Beethoven
David Nice
Unanticipated miracles happen every summer in the quiet paradise of Estonia's seaside capital. The first this year came as a total surprise. Having got off the afternoon coach from Riga last Monday and dumped bags at my villa base in Pärnu's garden zone, I headed back into town for the first event. Long on the cards were super-subtle Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing playing Massenet and Saint-Saëns conducted by Paavo Järvi, the festival’s chief mind and heart, and young Estonian musicians from the Järvi Academy in Lepo Sumera’s bracing Musica Profana. But until I opened the programme, I Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a particular quality to light seen from shadow. Think of the surface of the water glimpsed, hazy and haloed, as you swim upwards after a deep dive, or the smudged edges of city lights seen from a night flight. This concert by Ben Gernon and the BBC Philharmonic was an exercise in adjusted perspective. The sunny landscapes of Brahms’ Second Symphony and the smoky, slow-motion horror of 9/11 as viewed through Tansy Davies’ 9/11-inspired What Did We See? share little, but collided as they were here, each reframed the other, repositioned the listener.Premiered by English National Opera in Read more ...
David Nice
Once the Proms season is under way, you soon regret dissing the prospectus. Connections become apparent, long-term programming a merit, especially this weekend just gone, which took us from elegies and meditations on two world wars heavenwards at the halfway point - Britten's cautious but still cathartic optimism at the end of the masterly Sinfonia da Requiem - and up to the heights of Beethoven's "Choral" finale and Mahler's Eighth. It was also a fabulous demonstration of how a world can be captured as much in a five-minute piece as a 90-minute so-called “Symphony of a Thousand”.We began Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
In the right hands, the music of the various Viennese Schools can still sound almost startlingly original. Imogen Cooper’s are very much the right hands, containing a rare, refined artistry that only continues to grow with the years. In her Wigmore Hall concert on Tuesday she matched Beethoven’s mighty Diabelli Variations with the same composer’s late 11 New Bagatelles Op.119, early Schoenberg and Haydn at his bounciest in a programme that left one marvelling as much at the daring of these voices as at the vivid musicianship of the pianist – which is exactly the way things should be.Cooper Read more ...
David Nice
A magnificent riven oak with gnarly branches stands in the secluded graveyard of SS Peter and Paul's Church Peasmarsh, near Rye. Transport it in your mind to Flexham Park in a very different part of Sussex, imagine it struck by lightning and it could be one of that twisted group which Elgar encountered on a short walk from his Bedham cottage in the summer of 1918, subsequently permeating his massive and masterly Piano Quintet with the ghost story surrounding them. At any rate, having such an epic work conjured by top musicians in the Peasmarsh church made it seem as if we were close to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven Revisited: Symphonies 1-9 Taschenphilharmonie/Peter Stangel (Sony)The most enjoyable recent Beethoven symphony cycle I've heard is Yury Martynov’s set of the Liszt piano arrangements. Closely followed by this one. It’s also a left-fielder, arranged and conducted by Peter Stangel and performed by his versatile chamber-sized "pocket philharmonic orchestra". In his words, “all instruments play one-on-a-part, winds are reduced and some instruments are omitted completely, as if Beethoven had written for a large chamber ensemble.” As with this team's bewilderingly brilliant take on Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Calixto Bieito has a reputation as a radical theatre-maker, and by any standards The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety is an unusual, genre-breaking piece; Bieito has described it as “like a symphonic poem for a quartet of musicians, and a quartet of voices”. A mesmerising 90-minute melange on the subjects of its title – anxiety seems marginally the dominant emotion, somehow preceding sex – it’s a collaborative effort between the Heath Quartet (with whom Bieito worked on his ENO Fidelio five years ago) and four actors, Cathy Tyson, Mairead McKinley, Miltos Yerolemou and Nick Harris. Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Space is big – that seems to be the message of Unsuk Chin’s new oratorio Le Chant des Enfants des Étoiles. The work sets texts, ranging from the Baroque to the present day, concerned with space and scale. The work’s cosmic aspirations are reflected in its performing forces, a huge orchestra with augmented percussion, chorus, children's choir, and, for good measure, a suitably Gothic organ part. The work was given a colourful and atmospheric performance by the Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen, with lighting effects – almost total darkness to begin, later a blue/green flood across the organ Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It’s as intricate as it is concise. The depth to the architecture of James MacMillan’s Saxophone Concerto – which was given its world premiere this week by saxophonist Amy Dickson and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – is quite astounding, and all the more so for being packed into three five-minute movements. As with much of MacMillan’s music, the work is inspired by Scottish folk tunes, which certainly takes the saxophone into unusual territory in this concerto for solo instrument and string orchestra.The first movement, based on a march, strathspey and reel, is tight and spry, with the solo Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Even after the venue’s 30-month refurbishment, you still would not choose the sprawling foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall as the prime site for a pre-concert speech. By the time, last night, that Heritage Lottery Fund chair Sir Peter Luff got to say his piece – after Southbank Centre luminaries Jude Kelly, Elaine Bedell and Gillian Moore – the ambient din from a full house gathered to celebrate the QEH re-opening almost drowned his words.Sir Peter pointed out that this auditorium and its neighbours occupy Thames-side land laid waste by Luftwaffe bombs. The commitment to diversity – in Read more ...
Jansen/Maisky/Argerich Trio, Barbican review - three classical titans give chamber music masterclass
alexandra.coghlan
They were billed as a Trio, but when the classical super-group of Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky and Martha Argerich came together at the Barbican last night it was in a sequence of different combinations, each with their own musical identity. The centre of gravity, however, remained constant. Martha Argerich, the only performer present throughout, may have reinvented herself and her sound fifty times in the course of the evening, now asserting, now effacing, but it was she who rooted the whole, who provided the fixed compass point around which her colleagues roamed so freely.The alchemy of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven/Liszt: Complete Symphonies Yury Martynov (Erard, 1837 and Blüthner, 1867) (Alpha Classics)These performances were recorded between 2011 and 2015 and originally released as single discs. If you missed them first time round, snap up this slimline box now. I'd hitherto failed to realise just how extraordinary Liszt’s Beethoven symphony transcriptions can sound, much of the fun coming from hearing what Liszt strips away and what he decides to highlight. You're continually struck by Beethoven’s harmonic boldness. And, having just one musician allows for thrilling rhythmic Read more ...