Mozart
David Nice
Riccardo Chailly’s Strauss odyssey with his Leipzig orchestra peaked in Saxony last year, the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. I was lucky to catch a razor-sharp Till Eulenspiegel and a saturated Death and Transfiguration in Dresden’s Semperoper close to the birthday. 14 months on, and the Barbican has nothing like the same necessary air to offer around a mini-residency of richly-scored symphonic poems. But Don Juan ought to be the perfect festive opener, and here it leapt into the void as only a truly alive, disciplined interpretation can.This was a great lover very much Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The frail bridge between Baroque and Classical aesthetics was the theme for this debut UK appearance by Insula, the period-orchestra extension to Laurence Equilbey’s superb vocal ensemble accentus.With a chunky harpsichord continuo and urgent pulse, they delivered an instantly engaging response to the Miserere’s pleas for mercy and Zelenka’s relentlessly intense setting of it in which chromatic harmony is stretched on the rack and phrases are hammered in place with stabbing accents. Equilbey (profiled here by David Nice) encouraged the strongest of contrasts between a smooth legato for the Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a sunny afternoon at altitude – 1,082 metres, to be precise – in the precincts of France’s highest historic building, the austerely impressive early Gothic Abbey-Church of St-Robert, La Chaise-Dieu. I’m relaxed because I arrived the previous evening to hear the first of two concerts at the 49th Chaise-Dieu Music Festival, the Ensemble Correspondances‘ compact semi-reconstruction of an all-night “concert royal” entertainment at the court of the young Louis XIV – two hours as opposed to the 13 of the 1653 spectacle; and because I’ve spent the morning exploring the wonders of the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Antonio Salieri. Mozart’s nemesis – wrong. Beethoven’s teacher – right. Unjustly neglected in his own right – maybe. Bampton Opera have put some flesh on the bones of his reputation with an English-language production of La grotto di Trifonio, first performed in Vienna, October 1785. They have done Salieri proud: we can see for ourselves why he is who he is.He wrote a later operatic entertainment whose title encapsulates the tension at the heart of opera: First the music, and then the words. So, first the music. It’s heady stuff. Richly chromatic, sumptuously orchestrated, easing in and out Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mozart, arr. Makato Ozone: Piano Concerto No.9 Makato Ozone (piano), Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, dir. Tommy Smith (Spartacus Records)This is something pretty special. Jazzed-up Bach usually works, as Jacques Loussier has shown, and I've enjoyed recent arrangements of Stravinsky and Messiaen. But Mozart? Here is Japanese pianist Makoto Ozone's take on the Piano Concerto No.9, the Jeunehomme, accompanied by the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. It's stunning, the most potent musical pick-me-up I've encountered in months. The composer would surely have approved. As Ozone says, “There's a Read more ...
David Nice
It’s hardly surprising that at the grand old age of 86 Bernard Haitink can pack them in at the Albert Hall so that there’s no room left in the Arena and those still queueing 10 minutes before the concert have to go up to the Gallery. But he was also doing it back in 1978, when I went to hear my first Mahler “Resurrection” and found myself too late in the queue for the best standing-place in the hall, stuck in the rafters for the one and only time (never again). The Chamber Orchestra of Europe wasn’t even born then. For the decade after its foundation in 1981, it was a young orchestra; no more Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 2007, a tiny British theatre company called 1927 staged their first ever show at the Edinburgh Fringe – the darkly reimagined collection of fairytales and fables Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Now, almost a decade on, they are back where it all began – not at the Fringe but the Edinburgh International Festival, with their acclaimed Komische Oper production of The Magic Flute.If you’ve seen any of 1927’s recent theatre work – The Animals and Children Took to the Streets or Golem – you’ll be familiar with an aesthetic that blends live action and animation to create dystopian worlds Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
New Edinburgh Festival director Fergus Linehan has made it clear he wants to offer things people actually want to see. So including Wayne McGregor - prolific, popular, energetically self-promoting doyen of contemporary dance - in the dance programme for the first time makes plenty of sense. Since McGregor's frequent collaborator, contemporary composer Max Richter, was also being given his EIF debut this year, the chance to stage the UK première of one of their joint offerings, Kairos (2014) set to Richter's "Recomposed Vivaldi - Four Seasons", was obviously irresistible.That Kairos had Read more ...
David Nice
There were two reasons why I didn’t return to the Albert Hall late on Friday night to hear Andras Schiff play Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The first was that one epic, Mahler’s Sixth in the stunning performance by Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, needed properly digesting. The other was that at Easter I’d heard Jeremy Denk play the Goldbergs in Weimar, and I wanted that approach to resonate, too – dynamic, continuous, revelatory, in a very different way from how I know Schiff approaches Bach.Denk’s recitals are mandatory listening now, and the lunchtime recital yesterday at Read more ...
David Nice
Drawing an audience of five and a half thousand in to listen intently is harder than pushing out into the vasts of the Albert Hall. Yet it’s what seems to work best in this unpredictable space, and last night masterful veterans Elisabeth Leonskaja and Charles Dutoit knew exactly what to do. The results were romantic introspection in Mozart - an unfashionable but valid alternative to authentic sprightliness - and a Shostakovich Fifteenth Symphony that was more skull than skin, but a compellingly decorated skull for all that.The quietly commanding tone of the evening, in marked contrast to the Read more ...
David Nice
Yet another full Proms house sat down, and of course stood, for a rather strange six course meal which turned out not quite what the menu had led us to anticipate. While it was obvious that the rare and expensive bird dishes were going to be quickly over, the hors d’oeuvres in the shape of Mozart ballet music proved piquant but too many, and the real meat which we might have expected in Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements appeared instead in a work too often mislabelled a soufflé, Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto, through the alchemy of masterchef soloist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who also Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
So it begins. Thousands of expectant audience members in a sweltering Albert Hall – heave ho! – riotous applause for the leader as he tunes the orchestra. A few more visits and all this will seem normal again, but it’s a culture shock to be thrown straight back in on the first night.The First Night of the Proms has to tick many boxes, as does the Last Night, and in both cases the result is usually a very long evening. The season’s themes were presented – anniversary celebrations for Nielsen and Sibelius, as well as a focus on Mozart piano concertos – and we were also treated to a new work and Read more ...