Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
“Bergen is the most beautiful city in the world when it doesn’t rain,” said one Norwegian to me. There was a pause. “It always rains in Bergen.” Mention Norway’s second city to anyone and the first reaction is always the same. They don’t describe the UNESCO World Heritage Site that is the quayside Bryggen quarter, nor the city’s astonishing outlook – caught between mountains and sea – nor even the annual Bergen International Festival, the largest festival of its kind in the Nordic countries. They talk about the weather.Not without good reason have Norwegians nicknamed Bergen the City of Rain Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michael Finnissy: Second & Third String Quartets Kreutzer Quartet (NMC)Michael Finnissy, currently Professor of Composition at Southampton University, writes that his Second Quartet ”is based on a compact Haydn model”. The piece does pack a lot of event into 20 minutes, and there are sporadic flares of dry wit. Best is an extended passage near the close where cello and viola intone slowly moving consonant chords while the two violins screech about on top. It sounds as if we’re listening to two radically different compositions simultaneously. Or two duetting pairs recorded separately Read more ...
Daniel Ross
Right, notebooks out everyone. Michael Tilson Thomas began this Berg/Mahler double-header with a lengthy analysis of what we were about to hear in the former’s Chamber Concerto. Whether it was informative or not (and it was), it was a bit of a spoiler. It was nice to know exactly which themes are attributed to which dedicatee, but you couldn’t help but feel the surprises in the work have been somewhat spiked by this little lecture. Still, selected LSO folk and the effective duo of Yefim Bronfman on piano and Gil Shaham on violin were on hand to try and surprise us anyway.For most of it, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ask any young composer in this country who is the most important figure in modern British music, and the answer is likely to come back quick and sharp: Oliver Knussen. Himself a composer of dazzling brilliance when he gets round to it, and a conductor who gets far too much work for the peace of mind of those who want him to write more music, Knussen has also for years been a kind of guru figure to generations of young and not-so-young composers, sacrificing his own creative time and energy in their interests, advising, promoting, performing.At 60, after a spell of poor health and visibly in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Massenet: Werther Rolando Villazón, Sophie Koch, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House/Antonio Pappano (DG)Massenet’s Goethe adaptation needs a lot of love to make it convince as a drama. Fortunately this live Covent Garden performance, taped last May, has Antonio Pappano at the helm. There’s no one better at glossing over the piece’s longueurs. You need someone who can make you forget Werther’s clunkiness, its occasional risible moments. I can never maintain a straight face in Act 3 when Charlotte learns of Werther’s fateful message: “ I am leaving on a lengthy journey. Will you lend me Read more ...
graham.rickson
Serious programmes about classical music are now virtually invisible on the major channels. There’s always BBC Two’s Maestro at the Opera, I hear you shout. Or something with that nice Gareth Malone. A good selection of Proms will be shown live on BBC Four, but with luck will scrupulously avoid the witless interviews with celebs in lieu of proper interval talks. Enough ranting. As explained in John Bridcut’s impressively understated film, Delius was a curious figure; adored by many as an echt English composer, but one who spent most of his life abroad. He was buried in Surrey, at midnight, in Read more ...
David Benedict
There comes a point in almost every great soprano’s career when she tells the world that Tosca, the Marschallin or Isolde be damned: what she wanted to sing all along was The Great American Songbook. This announcement tends to be made - how shall I put this? - later rather than sooner. In Jessye Norman’s defence, in 1987, just five years after her landmark, ultra-luscious recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, she recorded a disc of Gershwin, Richard Rodgers et al. Yet since that recording included her terrifying, never-to-be-forgotten cover of Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are” ( Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The last night Haitink conducted at the Royal Opera House as musical director the staff wheeled on a moped as a leaving present. Ever since, his conducting has been inextricably linked to that mode of transport in my head. With Haitink, music-making has always seemed to be about getting from A to B in the most dependable, unfussy and often uninspiring way possible. For years, I haven't been able to see the point of him at all. But last night's performance of Bruckner Five with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra made me realise that a straight, uncluttered approach (especially to Bruckner) is Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony No 9 (with Finale completed by Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca) Berliner Philharmoniker/Sir Simon Rattle(EMI)Anton Bruckner’s last symphony is near perfect in its three-movement form. The realisation that the Finale was left almost complete after Bruckner’s death in 1896 is something you’d rather not confront. The vast Adagio closes in a mood of such otherworldly serenity that it’s difficult to imagine anything following it. We’ll get to that last movement later; programme your CD player to play the first three tracks alone and you’ve a very decent conventional Bruckner Read more ...
joe.muggs
“Post-classical” the FatCat label call it, and well they might. All three of the acts who played at the Barbican last night in one way or another used the instrumentation of the classical concert hall but in a way that was completely dislodged from tradition – not raging against it, nor fighting to escape it in the sense of high modernism, nor reviving it, but rather looking back on it as something other, something of a different era.Dustin O'Halloran's music is lyrical, strange and very pretty. It has something of the TV soundtrack about it, but as Noël Coward so rightly put it, it's Read more ...
geoff brown
I half expected to hear someone on the platform call out “Is there a doctor in the house?” For Mariss Jansons, principal conductor of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and esteemed beyond measure, didn’t look well during this concert, the second in the orchestra’s current Barbican residency. Drained from his exertions during Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, he left the platform weary and grey. The following interval was seriously extended. The next piece, Strauss’s Metamorphosen, he didn’t conduct at all, leaving the 23 string players to wing it alone with a wink, a nod, and as many waves Read more ...