Prokofiev
David Nice
It was melody versus the machine last night as Sakari Oramo’s six voyages around the Nielsen symphonies with the BBC Symphony Orchestra hit the high noon of the 1920s. The fallout from the First World War found three composers scarred but fighting fit. Prokofiev seemed less than his essential insouciant self in a Third Piano Concerto of more than usual bizarreries, and it was twice through the human meat grinder for the Viennese of Ravel’s La Valse and his Spanish proletarians in Boléro. The bookending made programmatic sense but in the end proved one work too many, exhausting for both Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ives: Symphonies nos 1 and 2 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew Davis (Chandos)Mervyn Cooke’s sleeve note for this disc, the first in Sir Andrew Davis’s Charles Ives cycle, sensibly punctures the main myth surrounding this most fascinating of composers. That he was insurance man by day, avant-garde pioneer by night isn’t quite the truth. Spend some time listening to Ives’s sprawling, ear-stretching 4th Symphony and you’ll begin to wonder whether he knew what he was doing. He did, of course, and a few enjoyable hours spent in the company of these two symphonies demonstrate that Ives Read more ...
David Nice
Over the past two Saturdays, Vladimir Jurowski and a London Philharmonic on top form have given us a mini-festival of great scores for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The hallucinogenic vision of ancient Greece in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé last week was succeeded yesterday evening by the fresh-as-poster-paint colours of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and excerpts from Prokofiev’s Chout (The Buffoon), a longer score in the Petrushka mould which has suffered disproportionate neglect (though not from the LPO – both Alexander Lazarev and Jurowski have conducted the complete ballet). Both works, especially in Read more ...
David Nice
Shock and Shakespeare were the two forces that powered a typically thoughtful programme from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. I said as much in a pre-performance talk where the links weren’t hard to find: that also means coming clean at the start about my involvement. But the world needs to know about this one. With no intention to write about the event, I found myself too astonished to keep quiet by the brilliant work of Brazilian Carlos Miguel Prieto, a conductor I haven’t encountered before, and struck afresh by the top-notch invention in James MacMillan’s The Berserking, now 25 years Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A memorial concert to a busy man. Alexander Ivashkin, who died last January, was a cellist, a scholar, a teacher, an authority on Russian music, and much else besides. This evening’s concert faced up to the daunting challenge of commemorating the many diverse aspects of Ivashkin’s career. The results were predictably wide-ranging, yet always coherent, and an impressive focus was brought to this mixed but never eclectic programme.Credit, then, to Danny Driver. The concert was organised by the University of Goldsmiths, where Ivashkin was Professor of Music, and where Driver has succeeded him as Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The question with Moscow City Ballet is: should I judge them on what they are, or on what they claim to be? The touring company, a self-supporting private enterprise, takes productions of classic ballets (The Nutcracker, Swan Lake et al) round provincial theatres in this and a few other countries. By the standards of pure classical ballet, the product they peddle is decidedly second-, if not third-rate: the dancers come from the fringes of the classical scene in Russia and the Ukraine and the choreography is simple, and even then often poorly executed. Their website's claim that "the company Read more ...
graham.rickson
Prokofiev: Symphonies 1 and 2, Sinfonietta Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Kirill Karabits (Onyx)Only two of Prokofiev's seven symphonies seem to be performed with any regularity. Of the remainder, nos. 2 and 4 remain the shadiest, so it's pleasing to hear a blistering, cogent account of the former. Prokofiev's friend Konstantin Balmont described the composer as "a sunny Scythian". Knowing that, it's far easier to enjoy this 1925 symphony's many positives. The first movement's relentless energy does sound undeniably positive in Kirill Karabits's hands, and his Bournemouth Symphony Read more ...
David Nice
In one way, it makes sense to give your London comeback concert in the venue where you made your European debut 44 years ago. Yet the Royal Festival Hall is a mighty big place for a violin-and-piano recital. Kyung Wha Chung had no problem nearly filling it last night with an audience including whole Korean families, but might have wished she hadn’t in the ailment-ridden dead of winter; her look could have killed a coughing child ("go and get a glass of water" is what I think I heard her say, from my very distant seat). There were swathes of panache in an emotionally demanding programme, but Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
The knots on the purse-strings have certainly been untied at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and it was good to hear another world première in less than a week. This time it was the turn of Michael Torke, the composer of Ecstatic Orange and Yellow Pages and a prolific composer of much else besides. But why this piece? There’s a bit of a connection with “Strawberry Fields Forever”, that iconic Beatles single, and his piece Tahiti was released on CD and recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music outfit Ensemble 10/10.The new Concerto for Orchestra was a single- Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s one of the ironies of life and art that Prokofiev’s tenderest and most romantic opera was composed at a time when he was abandoning his wife in favour of a Moscow literature student half his age. Betrothal in a Monastery is a setting in Russian of an opera libretto by Sheridan about the attempt of a Spanish grandee to marry off his young daughter to an elderly fish merchant. Like most comic operas, and some not so comic, it’s set in Seville; the wife Prokofiev was walking out on was Spanish.The trauma of such events naturally plays little or no part in the opera, which is a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Partitas 1-6 Igor Levit (piano) (Sony)Martin Geck's sleeve essay accompanying this pair of discs is a good read, hinting at the subtleties and complexities lying just below the surface of what may, superficially, look like six simple suites of dance movements. Bach's title page for the first Partita describes it as music "for keyboard practice... composed for music lovers, to refresh their spirits". Geck quotes from a letter about Bach written by Schumann in 1840: “I confess my sins to this lofty figure every day, while seeking to purify and strengthen myself through him... I'm Read more ...
David Nice
Comparisons, even on paper, between two season openers from London orchestras could hardly have been more instructive. I didn’t attend Valery Gergiev’s London Symphony Orchestra concert last week, for reasons several times outlined on theartsdesk. But quite apart from the fact that Gergiev and his court pianist Denis Matsuev are active supporters of Putin's “Might is Right” campaign in the Ukraine – a situation which tens of thousands of Muscovites are beginning to challenge – Matsuev is also the worst of barnstormers. Last night, on the other hand, we had mercurial pianist Jean-Efflam Read more ...