LSO
Simon Thompson
Right from the bracing brass fanfare that began this Sea Symphony, you know exactly where you were: right in the midst of the deck, with the spray in your face and the wind in your hair. The London Symphony Orchestra is midway through a residency at the Edinburgh International Festival. They’ve been the classiest musical act to grace the Usher Hall stage so far this festival, and this bracing performance of Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony has been the best thing they’ve done, not least because they fully grasped the scale of the piece and the many moods it goes through. This Read more ...
David Nice
A Salome without the head of John the Baptist is nothing new: several directors have perversely decided they could do without in recent productions. In concert, the illusion needs the charismatic force of a great soprano and conductor. We got that at the Proms 11 years ago with Nina Stemme and Donald Runnicles. Now Asmik Grigorian, even more the ideal as the obsessive teenage princess, crowns the end of a season that has been a total triumph for Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra.I've never bought the line that Richard Strauss's incredible 1905 psychodrama to most of Oscar Wilde's text Read more ...
graham.rickson
Antal Doráti in London: The Mercury Masters Vol. 1 (Decca Eloquence)A couple of recent YouTube videos show DG engineers hard at work remastering Karajan’s 1970s Bruckner and Mahler recordings for new vinyl LP pressings. The process looks tortuous, the multitracked master tapes painstakingly examined and reassembled, artificial reverb added using an empty stairwell. Listen, say, to Karajan’s Berlin performances of Mahler 6 and Bruckner 8 and you’re struck by the density of sound, the orchestral sonority almost oppressive in loud tuttis. Yes, the playing is accomplished, but there’s a Read more ...
David Nice
Three live, very alive Symphonie fantastiques in a year may seem a lot. But such is Berlioz’s precise, unique and somehow modern imagination that you can always discover something new, especially given the intense hard work on detail of Antonio Pappano and what is now very much “his” London Symphony Orchestra. They and Lisa Batiashvili also helped to keep Szymanowski’s hothouse First Violin Concerto in focus, too.There can’t be a more exhilarating curtain-up to a concert than Berlioz’s equally fertile Le Corsaire Overture. The whiplash timpani, the unison helter-skelters of strings later meet Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Every now and then a concert programme comes along that fits like a bespoke suit, and this one could have been specially designed for me. Two established favourites from big names of the 20th century plus a new-to-me piece by a forgotten figure worthy of re-discovery.And the LSO under Susanna Mälkki didn’t disappoint in any regard: this was a great night in the Barbican hall. I came across the black American composer Julia Perry (1924-1979) a few years ago, but this was my first chance to hear her music live. There are a few black and women composers getting performed these days who, I fear, Read more ...
David Nice
Who doesn’t love the quirky, passionate and humanitarian genius of Leoš Janáček? All of it, these days. Since Charles Mackerras introduced the UK to a then-unknown, even the less familiar operas have had plenty of exposure. Simon Rattle was among the champions, giving an early concert performance (the UK premiere, I think) of the astonishing Osud (Fate). Now he's performing and recording them all with the London Symphony Orchestra.The Adventures of Mr Brouček to the Moon and to the 15th Century, the full title promising its true wackiness, has had two ENO productions, one at Grange Park Opera Read more ...
David Nice
Tired after a hard day at the office? You might think you need a Classic FM-style warm bath, but the blast of Prokofiev’s Second Symphony, one of the noisiest in the repertoire, is the real ticket to recharging the batteries. Gianandrea Noseda, on the latest stage of his bracing journey through the composer’s symphonies and embracing the London Symphony Orchestra’s hugely popular Half Six Fix series, served it up with panache both in word and deed.The sweetener was the overture the 23-year-old Schubert furnished both for a “magic play with music”, Die Zauberharfe (no harp in the orchestra Read more ...
David Nice
Few symphonies lasting over an hour hold the attention (Mahler’s can; even Messiaen’s Turangalîla feels two movements too long). Wynton Marsalis is a great man, but his Fourth, “The Jungle”, is no masterpiece, not even a symphony – a dance suite, maybe, with enough bold textures to recall wandering attentions. We needed less of this, and more of the Duke Ellington selections superbly played by the 15-strong Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in the first half.Right at the start, clarinettists Sherman Irby and Alexa Tarantino blew us away in "The Mooch". Trumpet solos flamed; the saxophones had Read more ...
graham.rickson
Quartets Through a Time of Change: music by Ravel, Durey, Tailleferre and Milhaud Brother Tree Sound (First Hand Records)There are plenty – and I mean plenty – of recordings of the Ravel String Quartet, the majority, I would guess, paired with the Debussy Quartet, in what has become something of a programming cliché. The Brother Tree Sound quartet take the rather more enterprising approach of putting it alongside three other French quartets written between 1917 and 1919, none of which are very well-known if they are known at all. It works really well, both as exposure for the lesser Read more ...
David Nice
For all its passing British sea shanties and folksongs, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony does Walt Whitman’s determinedly global-oriented poetry full justice. That “pennant universal” was reflected in two superlative soloists from South Africa and the USA, our national treasure of an Anglo-Italian conductor, an Argentinian chorus director and a raft of international names in chorus and orchestra who just happen to be UK citizens.Only one aspect wasn’t big enough for this epic journey – the Barbican Hall itself. A Sea Symphony needs space above and around it: that you get in spades at the Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps all great music counterpoints and comments on the times, but Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra have been searingly congruent. Before he took up his post as Chief Conductor, there were the extinction whispers of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony the night before lockdown and the fury of VW’s Fourth on the eve of Boris Johnson’s election. Now the aggressive dynamism of Walton’s First raised us out of that sinking feeling as the USA worsens by the day.George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5. “Visions” (the composer pictured below by Frank Schramm), could have been charged, too, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There are no battlement leaps or murderous vows, no pistols or daggers, not so much as a slight cough disturbs the serene plot of La rondine – the Puccini opera once labelled a “poor man’s Traviata”.And yet it’s all the better for it. This is a voluptuous femme fatale of a score dressed up in a shy smile and a coy over-the-shoulder glance of a plot: pure musical emotion in search of a dramatic outlet. No wonder Merchant and Ivory found the soundtrack for A Room With A View’s unspoken yearnings and repressed passions in its “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta”.If repression is in Antonio Pappano’s Read more ...