Classical music
Boyd Tonkin
Water surged through this Prom from first spray to last drop. But there was nothing damp or diluted about Edward Gardner’s helmsmanship as he steered the London Philharmonic Orchestra through a succession of liquid rhapsodies: three from the early 20th century; one from 1993.Aigul Akhmetshina, the star mezzo (and ubiquitous Carmen) who sang in Ravel’s Shéhérazade song-cycle, went with the flow herself in a notably collegiate performance that impressively blended her own sumptuous instrument with the lush orchestration around the vocal line. On paper, this looked like an almost overloaded Read more ...
David Nice
Performers and public alike always treasure a beautiful and, in this case, remote setting for a music festival. But people matter as much as sense of place. When the players work together in various combinations for the duration, and tell you this is the highlight of their musical year, you know the achievement is utopian. And that was certainly the case with eight dynamic Bulgarian instrumentalists and three visitors new to the magic of Kovachevitsa.The Off the Beaten Path Chamber Music Festival isn’t the first Bulgarian institution to bring culture to this perfectly preserved but not Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Fresh from their triumph at the Proms, the Budapest Festival Orchestra arrived at the Edinburgh International Festival with a programme that centred on dance, and culminated in as fine a performance of Bartók’s Miraculous Mandarin (the complete score, not the suite) as you’d hope to hear. This is music that the Budapest players have in their blood, and you could tell that in the way they conjured up sound that managed to be grimy and nasty but lush at the same time. Iván Fischer paced the manic opening more slowly than you’d expect, but he shaped the unfolding drama with masterful edge, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Ravel: La Valse Orchestre de Paris/Klaus Mäkelä (Decca)Rereading the composer’s memoirs and performing the Symphonie Fantastique have rekindled my interest in all things Berliozian, so this new album arrived at a good time. Bits of it are really impressive, Klaus Mäkelä audibly relishing some of Berlioz’s more outré effects. How could a 27 year-old from a non-musical background write something so radical? The first movement’s tonal shifts are brilliantly managed by Mäkelä – try the moment at 10’40” where the clouds suddenly descend, and note how he gives Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Say what you like about this year’s slimmer-than-usual Edinburgh International Festival, but when it has hit the spot, it has done so triumphantly. Nowhere has that so far been truer than in the piano playing, as this pair of concerts demonstrated. In the Queen’s Hall on Tuesday morning, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy joined forces in a programme of four-handed piano (★★★★★), sometimes on one keyboard and sometimes on two, that climaxed in a transcendent, dazzling, occasionally stupefying performance of Messiaen’s visionary Visions de l’Amen. From the very opening, Kolesnikov played Read more ...
David Nice
“Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night,” quoth Blake. Beethoven and Bartók knew both extremes, but Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra led us from the most dancing of Seventh Symphonies to the endless night of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, from explosive A major to quietest C sharp minor. If not everything along the way was perfect, or even in one major case present, the outlines were bold and engaging.Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was the last major work I heard at the Pärnu Music Festival only a fortnight ago. It bears repeating that young Read more ...
Simon Thompson
NYO2 is a group of dazzlingly talented (and terrifyingly young-looking) 14-17 year olds from the USA, one of Carnegie Hall’s three national youth ensembles, and with a focus on supporting young musicians from communities that are under-represented in the arts. This Edinburgh International Festival concert marked their European debut, and they’re doing a miniature residency in Edinburgh that, in another concert, involves them playing alongside some talented young Scots. Whatever their age, they can certainly play. Perhaps the only concession to their inexperience came from conductor Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Powerful, Timeless, Inspiring” it says on the front cover of the programme-book for this year’s supposedly 297th Three Choirs Festival at Hereford. So please leave your frivolity at the cathedral door with your gun and your mobile phone.Richard Blackford has certainly taken the hint with his new cantata, The Black Lake, a studiously tearful, elevated distillation of Caradog Prichard’s One Moonlit Night, a coming-of-age novel about a Welsh boy born and brought up in the slate-quarrying village of Bethesda in north Wales just before and during the First World War. It’s a curious thing about Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Arvo Pärt was into his 40s before he made had his Big Musical Idea: simplicity. He has spent the subsequent half-century pursuing this ideal, largely through the religious choral music that has been dubbed Holy Minimalism. And in this year of his 90th birthday, the Proms gave the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir a late-night concert to celebrate this music – and the people turned out, in what was the best-attended late-nighter I can remember.The programme consisted of eight (plus an encore) small pieces by Pärt, alongside other pieces in similar vein, and one very much not. What was Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
According to the programme, Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra is heard somewhere around the world every other week. In which case I’ve been unlucky in never having heard it live before, despite being a fan for nearly 30 years. So I was relieved that last night’s Prom’s outing – in Tadaaki Otaka’s farewell with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, after a 40 year collaboration – didn’t disappoint.The playing was urgent, colourful and glorious - everything I could have wanted. Completed in 1945, the Concerto is a direct descendant of Bartók’s, and this came over loud and clear in the Read more ...
David Nice
Life-changing? That's how the Pärnu Music Festival felt on my first visit in 2015, alongside the discovery of Estonia as a pillar of the European Union ideal. It’s also how Palestinian Lamar Elias, a student on the annual conducting course, described Paavo Järvi’s Beethoven Seven this year with his Estonian Festival Orchestra: a typical high repeated the next night with Arvo Pärt’s Credo to follow.Sadly the great Neeme Järvi, 88, who gave the controversial 1968 premiere of Credo, Pärt's large-scale testament of faith and seminal break with serialism and complexity, in Soviet Estonia Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This Prom began in sombre and melancholic shades of grey. Then, as her encore, the superb Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili launched into Liszt’s Paganini étude, “La Campanella”, and bells of long-awaited joy rang around the Royal Albert Hall. Under those leaping acrobatic fingers, musical sunshine drove away the clouds.Planned or not, these drastic contrasts prepared the ground for the volatile monster to come: Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, with its huge lurches and topples from darkness to light, and back again.Ryan Wigglesworth conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. He began with Read more ...