Prokofiev
Hanna Weibye
In London, seeing the same ballet company do three different pieces in three different theatres over four nights would be some kind of festival. In Berlin, it's just business as usual – albeit quite a busy week! – for the hard-working Staatsballett. Wednesday night saw the opening of a new run of John Cranko's Romeo and Juliet, with Polina Semionova as Juliet, at the Deutsche Oper, Thursday a performance of Artistic Director Nacho Duato's Multiplicity: Forms of Silence and Emptiness at the Komische Oper, while last night the Schiller Theater was packed out for Giselle with the Stuttgart Read more ...
David Nice
London has been missing out on Boris Giltburg for too long. He's been playing Shostakovich concertos back to back with Petrenko in Liverpool, and the big Rachmaninov works up in Scotland (see theartsdesk's review today of the latest Royal Scottish National Orchestra programme). But like his similarly Russian-born peers – take your pick of a favourite among Yevgeny Subdin, Daniil Trifonov, Rustem Hayroudinoff, Nikolay Lugansky, Alexander Melnikov and Dennis Kozhukhin – the 32-year-old Israeli-based pianist unleashes astonishing stamina and intellect in cleverly-concocted recital programmes; we Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When producing Cinderella, the main question is: sweet or sour? That Prokofiev score is splendid, but it's no walk in a candy shop; in Act I the stepsisters have passages so scraping, spiky and dissonant that sugar-coating would seem to be out of the question. On the other hand, there's a Nutcracker-like family audience at the ready for pretty productions which skim lightly over the whole neglect and cruelty thing – but that leaves you with a story so bland that even Disney had to invent singing mice to perk it up.Big international choreographers tend to go for more acidity, but with Read more ...
David Nice
Prokofiev milestones stood proudly at the ends of the New Year’s first three major UK concert programmes. The Second Piano Sonata raged as the zenith of the composer’s generous enfant terrible period in Christian Ihle Hadland’s journey through two centuries of piano masterpieces; the Fifth Symphony rocketed skywards in the hands of enthusiastic but also technically brilliant teenagers in Leeds, according to theartsdesk's Graham Rickson, and presumably in London too; and the late Cello Sonata celebrated outward simplicity alongside inner ambivalence in the electrifying duo performance of Read more ...
graham.rickson
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain’s standard of playing is consistently impressive, so much so that it’s easy to forget that the ensemble is effectively reconstituted from scratch each autumn. Last night’s fresh incarnation, deftly conducted by Nicholas Collon, sounded as if they’d been playing together for decades, though without any sense of complacency which that might bring. When you’ve 163 teenagers squeezed onto a stage, the worry is that the details will get lost in a blurry soup of sound. But no; this account of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony was immaculate.Collon’s flowing Read more ...
graham.rickson
Roger Doyle: Time Machine (Heresy Records)Roger Doyle’s Time Machine is a suite of 11 linked pieces, its starting point being the composer’s archiving of telephone messages recorded while living in late 1980s Dublin. Younger readers won’t know what an answering machine is, let alone understand the joys of living in a world without smartphones. One where calls could only be made or received if you were actually at home, and people turned up punctually to meetings. Happy days indeed. Doyle half-thought that his cassettes might eventually come in useful, and began to assemble the work from 2010 Read more ...
David Nice
Why play a very substantial act of ballet music in concert? In the case of Aurora’s wedding entertainment from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, there are at least three good reasons. It embraces the most inventive and unorthodox of divertissements in any ballet – the one in The Nutcracker comes a close second – and a symphony orchestra deserves the chance to perform at least a substantial chunk of what Stravinsky called Tchaikovsky’s chef d’oeuvre. Besides, you won’t have heard every sequence in any choreographed version, not even the very thorough one by Matthew Bourne, who includes more Read more ...
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Symphonies 4 (Op.47) & 5, Dreams Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Kiril Karabits (Onyx)Prokofiev was adept at recycling good ideas. His Symphony No. 3 is linked thematically to the opera The Fiery Angel, and the less abrasive No 4 shares some ideas with the ballet The Prodigal Son. The piece was radically revised in 1947 and became Prokofiev's Op 112, though I've always preferred the more compact earlier version. Composed in 1929, it's full of delectable ideas, the lyricism anticipating the scores written after his return to Russia in the mid-1930s. Like the beautiful woodwind Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Gergiev’s programme for this concert raised eyebrows when the Proms were announced: all five Prokofiev piano concertos, presented in chronological order, over the course of a long evening. As it turned out, he had some good reasons for his plan. The three Russian pianists he lined up – Daniil Trifonov (Concertos 1 and 3), Sergei Babayan (2 and 5), and Alexei Volodin (4) – had between them the talent to carry any programme. And the composer benefited too, with his Fourth and Fifth Concertos, both difficult works to programme, finding a natural home, and both appearing for the first time at the Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christopher Wheeldon is the purveyor of pretty. You can perfectly well see why San Francisco Ballet, who commissioned a new full-length work from Wheeldon in 2012, got cold feet at the prospect of tackling the difficult, Britten-scored Prince of the Pagodas, and steered Wheeldon instead towards Cinderella, with its ready-made audience of little girls in blue sparkly dresses and splendid Prokofiev score. I'm sure it has been a useful addition to SFB's repertory, and to that of Dutch National Ballet - the co-commissioning company who gave the piece its UK première last night - but I wonder Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hans Gál: Symphonies 1-4 Orchestra of the Swan/Kenneth Woods (Avie)Previously paired with those by Schumann, Hans Gál'sfour symphonies are now sensibly repackaged as a slimline two-cd set. Musicians are always trying to make the case for previously neglected composers, and it can be a crushing disappointment when you dive in but can't see what all the fuss is about. Havergal Brian's appeal still eludes me, but I've enjoyed getting to know Weinberg. I also "got" Gál; he's definitely one of the good ones. Conductor Kenneth Wood's accessible sleeve notes suggest that Gál's obscurity is partly Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It was as a violin soloist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra that Joseph Swensen first appeared, in the mid-1980s, on the Scottish musical scene. He went on to become the orchestra’s principal conductor – a long and fruitful collaboration that lasted from 1996 to 2005. In this concert he returned to the orchestra where he now holds the title Conductor Emeritus, as both conductor and soloist, taking the podium for Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks and Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, and picking up his violin for Prokofiev’s Cinq Mélodies and Barber’s Violin Concerto.I have lost Read more ...