Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
In a week that sees Proms visits from two major American orchestras, it fell to Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to raise the curtain for their blue-blooded “Big Five” colleagues the Philadelphia Orchestra. With Tchaikovsky featuring large in both programmes comparisons are only natural, and it will be interesting to see what response Thursday night offers to an energetic but at times rather unsubtle evening of music from Pennsylvania’s “other” orchestra.As titles go, Fantastic Appearances of a Theme of Hector Berlioz is a particularly fine one, getting bonus points for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
While revered and respected, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis has never inspired audiences with the same affection as Bach’s B minor Mass, Haydn’s Nelson Mass, or even Mozart’s Coronation or C minor settings. Perhaps it’s the austerity, the monumentality of the work Beethoven knew to be his greatest that rejects the easy assimilation into secular concert life, perhaps it’s more simply the lack of big tunes to wash down all that liturgy. Furtwängler famously drew back from the work’s sacred challenges as he grew older, but Sir Colin Davis is evidently determined to keep tackling a work whose Read more ...
Ismene Brown
On 9 September theartsdesk, Britain's first professional arts journalism site, will be two years old. To celebrate we’re holding a live debate with four leading performers during the Kings Place Festival. An actor, a singer, a dancer and an instrumentalist will share their different experiences of performance. Join us, live or online, for a stellar event.Toby Jones actor | Mara Carlyle singer | Mahan Esfahani harpsichordistBridgett Zehr ballerinaLeading performers in different art forms join us for a live debate and lunchtime reception in the Kings Place Festival.Actor Toby Jones, acclaimed Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may have taken her until 2005 to get her Wigmore Hall debut, until 2006 to break onto the stage of the Royal Opera House, but at 53 Susan Bullock has finally arrived, claiming the crown of soloist for this year’s Last Night of the Proms, a firm foothold at Covent Garden and her rightful place as Britain’s finest dramatic soprano. For a singer who “started singing by mistake”, whose musical training began in a council house in Cheshire on a piano rescued from the local rubbish dump, it’s no small achievement.Chance and luck have played their role in the careers of many performing artists ( Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Dominated by a focus on contemporary music, this year’s Proms’ Saturday Matinees have also developed something of a heavenward glance as the series has progressed. Last weekend it was the Christian mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen at the fore, with Britten’s Sacred and Profane providing a slippery foothold in the earthly. Yesterday we cast off worldly shackles entirely, gazing beyond the limits of our own humanity in the musical visions of Tippett, Tavener and Sofia Gubaidulina.Festivals across the world have taken the opportunity of her 80th birthday to celebrate the music of Sofia Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Don't expect polish," announced Ivan Fischer apologetically. "Things vill go rrrong. We may start pieces again." The tuba had been turned into a tombola. The percussionists were playing their buttocks. Someone else was blowing a Hungarian didgeridoo. A certain amount of madness was expected from the second Prom, an experimental Audience Choice concert. But the Mahler One of the first Prom? Who knew that that would be equally if not even more outrageous.As Edward Seckerson once wrote on theartsdesk, Mahler is about extremes: extremes of dynamic, tempo and texture. And death-defying extremes Read more ...
David Nice
What do visiting German performers add to the Edinburgh International Festival's Auld (Scotland-France) Alliance thread? Simple: when they communicate as superbly as soprano Diana Damrau and Jonathan Nott's Bambergers, the music-making works at the highest level. The fact that Damrau enlisted French harpist Xavier de Maistre for one of the most singular song recitals I've ever heard, and that the symphony concert set Messiaenic pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard at its centre, simply gave us more for our money in a cavalcade of light to illuminate the grey tail-end of the festival.Damrau has Read more ...
graham.rickson
We head east this week - new pieces by a contemporary Russian composer, and a bargain box set showcasing the flamboyant orchestral music of a neglected Russian. And a famous viola player leads a young Moscow orchestra in electrifying accounts of Brahms and Tchaikovsky.Brahms: Symphony No 3, Tchaikovsky: Symphony No 6 Novaya Rossiya State Symphony Orchestra/Yuri Bashmet (ICA Classics)
You don’t expect to find these two composers sharing a disc, in the light of an infamous quote attributed to Tchaikovsky in 1886: “I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard!” Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Police. Placards. Protests. And bag checks. It meant only one thing. Jews were performing at the Proms. Here we were in the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2011 witnessing a stage of musicians being barracked and abused for having the gall to be Jewish. Last year, four more Jewish musicians, the Jerusalem Quartet, had the cheek to perform and broadcast a recital at the Wigmore Hall. They were again heckled and hounded off air. No, not a portrait of Europe in the early 20th century, but Britain in the 21st. I wonder. In a few years, will Jews be able to make music publicly in Britain at all?If Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Over the past six weeks of the Proms the BBC’s hard-working Symphony Orchestra has performed everything from Britten to Brahms, Verdi to Volans. Their Mahler with Ed Gardner was an operatic epic, their programme of English music for Mark Wigglesworth glowed with wit. Yet hearing their ragged and unlovely account of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony last night it was hard to remember their triumphs, hard even to remember the delicate account of Graham Fitkin’s new Cello Concerto that they delivered in the first half, so complete was their collapse.Conceived as a programme of boundary-breaking works, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
David Fray certainly has the locks to be a piano virtuoso (eat your heart out, Franzi). And he has the looks, the troubled brow, the pallor and a suitably eccentric manner (the Glenn Gould hunch and hum came out for all the runs). But does he have the hands?He definitely has hands. And on last night's viewing they were the right hands for Mozart. The understated Piano Concerto in C major K503 has never been the most popular of Mozart's concertos. Eschewing virtuosity and outward emotion for sunny but sensitive inward mooching, the work requires an especially careful and Read more ...
David Nice
Born in Russia in 1972, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's principal conductor has galvanised the capital's music scene with some of the most thoughtful, groundbreaking and carefully prepared concert programmes today. His operatic credentials at Glyndebourne have been no less impressive, with attention to the right individual style in Verdi, Wagner, Rossini, Tchaikovsky and Mozart, among others. Widely read as well as a serious film buff, and sometimes baffling his fellow musicians with the breadth of artistic reference he brings to bear on his craft, Jurowski offers typically eclectic Read more ...