Bruckner
theartsdesk
Let's be honest, this is the least interesting Proms season on paper for years, at least in terms of adventurous repertoire choices, following on the heels of the best in 2017. Yet in statistical terms it's more comprehensive and multi-media-friendly than ever, starting tonight with a free "Curtain Raiser" performance before the official First Night tomorrow - see David Kettle's choice below – and ending some 75 main Proms and 11 smaller-scale beauties later on 8 September. All are broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and many televised.The conscious spotlighting of women composers, who have in fact Read more ...
David Nice
Questions of interpretation apart, Simon Rattle has yet again proved the great connecter, this time in concerts separated by just over a month. Having set his seal on his new, galvanizing partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra by asserting, as he has since the late 1970s, that Mahler's Tenth Symphony in Deryck Cooke's performing version is the true end of that composer's quest, he returned to London on his farewell tour with the Berlin Philharmonic to test the waters of a completion from fragments, the finale of Bruckner's Ninth.Unless you buy into Robert Simpson's assertion that Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert was to have been conducted by Stanisław Skrowaczewski, who died in February. Though futile, it’s hard not to speculate about what could have been, especially given his spectacular Bruckner performances with the London Philharmonic in recent years. But life goes on, and in his place we heard Lawrence Renes, whose account of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was solid and dependable, even if it was more memorable for the quality of the orchestral playing than for his interpretive insights.Renes is a Dutch/Maltese conductor, well established in both of those countries and a regular visitor Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Richard Goode is one of the world’s great pianists, but you wouldn’t guess it from his humble and unpretentious stage manner. He wears thick glasses and squints into the music, and when he plays he sings along under his breath. When he is not playing, he often turns and gestures vaguely at the orchestra, not so much aping the conductor as moving with the flow of the music. He clearly lives every note, and everything he does is to the service of the score.Not virtuoso showmanship, then, and little bravado, though his playing is always lucid and engaging. That’s an ideal combination for Mozart’ Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How do you get to heaven, especially if you need to reach the pearly gates by way of the earthbound acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall? With Chief Conductor Daniele Gatti as their spirit guide, the sumptuously arrayed pilgrim band of the Royal Concertbegouw Orchestra from Amsterdam sought different routes in the centrepieces of their pair of Proms. In Bruckner’s majestic, yet often intimidating, Ninth Symphony, unfinished on the composer’s death in 1896 and presented here without any of the fabricated finales that later hands have slapped on it, the way turned out to be blocked despite the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Bernard Haitink is one of the great Bruckner conductors of our time. His interpretations are expansive yet vivid and always go straight to the heart of the music. But he is also an old man, and physical frailty is increasingly inhibiting his work, reducing the spontaneity of his communication with the orchestra. The results are both frustrating and inspiring, with details lost and clarity of texture often compromised. But he still has a firm grasp of the bigger picture, making this performance of the Te Deum and the Ninth Symphony continually compelling, for all its flaws.The Te Deum is often Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
François-Xavier Roth is a distinctive presence at the podium. He is short and immaculately attired, and first appearances could lead you to expect a civilised and uneventful evening. But the facade soon drops. His movements are brisk and erratic, as he conducts without a baton and instead shakes his outstretched hands at the players. He often leaps into the air, landing in a fierce pose directed at one of the players, before returning to his repertoire of small, indistinct gestures.Yet the results are impressively detailed and precise. Rhythmic clarity is a hallmark of his interpretations, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Serenades 1 & 2 Gävle Symphony Orchestra/Jaime Martín (Ondine)You know within seconds that this release is going to be good: droning string fifths introducing the catchiest of horn solos, the tune echoed in some style by a winningly perky clarinet. This is Premier League playing, and discovering that it's from an orchestra you've never heard of adds to the pleasure. Brahms's two Serenades are terrific pieces and don't get heard anything like as often as they deserve. Happily, both are on this disc, wonderfully performed by Sweden’s Gåvle Symphony Orchestra under Spanish flautist- Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Bruckner conductors improve with age: Haitink, Blomstedt, Gielen – octogenarians all. But Stanisław Skrowaczewski went further, conducting his favourite composer almost to his death, this week at the age of 93. And more than any of his contemporaries, he seemed to embody the Brucknerian qualities of wisdom, experience and patience. A glorious Indian summer brought his work to a new generation, as, apparently oblivious to physical frailty, he toured extensively, in his last years appearing with the world’s top orchestras.Skrowaczewski was born in Lwów, then in Poland, now Ukraine, in 1923. A Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Birmingham audiences are a supportive bunch. There was never much likelihood that they’d greet Andris Nelsons’s first Birmingham appearance since he departed for Boston in 2015 with less than the same warmth that they keep for other former CBSO music directors. Even so, he must have been gratified to walk out to a capacity audience – for a programme of Bruckner and Maxwell Davies – and a 30-second ovation, complete with a couple of cheers, before he’d given so much as a downbeat.Of course, the CBSO has already embarked on a whole new adventure, and with an artist as exciting as Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Bruckner’s Third Symphony doesn’t so much begin as become audible. A steady heartbeat in the bass, oscillating violas lit from within by clarinets, and in the middle, slowly pulling clear of the texture, the proud, sombre trumpet motif to which Wagner himself agreed to attach his name. Not the least of Alpesh Chauhan’s achievements in this performance with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was that he established all of this with his very first gesture – not just the subtle, unmistakably Brucknerian layering of the music’s textures but that whole vast, mysterious sense of the music Read more ...
David Nice
Soft power in the shape of cultural ambassadors can go a long way. With a little help from its big guns in banking and industry, Germany has given this year's Proms no less than four of its major orchestras – from Leipzig, two from Berlin, and now from Dresden: all the more reason to wave those EU flags on a typically international Last Night in three days' time.There's even been co-ordination this week in the shape of Mozart piano concertos and Bruckner symphonies three nights running, first from Barenboim and now from Christian Thielemann. A failsafe interpreter of the Austro-German Read more ...