Classical music
igor.toronyilalic
Poor old Stephen Hough. The Liszt double. Again! Was he not at all Liszted out after last year's epic bicentenary? Were we not Liszted out by last year's epic bicentenary? Hough has been living, breathing and eating these two pieces for the past year and a half. The familiarity might have bred contempt. Amazingly it hasn't. In fact, all the prep work of last year appeared to make this performance of the first two piano concertos one of the most satisfying I've heard.The works are well known to us today. The rhetorical gestures, the reveries, the roulades are pure Liszt, the epitome of Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow.” And how! The BBC Phil’s composer/conductor H K “Nali” Gruber could not have timed the UK premiere of his Northwind Pictures better. We were ready targets for his shattering evocation of the wind with every device at the percussionists’ disposal and a large hand-cranked wind machine. The boys in the back row had a great night out.A one-movement piece, it is derived from his comic fairy-tale opera Der Herr Wind (Mr North Wind), successfully premiered by Zurich Opera in 2005. You don’t need to know the story to get something out of the music, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Louis Andriessen: Anaïs Nin, De Staat London Sinfonietta and soloists/Atherton (Signum)A friend of mine studied with the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen in the 1980s. He sent me a cassette (remember those?) of De Staat, and I can remember being bowled over by the music’s stark majesty and rhythmic punchiness, Andriessen’s repetitive vocal lines soaring over minimalist riffs, more redolent of Stravinsky than Glass. Written in the mid-1970s, Andriessen wrote of one early performance that he “had to sing every note for them (the musicians), because they articulated the piece like Bruckner Read more ...
geoff brown
At last, a bag of sweets! In earlier concerts from Vladimir Jurowski’s LPO series Prokofiev: Man of the People? much time was spent consuming the composer’s flat soufflés, experimental rock cakes, or the fancy dish that was really haddock. Interesting for the brain, maybe, but the diet on occasion has been hard on the stomach. Not that any of this impinged on audience numbers: the season has definitely proved Jurowski’s happy lock on the London Philharmonic’s audiences. They will follow their artistic guru and Principal Conductor almost anywhere.But for this last concert of all, the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The roar with which Leonidas Kavakos and Emanuel Ax dispatched Beethoven’s mighty Op. 30 C minor Violin Sonata – flinging off the writhing semiquaver coils of the Finale with desperate vigour – was enough to remind anyone in the Wigmore Hall last night of the serious talent of this Greek violinist. It was not however quite enough to banish the memory of the evening’s whimpering start – the ragged gesture in the general direction of the Violin Sonata in A Op. 12 No. 2 – with which we opened.From the flurry of competition wins that launched his career, Kavakos has built a mature performing Read more ...
graham.rickson
Handel: Agrippina Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin/René Jacobs (Harmonia Mundi)Handel’s early opera appears in a new edition from René Jacobs, in a version which aims to reconstruct Handel’s original intentions. Agrippina was premiered in Venice in 1710 and was a huge hit, bolstering Handel’s operatic confidence which blossomed after he pitched up in London two years later. Jacobs’s edition is trimmed – several arias in the third act are gone – but you don’t feel you’re missing much. As with this conductor’s superb Magic Flute, there’s a thrilling sense of theatre, helped by the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The London Philharmonic’s current festival – Prokofiev: Man of the People? – is all about the question mark. While the festival’s concerts, lectures and even its classical club-night each make their own statement, the overarching spirit here is one of exploration, of questioning. Jurowski and his orchestra are peeling back the composer’s grinning modernist mask and attempting to expose the human face (or possibly faces) behind it. It’s a provocative process, and one that calls Prokofiev’s lesser-known works to testify against the evidence of such popular, high-gloss favourites as Romeo and Read more ...
geoff brown
How do you solve a problem like Prokofiev? Not with a TV talent hunt promoted by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Not even, I’m beginning to think, with the current London Philharmonic concert series, Prokofiev: Man of the People?, devised by Vladimir Jurowski. Prokofiev’s uneven output; his parade of masks, making it hard to decipher what the composer is thinking and feeling: these form the principal difficulties, especially when the popular works are put to one side in the programmes and the gargoyles and dead dogs march in. We had a couple of those in last Wednesday’s London Philharmonic concert Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Complete Works for Piano and Orchestra Howard Shelley (pianist and conductor), Orchestra of Opera North (Chandos)Lavish Beethoven box sets continue to appear. I’ve enjoyed Chailly’s symphony cycle, and another good one with Christian Thielemann and the Vienna PO has just dropped into the intray. Symphonic overload has been thwarted by this comprehensive collection of Beethoven’s music for piano and orchestra. Howard Shelley directs as well as plays, but there’s no slackness in terms of orchestral response. Shelley previously recorded matchless accounts of the Grieg and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last Tuesday night saw the London Symphony Orchestra celebrating 20th century English music under the baton of Antonio Pappano, launching proceedings with a stylish (and more than a little sexy) rendition of the dance suite from Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face. Last night the LSO were back with Adès himself for an evening offering a rather more expansive tour through the composer’s work, pairing its dense orchestral textures with a selection of songs from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn.We opened however with music from young Spanish composer Francisco Coll, Adès’s only composition student. Coll’ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Liszt: Piano Concertos 1 and 2; Grieg: Piano Concerto Stephen Hough, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Litton (Hyperion)Liszt’s two piano concertos, particularly the subtler Second, aren’t played enough. They’re compact, dramatic, witty and cleverly structured, and it’s hard to listen to performances like these without grinning. Liszt can move from high-class schmaltz to cheesy melodrama in a flash; from the most poised romantic reverie to music which sounds as if it’s accompanying someone about to jump off a cliff. And what Stephen Hough excels at is the quick transformation, the mercurial Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Wigmore Hall staged its own Entente Cordiale last night with an operatic double bill bridging both sides of the Channel. Christian Curnyn and the Early Opera Company looked beyond predictable partners for Purcell’s inconveniently short Dido and Aeneas, lighting on Charpentier’s Actéon, another miniature tragédie en musique. With rather more emphasis on the musique and rather less on the tragédie, the work may not be quite the equal of Purcell’s concise emotional epic, but as an evening’s musical dialogue this was harmonious indeed.Near contemporaries, Charpentier and Purcell have both Read more ...