Philharmonia
Gavin Dixon
Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Nobody knows de trouble I see is a popular concerto, but it’s an unlikely hit. Zimmermann maintains a distanced relationship with the spiritual on which the work is based, and, while there are jazz elements too, this is a long way from crossover. Zimmermann maintains his modernist/serialist perspective throughout, and all the jazz ideas – the trombone glissandos, the sax section replacing the French horns, the vaguely improvisatory trumpet writing – are configured within a strict and austere single-movement structure.Fortunately, both trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger and Read more ...
David Nice
Great Estonian Neeme Järvi’s two conducting sons have had varying success in London this week. Kristjan did what he could with a dog’s dinner of a Britten Sinfonia programme on Wednesday night, while older brother Paavo presumably chose the three surefire masterpieces in his Philharmonia concert yesterday evening. The climax was Nielsen’s Fifth Symphony, one of the greatest of the 20th century; certainly there’s none to cap its sheer physicality. But the same tension and uncertainties had a different kind of impact in the Flute Concerto, one of Nielsen’s later enigmas, and while Haydn’s “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
Haydn: Symphonies 31, 70 and 101 Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Linn)Josef Haydn recalled his three decades spent working for the Esterházy court in the following terms: “I was cut off from the world, there was no one near me to torment me or make me doubt myself, so I had to become original.” And the three D major symphonies on this generously-filled disc do bubble with originality; No. 31, nicknamed the Hornsignal, opens with a four-horn blast which looks forward to Tchaikovsky's 4th. Haydn's ready access to a quartet of highly paid horn virtuosi in his court 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 ...
Christopher Lambton
It's fitting that for its 50th anniversary the Edinburgh Festival Chorus should perform Berlioz’s gigantic Grande Messe des Morts. There is nothing in the large-scale orchestral repertoire in which the chorus plays so huge and significant a role – it sings throughout and the only soloist that Berlioz admits is a solitary tenor whose appearance in the "Sanctus" is almost apologetic.You don’t have to be a very acute observer of the Festival Chorus to realise that a 50th birthday, for a choir as much as for a person, is a mixed celebration. Some members of the chorus have sung in it since its Read more ...
Richard Bratby
In his memoir As I Remember Arthur Bliss is reticent about his experiences on the Western Front. He describes his “purely automatic” impulse to enlist in August 1914, and later recounts the nightmares that troubled his sleep for a decade after the Armistice. He barely touches upon the injury that felled him on the first day of the Somme, the experience of being gassed late in 1918, or indeed the death in battle of his beloved younger brother Kennard – describing an unending sense of loss in a single paragraph.And yet, he writes, “I cannot make a logical sense of my life without depicting Read more ...
David Nice
Vladimir Ashkenazy should be made an honorary Finn: not just for his constant championship of Sibelius’s orchestral works throughout his conducting life so far, but above all for the way he understands them. On the evidence of last night’s 150th anniversary concert, crowned by a superbly direct performance of the Second Symphony, his approach is now thoroughly Finnish at the deepest level in the way that it paces the sentiment, effortlessly negotiates the shifts of mood without histrionics and shears the music of romantic rhetoric. No Slavic or Teutonic plushness here.The first half, a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Even by trumpeters’ standards, Håkan Hardenberger is a flamboyant figure. He sports a sharp, tailored suit and a wing-collared shirt, and his stage presence is all swagger and pomp. HK Gruber has captured his spirit perfectly in his jazzy, experimental trumpet concerto Aerial, which has become the trumpeter’s calling card. That proved the highlight of the evening here, though, as it was followed by a lacklustre Mahler Five, a rare disappointment from the usually reliable conductor Andris Nelsons.The Gruber concerto is in two movements – one slow, one fast – but even in the slow movement there Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
While the Berlin Philharmonic's progress through London with Simon Rattle has grabbed the column inches away from the rest of the capital's classical music offerings this week, a delightful mostly Ravel programme from the Philharmonia should not be passed over. It presented the G Major Piano Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida as exemplary soloist, and an imaginative semi-staging of the “lyrical fantasy” L'Enfant et Les Sortilèges, a work too rarely performed, and which is hard to beat for sheer magic.Both of these compositions are the result of long creative processes. They are lovingly crafted Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Andris Nelsons is flavour of the month in London. He is in town to conduct The Flying Dutchman at Covent Garden, but between performances he is moonlighting at the Festival Hall, giving two concerts with the Philharmonia. This, the first, opened with a serviceable Mozart Piano Concerto No. 25 from Paul Lewis, and concluded with a Bruckner Third Symphony that was in a different league entirely.The orchestra was reduced for the Mozart, though still large for the repertoire. Nelsons and Lewis have a curious working relationship, the conductor pushing for more expression and phrase shaping than Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Hector Berlioz knew from early on in life which aspects of death he would want to avoid. He had seen quite enough of the medical textbooks that his father had tried to foist upon him. He had even got as far as smelling the dissecting table as a medical student in Paris, desperately counting the days before he could make his escape into music. The composition commission he received just a few years later in 1837 from the Minister of the Interior was exactly what he wanted and needed him to free himself from those memories, to write a requiem full of grandeur, glory and the sound and the sheen Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hartmann – Symphonies 1-8 Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, cond Markus Stenz, James Gaffigan, Michael Schønwandt, Christoph Poppen, Osmo Vänska, Ingo Metzmacher (Challenge Classics)The symphonies of Karl Amadeus Hartmann rarely get a hearing in the UK. He's rated by some as the greatest German symphonist of the 20th century, a figure who Hans Werner Henze summarised as a composer for whom “symphonic architecture was essential... as a suitable medium for reflecting the world as he experienced and understood it – as an agonizingly dramatic Read more ...