Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
Youth orchestras do well at the Proms. Built to the same sprawling scale as the Royal Albert Hall, their energy is also a natural fit for the relentlessly enthusiastic Proms audience. The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, the Aldeburgh World Youth Orchestra, our own National Youth Orchestra – year after year we marvel at the skills of these young musicians and come away with new demands to make of our professional ensembles. But last night the newly formed National Youth Orchestra of America showed their inexperience. Rarely has a youth orchestra sounded so Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a dilemma of anniversary years, and never more so than with Wagner’s and Verdi’s 200th birthdays: do you stick to the masterpieces or try and bring the rarities to life? No-one would have minded, I suspect, if Antonio Pappano and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia forces he has raised to the level of one of the world’s great ensembles had reprised their peerless Verdi Requiem. It was unfortunate, then, if some of us sat with interest through unusual fare wishing for better alternatives in every case.Oh for the Ave Maria of Otello’s Desdemona, you couldn’t help thinking as ethereal Italian Read more ...
David Nice
If there’s a more thinly written, loosely structured and hammily acted play than Samuel Adamson’s panorama of Purcell’s London, then I have yet to endure it. Baffling, because this is the writer who brought us Southwark Fair, a lively depiction of the local scene which never so much as hinted as the village-institute clichés and banalities piled high here in a production by Dominic Dromgoole which does little to finesse the sorry situation.Who could have resisted top-league trumpeter Alison Balsom’s proposal to put on a show at the Globe? It must have seemed like a good idea: Purcell: The Read more ...
Jasper Rees
By the time silence descends on the Royal Albert Hall at five o’clock in the afternoon for a performance that will end six hours later, Semyon Bychkov will have been rehearsing for 60 hours. It breaks down into four days of orchestra readings, with tutti and sectional sessions for each act, then two days of the singers and a pianist, followed by six days of everybody together. And all for one performance of Tristan und Isolde with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.Bychkov has a long relationship with Tristan. He first conducted a concert performance of the second act in Turin, and the whole staged Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto Howard Shelley (piano), Tasmin Little (violin), BBC Philharmonic/Edward Gardner (Chandos)Edward Gardner starts Britten’s Piano Concerto with amazing ferocity and drive. Winds and horns make light work of their repeated quavers, and Howard Shelley relishes the fast tempo when he makes his entrance a few seconds in. What a fabulously entertaining work this is, but don’t search for profundity. The sardonic edge that’s found in several early Britten works is never far away, but there’s so much wit and energy, and there are several moments where Read more ...
David Nice
A second visit to hear this already great young Russian pianist in six months was meant for private pleasure only. Yet no-one in the Wigmore Hall audience last night, I’ll hazard a guess, will ever have heard Liszt playing like Sudbin’s in a first half which itself merited a standing ovation, so the world needs to know about it.So many Liszt interpreters give us a too-many-notes feeling of rapid indigestion, a heaviness like the hot, humid, blanched days we’ve had recently. Sudbin’s playing was like yesterday’s happier summer evening, all clear colours with a cooling wind, in the recital’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Anniversary years are essential to classical music, shaking up our regular rhythms of programming and listening every year with new emphasis and new discoveries. While Britten, Wagner and Verdi have all had their moments in 2013, it is Witold Lutosławski who may yet emerge as the unlikely hero. Last night his exquisitely stark Cello Concerto held its own against a major Adès premiere, itself written in memory of the elder composer – surely one of the 20th century’s neglected greats.The Cello Concerto isn’t folk-charming like the Concerto for Orchestra or sensuously appealing like the Third Read more ...
David Nice
You can get away with playing ballet music of the Ancien Régime on Bastille Day so long as you end with a revolution. That was how live wire François-Xavier Roth and his mostly French musicians angled it, covering nearly 250 years of Parisian dance premieres on their way to the Proms centenary performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Roth promised surprises in heading back to Stravinsky’s 1913 autograph manuscript, but those mostly came in the last minute, and plenty of other novelties delighted on the way to the sacrifice.There were spectacles few, if any, will have seen at the Proms Read more ...
theartsdesk
There's the First Night and there's the Last Night. Nowadays among the staples of the two-month world-famous festival of music at the Royal Albert Hall, there is also the Doctor Who Prom. Last night, to mark the 50th anniversary of the resurgent TV sci-fi show, a celebration was laid on featuring Murray Gold's music from the last eight years of Doctor Who.Performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the London Philharmonic Choir under Ben Foster, there was also, to tickle the musical tastebuds of the fans, some music not hitherto noted for its connection to Daleks, Cybermen, time Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What a way to open. Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony is exactly the kind of work that the BBC Proms and the Royal Albert Hall were made for, and as the surging, over-generous music and Walt Whitman’s ecstatic poetry ring out across the space it’s hard not to feel just a little bit of heart-swell. Add to that conductor Sakari Oramo making his debut as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and you have a First Night to rival the excitement of the Last Night.What a shame then that it was such an uneven evening of music. Like Britten and Vaughan Williams’s stormy seas, the highs and lows Read more ...
theartsdesk
Chris Christodoulou has been photographing conductors at the BBC Proms since 1981. Many attending the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall may well have attempted to spot him. They can give up on that game herewith. As he explains to theartsdesk, the venue with its many curtains and nooks allows him to work discreetly. (If you want to know what he looks like, see below right.) We have been featuring Chris’s pictures in an annual gallery since 2010. This year we have asked him what makes a good picture of a conductor, and how he goes about securing it. He explains, and has supplied us with a Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It is nearly 50 years since Martha Argerich played in Manchester. She performed with the Hallé Orchestra and the conductor was Claudio Abbado, making his UK debut. That was in 1965 and a year later they repeated their double act. Thanks to the Manchester International Festival and her special working relationship with conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, music director of the Manchester Camerata, she bridged that gap last night.I must admit to a sense of some disappointment when she decided to replace the work advertised, Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, with Beethoven’s First. However, she gave Read more ...