Classical music
David Nice
It's been quite a week for youth and the vernacular in the world of so-called “classical” music. Multiply by four the seven fledgling stage animals currently firing up John Adams’s “earthquake-romance” in London's East End, add an orchestra of 13-to-24-year-olds from four continents, student dancers, amateur choirs young and old and just a handful of professionals, and that's only the starting-point for this hair-raising, goosebump-inducing, 500-strong performance of what many of us believe to be Bernstein's most cohesive masterpiece.The real starting point, in fact, was nine months ago, this Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
One of the greatest pianists (and latterly conductors) of his generation, founder and artistic director of the Russian National Orchestra, Mikhail Pletnev, has been charged by Thai police with raping a 14-year-old boy, according to the BBC. Police also raided his Thai home in connection with a paedophile ring and found, say prosecutors, several "compromising" photographs with underage boys.Extraordinary. Echoes of conductor Robert King, who was convicted of sexually assaulting five minors a few years back, who is making his British comeback this year at the Wigmore Hall. Pletnev will no Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A packed Festival Hall and a cheering, stamping, standing ovation – hardly the usual welcome for an evening of contemporary music. Sitting, wizened and waistcoat-clad, at the centre of the front row was the reason: Ravi Shankar. Framed by the mathematical minimalism of John Adams’ Shaker Loops and Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Shankar’s first-ever symphony was last night given its world premiere by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.At 90 years old – an age at which few composers are working, let alone breaking new ground – Shankar has produced Symphony, the culmination of decades of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Before Covent Garden's performance of Manon the other day, I had always presumed I'd rather have my eyes out than listen to an entire opera by Massenet. How wrong I was. This Saturday I hope to be proved wrong again, when my colleague on theartsdesk David Nice will attempt to open my ears to another great French worshipper of the pretty in music, the first true master of ballet music before Tchaikovsky, Léo Delibes - whose music I've been even more studious in avoiding.David has spent the last three weeks listening to different versions of the complete ballet of Coppélia for this week's Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps we'd better get the Prokofiev part of the opening concert out of the way first. I have a real problem with Russian whizz pianist of the moment Denis Matsuev. His iron-clad technique and heavyweight thunder still leave some room for quieter playing, but where were the atmosphere or the bright nimbleness in the tour de force of the Third Piano Concerto? True, you feel safe in Matsuev's hands from the word go, and fiendish elements in the solo role which Prokofiev wrote for his own chameleonic keyboard genius and which stretch even as marvellous a pianist as Martha Argerich to the Read more ...
josh.spero
Last night, I went to a concert by an orchestra which can wholeheartedly say that the steep cuts coming to the budget of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport won't affect it at all - because it receives no Government money, despite being one of London's most promising orchestras. The Young Musicians Symphony Orchestra exists to let talented young flautists and cellists and the rest get a bite at the biggest cherries - the key orchestral repertoire - which they wouldn't normally be able to access in their quartets and chamber groups. There are also masterclasses for the musicians and the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Helmut Lachenmann is a sort of George Bush of contemporary classical composition, a bogeyman, a warrior, an ideologue. In my time his name has always been served up with an exclamation mark - "you like Lachenmann!?" - partly because his politics have always reveled in anti-social extremes, partly because his musical tools were always either abstraction, noise, difficulty or perversity (musica negativa, as Henze once put it), his enemy, having a good time. The results are as intimidating to the ears (and performers) as his medieval face (picture, left) is to the soul. And in 50 years of Read more ...
graham.rickson
This month’s selection includes a flamboyant fin-de-siècle Italian symphony that could give you a nosebleed. A little-known American band provide a fresh take on a British 1930s warhorse, and classy Viennese musicians play some delectable Schumann symphonies. Everyone’s favourite Latin American youth orchestra give us a Stravinsky classic, coupled with a fascinating Mexican rarity. Contrast is provided by two wonderful discs of more intimate music-making - Zoltan Kodály’s magnificent solo cello sonata and some lesser-known songs by Britten. Finally we dip our toes into the world of Read more ...
kate.connolly
"It was only on Monday afternoon that the final scores of three of the movements were put into my hands," says Sir Simon Rattle, chuckling at the memory and casting a mock glance of disapproval at the composer and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis who is sitting next to him looking rather sheepish. "It makes us realise that composers are human beings just like we are," the conductor adds. "I'm just praying I get all my tempos right by tonight."Even by the usual stressful standards of world premieres, the run-up to this one was a particularly nail-biting affair. I attended the dress rehearsal for Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Brilliant though it was to be shooting an Imagine film for BBC One, we did experience the occasional tremor of foreboding about making a programme with Nigel Kennedy. We (that's me and director Frank Hanly) had a bit of previous with Nigel - I'd done several print interviews with him, and we'd shot a couple of short films with him for EMI.The last one was at Rockfield studios in Monmouth for his recent jazz album, Shhh! We'd bowled up out of the pouring rain on a black November night to be greeted like long-lost family members, as Nige plied us with wine and insisted that we join him, his Read more ...
william.ward
One of the downsides of the international media’s obsession with the crimes and misdemeanours of Silvio Berlusconi and his make-it-up-as-you-go-along style of government is that anything that doesn’t fit in with the overall narrative of the crazed, corrupt media mogul destroying an otherwise magnificent, well-organised country, tends not to make the headlines.The UK media is currently full of the Italian premier’s latest assault on the Freedom of Expression. This is a singularly cack-handed bill which aims to prevent one ill - police wire-taps being relayed in the media before trial Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
If the second half of the 20th century saw opera throttled by existential crises, and left composers wondering whether the only future for the art form was for it to be hung out to dry, or to become an arcane intellectualised annex for the musical games then in vogue, Gerald Barry's one-act opera, La plus forte (2006) - receiving its UK premiere in a concert performance last night - marks the end of hostilities. So effortlessly does Barry seem to rise above the tangled, stagnant realities of recent operatic and musical convention, and return and restore the art form to the business of Read more ...