LSO
peter.quinn
The UK premiere of Wynton Marsalis's Swing Symphony (Symphony No 3) last night was extraordinary on several counts. We heard, first and foremost, a real dialogue between jazz band and orchestra. Not one of those fist-bitingly cornball jazz arrangements where the jazz players get to stretch out and the orchestral players sit back and contribute the sustained, saccharine harmonies. This was a genuine coming together where all hands contributed equally to the rhythmic, harmonic and melodic detail of the work. And talking of melody, the one that Marsalis penned for the orchestral bass section – Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Twenty young conductors have been shortlisted to compete in the Donatella Flick/London Symphony Orchestra Conducting Competition in late September. The top prize is a cash award of £15,000 and an attachment to the LSO as Assistant Conductor.The 20 comprise four from the UK - Joolz Gale, Ben Gernon, Jonathan Lo and Gemma New - Irishmen Daniel Stewart and Robert Tuohy, three from Spain, two each from Italy, France, Greece and Germany, a Hungarian, an Austrian and a Portuguese.They were chosen from 187 applicants from EU countries via videos they submitted. They will be whittled down to 10, and Read more ...
Daniel Ross
Right, notebooks out everyone. Michael Tilson Thomas began this Berg/Mahler double-header with a lengthy analysis of what we were about to hear in the former’s Chamber Concerto. Whether it was informative or not (and it was), it was a bit of a spoiler. It was nice to know exactly which themes are attributed to which dedicatee, but you couldn’t help but feel the surprises in the work have been somewhat spiked by this little lecture. Still, selected LSO folk and the effective duo of Yefim Bronfman on piano and Gil Shaham on violin were on hand to try and surprise us anyway.For most of it, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2 Peter Hill (piano) (Delphian)Book 2 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier doesn’t often appear without Book 1. It’s sometimes unfairly perceived as drier, more academic than its predecessor. Bach’s didactic aim for Book 1 (“for the profit and use of musical youth desiring instruction”) remains apposite. Sensible pianists won’t underplay this, and what you want to hear is something akin to an interesting lecture delivered by a charismatic guru. And Peter Hill fits the bill – hearing him play Bach is a little like listening to a friendly primary school Read more ...
geoff brown
“I don’t want to be a Cyclops,” Pierre Boulez said in 2010, faced with the prospect of conducting a Chicago concert with only one working eye. Eye troubles, alas, have continued to bedevil the octogenarian giant of contemporary music, which is why his current engagements with the London Symphony Orchestra – there’s also a tour to Paris and Brussels this week, and a second Barbican engagement next Tuesday - have fallen into the hands of a younger composer-conductor of advanced habits, the admirable Hungarian Peter Eötvös.And what good hands they are: not perhaps as fastidiously incisive, but Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Donatella Flick, one of Britain's most important arts patrons, is furious. "Madness!" she cries in her lush Italian voice. "This is a country that was fantastic, and now there's a demolition going on, bit by bit!" We're sitting in Sir Winston Churchill's old drawing room - now her drawing room - near Kensington Gardens, and I would give a lot to see David Cameron flinching on her huge black sofa as he got a withering dressing-down. Yesterday Cameron's government agreed to delay for further consideration their big new wheeze for getting the rich to pay more tax by cutting the advantages of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Critical, urgent, hard - those are the three words used about the challenge to get the rich to pay more for the arts by the new man at the tiller. He should know. Jonathan Moulds, European President at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, is one of the super-successful, super-wealthy financiers to whom the Cameron government is desperately looking to pick up the slack as they cut back public spending. What the government hopes for is modern-day Medicis - arts patrons who use their wealth to back orchestras, performers, theatres and educational projects - and lots of them. The lobby group for this Read more ...
geoff brown
It’s over 30 years since André Previn left his post as principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. But once you’re part of the LSO’s treasured ‘family of artists’, the orchestra never lets go, year upon year inviting you back for Christmas, New Year, weddings, bar mitzvahs, any occasion going. The same with the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter – briefly in the last decade Previn’s fifth wife, though they share the same platform with just as much ease now that they’re divorced.Sunday’s unusually diverting concert formed part of the LSO’s "Artist Portrait" of Mutter: a portrait hardly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last Tuesday night saw the London Symphony Orchestra celebrating 20th century English music under the baton of Antonio Pappano, launching proceedings with a stylish (and more than a little sexy) rendition of the dance suite from Thomas Adès’ Powder Her Face. Last night the LSO were back with Adès himself for an evening offering a rather more expansive tour through the composer’s work, pairing its dense orchestral textures with a selection of songs from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn.We opened however with music from young Spanish composer Francisco Coll, Adès’s only composition student. Coll’ Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Just a few weeks ago, John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique delivered what was unquestionably one of the year’s finest concerts – performing Beethoven’s Fourth and Seventh Symphonies with more wit, swagger and verve than even the mighty Leipzig Gewandhaus could muster. Returning to Beethoven last night with the very different orchestral forces of the London Symphony Orchestra, the question was surely whether Gardiner could summon the same magic for a second time.The short answer is not quite. But when dealing with Gardiner’s meticulously detailed performances, it Read more ...
David Nice
Praise be, or slava if you prefer, to Valery Gergiev for honouring new Russian music alongside his hallmark interpretations - ever evolving or dangerously volatile according to taste – of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Stravinsky. Last LSO season featured some of the less than inspired recent works Rodion Shchedrin has been dredging by the yard. Yet few would begrudge the palm of deep and original musical thought to this past week’s heroine, Sofia Gubaidulina. Gergiev riveted a quarter-full Albert Hall with her stunning St John Passion and Resurrection at the 2001 Proms, and last night he had a Read more ...
David Nice
Highly finished literary tales of doomed nixies, like Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, seem to have prompted reams of bad art but plenty of mellifluous music. Not even all of that is on the same level. Viennese late-Romantic Zemlinsky's loose-limbed three-part Andersen homage has long floated in a limbo somewhere below the more curvaceous forms of Dvořák's Rusalka and Sibelius's The Oceanides, and not just because of unfavourable historical circumstances (the composer withdrew the work after its 1905 premiere, and it did not resurface until 1984). Still, it was good to hear it in Read more ...