piano
Gabriela Montero, Kings Place review - improvising to a Chaplin classic is the icing on a zesty cake
David Nice
As the Statue of Liberty appears in Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, our improvising pianist proclaims “The Star-Spangled Banner”, only for it to slide dangerously. The passengers on the ship taking them to a new life are brutally cordoned by the crew; enter the same fierce bass-register tritones which made us jump out of our seats as Gabriela Montero began her recital with Prokofiev’s Sarcasms, then a whiff of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata, and later, as our hero finds himself dollarless in a New York restaurant, echoes of the other Second Sonata in the programme. Prokofiev and Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This concert almost had me in tears before a single note was played because it marked (joy!) the first classical concert to take place in the Usher Hall since it was shut in March 2020. She has been closed for eighteen long months, but she hasn’t aged a day.The final piece of music I heard in the Usher Hall before lockdown was Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, so there’s a pleasing symmetry to the fact that it’s also the first I heard when it reopened. And it’s played here by a crack musical team, one that is still glowing from its magnificent Mozart at this summer’s Proms. That concert, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Dazzling. That was the first adjective with which the illustrious Marian McPartland described Helen Sung’s piano playing, when she had the remarkable Houston-born pianist as her guest for an episode of the NPR radio show Piano Jazz in 2006.On Quartet+ (Sunnyside), Sung is celebrating “landmark women in jazz”, including McPartland (a new arrangement of “Kaleidoscope”, the theme from the radio show, worked in with a string quartet version of “Melancholy Mood”), and also Mary Lou Williams, Geri Allen, Carla Bley, and Toshiko Akiyoshi. “True pioneers and giants all,” as Sung describes them. Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
A gem in Edinburgh International Festival’s classical music programming has always been the Queen’s Hall series. Hosting some of the finest chamber musicians on the international stage, that venue has seen countless incredible, more intimate performances over the years. While the doors of the Queen’s Hall remain closed for International Festival activity this year (there are still other concerts happening there), EIF’s chamber music programme is currently taking place just down the road, in a purpose-built outdoor venue housed in Edinburgh’s Old College Quad. And, despite the obvious concerns Read more ...
David Nice
In the beginning, 38 years ago, came a career-making Mahler Third Symphony for Esa-Pekka Salonen in his first concert with the Philharmonia. Reassembling that vast epic wouldn't be possible under present circumstances. Last night, ending 13 years as the orchestra’s music director, Salonen returned to the purest source, Bach, cannily but also movingly referencing two of his predecessors in the post, Klemperer and Sinopoli, in two arrangements, and ended where the first of these farewell concerts started, with Beethoven in C major, homaging another early partnership, with the wonderful Mitsuko Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
By chance, I started watching this streamed concert shortly after hearing a live BBC broadcast of the Philharmonia playing in front of an audience for the first time in over a year. Much though I love the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, steadfast companion over many Edinburgh winters, from student standby to bus pass, there is no doubt where I would have rather been. A link, a click and a screen in my office do not even approach the palpable excitement in the Royal Festival Hall that evening (David Nice was there and confirmed that in his review). Orchestral music needs an audience, and it Read more ...
David Nice
One of the many things we’ll miss when Esa-Pekka Salonen moves on from his 13 years as the Philharmonia’s principal conductor will be his programming. For this first of his farewell concerts, he’s not only chosen what he loves but made sure it all fits. No two symphonies could be more different than Beethoven’s First and Sibelius’s Seventh (his last), yet they both hover – Beethoven playfully, Sibelius enigmatically – around the key of C major. The multi-part string hymn near the beginning of the Seventh was more than prefaced by the wind and brass of a Stravinsky masterpiece. And if Liszt’s Read more ...
Jon Turney
Music and time each dwell inside the other. And the more you attend to musical sounds, the more complex their temporal entanglements become. Time structures music, rhythmically and in its implied narratives. From outside, we place it in biographical time, whether cradle songs, serenades to a lover or wakes. Then music sits in history, yet somehow also apart from it, the latest sounds prone to evoke links between sonic effects and emotion that feel inexpressibly ancient. More ancient still, when we muse on bird choruses, animal cries or the thousand mile songs of whales, human music seems to Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
I can’t deny that it’s great to be able to experience a recital by Benjamin Grosvenor live from the Barbican despite lockdown, streamed into your own home. The filming of this performance on Saturday night was superb, clear and well paced; we could see his hands up close, from a good variety of angles, and they are well worth seeing; and the coloured lighting was coordinated nicely with the music, for instance sea-turquoise for Ravel’s “Ondine”. Nonetheless, a certain heartbreak remains upon seeing the pianist adrift on a small platform constructed in the middle of the empty stalls, like a Read more ...
David Nice
It seems right that (arguably) the greatest orchestra in the world has (unarguably) the best livestreaming and archive service. Thanks to a vital musicians’ Covid testing set-up, the Berlin Philharmoniker is even more supreme online now that it can field a full team for a work as opulently hard-hitting as Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, without distancing – pairs of string players share stands – even if also, still, without a live audience. The programming has been uncommonly interesting lately, with a "Golden Twenties" series featuring rich and rare repertoire, but even a one-off guest Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Sergey Prokofiev died on 5 March 1953, on the same day as Stalin. Perhaps that uncomfortable coincidence makes March the perfect time for a festival of Russian music. Pushkin House, the Russian cultural centre based in a Georgian villa in Bloomsbury, is holding one right now. Filmed in their empty salon, their chamber music and solo recitals are online to view for several weeks, the concerts released one at a time on designated days, and offering some familiar music, but focusing on much that is unexpected and occasionally revelatory. After an engaging introductory talk by the festival Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
From a distance, the pianist Christian Blackshaw bears an uncanny resemblance to Franz Liszt, silver hair swept back à la 19th century. At the piano, though, you could scarcely find two more different musicians. There seems not to be a flamboyant bone in Blackshaw’s body. His playing of the Mozart piano sonatas at the Wigmore Hall over the past few years has been matchlessly gorgeous, pure as the driven snow, and in yesterday’s short but intense programme of Mozart and Schubert, the solitary pianist’s performance spoke direct to his locked-down listeners, screen to screen, with playing Read more ...