Classical music
edward.seckerson
In 2007 the English tenor, Ian Storey, made a dramatic and highly visible debut as Tristan in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the season opening of La Scala, Milan, conducted by Daniel Barenboim and directed by Patrice Chereau. It was seen by millions on TV, in cinemas, and on DVD and marked a big development in this singer’s career. This year he will be singing Siegfried in Götterdämmerung, again under Barenboim, as part of a complete bicentennial Ring cycle at the BBC Proms.Storey eschews the heldentenor label preferring to call himself a “dramatic” tenor but whichever way you look at it his Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies 4 and 7 Academy of St Martin in the Fields/Joshua Bell (Sony)Nothing to shock here – no period timbres, no radical speeds and no indulgence. If you’re hoping for a sense of the epic, the self-consciously profound, you might want to look elsewhere. These classically-tinged Beethoven performances aren’t even part of an upcoming cycle. However, Joshua Bell, conducting and leading, delivers performances of sublime grace and wit. He gets so much right, such as the hushed anticipation at the start of No 4 and the disarming simplicity of the movement’s main material. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Zipangu. What a name for a piece of music. Such a strange and suggestive collection of vowels and consonants. Such a musical string of sounds. A fascinating name. The name, in fact, the programme told me, for Japan during the time of Marco Polo. The life of the composer of the work, Claude Vivier, is fascinating, too, in a grisly way. While completing an opera about a young man who stabs a stranger to death, Vivier was murdered in his Paris flat by a rent boy. Incredible story, incredible-sounding work; you can see why programmers are increasingly attracted to Vivier. I just wish I enjoyed Read more ...
David Nice
“I do not believe in miracles,” scoffs Herodias in Oscar Wilde’s - and Richard Strauss’s - Salome. “I have seen too many.” I know how she feels. So it was a bit of a shock to find the highest-kicking of today’s composers, John Adams, and his inseparable genius director Peter Sellars, taking the raising of Lazarus seriously in the first part of their latest opera-oratorio (my term, not theirs, and also applicable to El Niño, Adams’s millennial take on Christ’s birth and its concomitant hazards).What that meant in practice, for me at any rate, was to sit through Act One compelled by every Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The 36th Dresden Music Festival has a big title and even bigger ambitions. Empire is a theme which Artistic Director Jan Vogler hopes will embrace not just the cultural achievements of the British Empire but the broader implications of the word. The Brits are coming for sure with a range of music stretching from the Renaissance via Purcell to Elgar and Britten. The Americans are coming, too, with the New York Philharmonic “in residence” under their Chief Conductor Alan Gilbert. And 2013’s big anniversaries - Wagner, Verdi, Lutosławski, Britten - will be celebrated in style.Vogler, who has Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony no 9 Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra/Gustavo Dudamel (DG)This new, live, Mahler 9 sounds impressive – microphones are closely placed and you really feel in the thick of things. Dudamel’s intakes of breath are clearly audible but not intrusive. His first movement is outstanding. The timings are expansive, but the pace doesn’t slacken. Each precipitous climax is paced with mature skill, the tension cannily ratcheted up. There are moments when you genuinely think that it’ll all end happily, making the third, funereal crisis a shocker, Dudamel’s raucous trombones putting Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
For finding new popes as much as for hunting down new music, looking to the ends of the earth seems a fruitful route to take. Last night saw the start of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Barbican residency with their principal conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. And with them, they brought the latest music from the Pacific rim, all of it quite surprising.Surprising, that is, for not being very surprising. For the new music from West Coast Americans John Adams and Joseph Pereira, and Korean Unsuk Chin, didn't sound like you might expect. It wasn't bracingly fresh or pioneeringly brave. Nor did any of it Read more ...
theartsdesk
Regular readers of theartsdesk will know that we have a lot of time for Volker Bertelmann, the composer-pianist-producer better known as Hauschka. Adapting styles from rigorous minimalism through romantic compositions to club-inspired electronica, he has ploughed his own furrow through postclassical and leftfield music.So we were very happy when, to trail a show he's doing tomorrow night at London's Bishopsgate Institute with regular collaborator violinist Hilary Hahn, and his new remix album, he offered us the first showing of this 38 minute concert recorded in Nairobi, Kenya last year Read more ...
philip radcliffe
What Manchester has today, Vienna will have tomorrow. The BBC Phil’s composer/conductor HK “Nali” Gruber is taking his musicians and singers back home to the Wiener Konzerthaus to reprise this concert next week. You can’t fault it for variety – Stravinsky, Britten and MacMillan, Gruber’s predecessor as composer/conductor here. But the main thrust is celebrating Stravinsky. It is the centenary of The Rite of Spring. In the BBC Phil’s series of celebratory concerts, we here came to his opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex, also premiered in Paris, in 1927. It hasn’t been heard in Manchester for nearly 20 Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Harpsichord Concertos Retrospect Ensemble/Matthew Halls (harpsichord and director) (Linn)This release fizzes with energy. I’ve long preferred hearing these concertos played on a modern piano. But listening to Matthew Halls’s harpsichord performances have made me completely reassess the music. Velvety piano tone usually lends Bach’s keyboard music plenty of plush gravitas, with the D minor concerto emerging as darkly romantic, full of brooding angst. Here, the music’s character is sparkier, more pugnacious. Halls’s exuberant solo line sparks and glitters, pitched against the Read more ...
David Nice
Curious and curiouser. Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto, centrepiece of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s latest Philharmonia concert celebrating the Polish master’s centenary, adds ballast to the idea that the composer, like Schoenberg and Tippett, burrowed into a specially comfortless rabbit warren in his later works. On the other hand his Concerto for Orchestra, begun two decades earlier in 1950, proved its mettle as a serious audience-pleaser. Yet if you asked an unprepared listener to name that composer, the answer would most likely be – not Bartók with his work of the same name but that other, much more Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
In November 1973 a 20-year-old music scholar from St. John’s College, Oxford conducted the first ever concert by the newly founded Tallis Scholars, in St. Mary Magdalen, Oxford. Anyone who was there might have sensed that a new era was beginning. David Munrow was still alive: the period instrument revolution was just taking off. But Peter Phillips seemed to be inaugurating a new generation of Renaissance and Polyphonic singing - an expertise on show this week at a sensational recital in St Paul’s Cathedral - such as this country had not heard before.Except that, modestly, he would insist it Read more ...