20th century
igor.toronyilalic
A great deal of scepticism greeted the release of a new Beethoven symphony cycle from Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra in the mid-2000s. Would this lot really be able say anything that hadn't already been said by the hundred or so other cycles? Could anyone really find anything very new or fresh to say about these warhorses? The answer then was yes. And the answer last night in their Prom's performance of Beethoven's Ninth was also a resounding yes. Hardly surprising if you'd heard Vänskä's Bruckner the night before or his Sibelius cycle earlier this year. In Vänskä-land even stale Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may have been the glossy, Labrador-like abandon of John Wilson and his fabulous orchestra, but barely two bars of the Oklahoma! overture had passed before I caught myself grinning and drifting into critical neutral. Richard Rodgers’ scores are built for a symphony orchestra, and the massed forces of over 50 strings, swollen brass and percussion sections, brought out their sweeping, sparkling best. There have been major international orchestras this season that have failed to muster half the energy and commitment Wilson drew from his players; the overtures and instrumental interludes (in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
From Russian “avant-garde constructivism” to Estonian minimalism via a jazz-inspired French concerto and the defiant originality of Scriabin – last night’s Prom from Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia Orchestra had a lot of ground to cover. I can imagine few pieces more antithetical – in spirit as much as style – as the self-reflexive indulgence of Scriabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy and Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No 4 with its meditative asceticism; it says much of Salonen’s persuasive energy that it was a dialogue rather than a squabble that ensued amongst this rag-bag of the 20th and 21st Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Meditative experiences are hard to come by in the Royal Albert Hall. The twitching, scratching, fidgeting ticks of over 5000 people conspire to break your focus, to draw attention from the musical middle-distance back to the here and now. Last night’s two Proms – whether through programming, performance or just a happy chance of circumstances – both glanced into this distant space, briefly achieving that sense of communion peculiar to Proms audiences. As a birthday tribute to composer-mystic Arvo Pärt, it was fitting indeed.As he has already proved at ENO, Ed Gardner is a master of Read more ...
howard.male
Every great novel is a world, and every great novelist responds to and recreates their own time in their own image. Therefore how could a three-part documentary series possibly cover that fertile period in British literature that took in both world wars and their aftermath? Of course it’s an impossible task but it’s one that is neatly circumvented here because these programs are really just an excuse for the BBC to dust off some old tapes of some of our greatest writers speaking about their work.This first in the series begins with the only known audio recording of Virginia Woolf. Across Read more ...
David Nice
The anything-goes context of Tête à Tête's enterprising opera festival at the Riverside Studios, now in its fourth year, seemed like a good place to try it out before a packed and intrigued audience (a full production is on the way, and will feature the film sequences that constitute such a novel and integral part of the experiment). Some of us needed little persuading that Martinů was always a true original in everything he touched, even if the masterpieces were yet to come in the next few decades of exile and homesickness for his native Moravia. UK audiences have already had a chance to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Life changes at such speed in cities that it seems as if all the world must move at the same pace. Photographs prove otherwise. Looking at the two portfolios of West Country photographs below, you could surely not readily believe that more than a century separates them. James Ravilious's Devonian sheepfarmers and John Wheeley Gutch's Cornish fishermen have worked natural resources for centuries - the fact that the images lie 130 years apart are purely an indication that while technique changes, human interest does not. James Ravilious The son of the renowned engraver and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
For most people a 25th anniversary is cause for celebration – a party, a dinner, maybe a few speeches. If you are musical theatre phenomenon Les Misérables however, festivities operate on an entirely different scale. London struggles to support two opera houses, yet this anniversary year will be playing host to three separate (and briefly simultaneous) productions of Boublil and Schönberg’s classic show, including an all-star, cast-of-thousands spectacular at the O2.Skipping over what such excess says about the tastes of London’s theatre-goers, it also says much about the show itself. An all- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Every year there are a couple of Proms that have a haphazard look about them, as if a fire had suddenly broken out in the BBC archives, and the programming committee grabbed whatever came to hand – a piano quartet, a couple of choral odes and a concerto for mandolin – and made for freedom. Though there had evidently once been a clear architecture to Sunday’s concert by the BBC Symphony Chorus and friends, in practice things were somewhat confused; endless personnel shiftings and a stuffed-to-bursting programme blunted the impact of music which demanded altogether simpler treatment.Bookending Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ever since I can remember, the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg has played a walk-on part in histories of Soviet music. If you find him in an index at all (probably under Vainberg or Vajnberg, and usually with the first name given him by a box-ticking Soviet border guard in 1939: Moisey, or even Moshe), you’ll usually end up reading one of those melancholy and unhelpful lists: “Shostakovich’s followers include...”Grove’s Dictionary concedes a short and somewhat misleading entry: “His works are often based on a programme, largely autobiographical in nature.” Boris Schwarz, in the standard, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the second part of this historic career overview interview with the unique British impresarios, Victor and Lilian Hochhauser talk about their razor-edged relations with Soviet apparatchiks and the pressures they came under to prevent artist defections. Victor (who is a very engaging raconteur) reveals the lengths the Russians tried to go to stop Pierre Boulez conducting Berg in the USSR - liver-busting ceremonial vodka sessions, and a solution of Lewis Carrollian ludicrousness. "I hated them," he says, "but we needed each other."Following on from last week's revelations about their Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The stage of the Royal Albert Hall has a rather unfortunate habit of making orchestras seem incidental. Stretching endlessly across, one of the world’s largest organs by way of backdrop, even the most generous conventional ensembles take on Lilliputian proportions. Youth orchestras, with their Romantic scale and do-or-die attack, often emerge best from this encounter, as the Simón Bolívar and Gustav Mahler ensembles have recently proved. Framed by eight double basses and five horns, the Royal Albert Hall finally starts to make sense as a performance space. In the hands (and lips) of the Read more ...