordionist emerges as the accompanist, eking out the understated melancholy from the shifting harmonies. It’s a deceptively simple, elegiac introduction to the wonderfully daring ninety minutes that ensues.The electrically compelling Finnish violinist Read more ...
David Nice
Lilac time in Oslo, a mini heatwave in June 2023, a dazzling Sunday morning the day after the darkness transfigured of Concert Theatre DSCH, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra’s from-memory Shostakovich music-drama. Pekka Kuusisto and I decide not to enter the café where we’ve met but cross the road to the Royal Park and sit on a park bench talking for two hours.Kuusisto in conversation is exactly the inspirational, enthusiastic and galvanizing person you may have seen spellbind Proms audiences in a song-and-fiddle encore, transform a classic or cross supposed boundaries into folk music. I’ve Read more ...
David Nice
Behind this poignant, simple-seeming hour of music for soprano and lute(s) lay a spider-web of connections between outsiders in the City: rebels, prisoners, immigrants, Black Londoners. Elizabeth Kenny’s programme note wove it all together brilliantly; we could have heard even more of her talking during the concert. Most of us could have done with seeing more than 15 minutes of the wonderful Nardus Williams, too.On the way to the Tower I’d been reading the chapter in Antonio Pappano’s marvellous autobiography where he writes about coaching young artists and declares, “I am merciless that the Read more ...
David Nice
Any programme featuring Gershwin’s top large-scale works might tend to the “pops” side. Bernstein’s West Side Story Overture and even the sweet dream of Florence Price’s Adoration fit that bill. But An American in Paris sounded completely different from usual, its radical side highlighted, following Ives’s Three Places in New England and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Andante for Strings.Enterprising Tom Fetherstonhaugh and the (equally) young professionals of his Fantasia Orchestra have been regular visitors to Proms at St Jude's Music & Literary Festival – to give the full, unwieldy name of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Allan Pettersson: Complete Edition Various artists (BIS)That this hefty anthology (17 CDs and 4 DVDs) has been with me for several months shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s encountered the work of Swedish composer Allan Pettersson (1911-1980); this is music that can’t be, mustn’t be rushed. Sample an early piece, like 1934’s Two Elegies for violin and piano, or the witty Four Improvisations for String Trio (1936), then leap forward to Petterson’s last completed symphony, his 16th (1979) and you’ll wonder what on earth happened to him? BIS’s handsome Complete Edition contains four bonus Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
London’s non-professional orchestra sector is an undervalued asset to the city, and deserves more attention. And so last night I went to hear the Royal Orchestral Society, accompanying horn superstar Ben Goldscheider, and it proved a better way to spend an evening than sitting through another tortuous England football tournament game.The programme was typical of the ROS’s imaginative approach to repertoire under conductor Rebecca Miller. It focused on Ukrainian music – and had an invited audience from London’s Ukrainian community in attendance. (Concerts later this year promise Judith Weir Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There’s a masterful subtlety to Philippe Herreweghe’s interpretation of Bach’s last great choral work – it shuns blazing transcendence for a sense of serene contemplation that reveals every angle of the mass’s geometrical perfection. Listening to the multiple layers of sound is rather like appreciating the shifting colours in the inlaid mother of pearl on a harpsichord – nothing dazzles, but it draws you in with its meticulous polish and understated beauty.Herreweghe has now recorded the Mass in B Minor three times with the Collegium Vocale Gent, and by general consensus it has improved with Read more ...
David Nice
It may be unusual to begin festival coverage with praise of the overseer rather than the artists. Yet Roger Wright, who quietly leaves his post at Britten Pears Arts this July after a momentous decade, is no ordinary Chief Executive. I’ve never heard anyone say a bad word about him; he has been a beacon during difficult times for the arts in the UK, and especially during lockdown; and he leaves the Aldeburgh Festival in best ever shape, just as he did the BBC Proms before it.What was for me the deep heart and soul of the first Saturday and Sunday – and, alas, circumstances prevented my Read more ...