Proms
David Nice
After the enervating excesses of Salome and Elektra at the weekend, the abundance of notes at the Proms continued in a piano recital and an orchestral showstopper, but this time with built-in air conditioning. After all, both 22-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor and septuagenarian Charles Dutoit are absolutely in control of the colours they make, very occasionally too much so. But it was a rainbow-hued day inside the Cadogan and Royal Albert Halls, culminating in a spectacular and perhaps unrepeatable Respighi triple bill of Roman impressions.The Grosvenor happening (***) was a first in several Read more ...
edward.seckerson
How much familial dysfunction and lust - whether for sexual gratification or revenge - can one take in a single weekend? Salome and Elektra back-to back may on paper seem like a feast of divine decadence but no sooner had one become accustomed to the sickly sweet air of the former when the putrefaction of the latter (I always think that Strauss’ orchestra is in the final stages of decay with Elektra) filled one’s nostrils - and ears. Then there was the little matter of inevitable comparisons, of Salome - with Stemme, Runnicles and his fabulous Deutsche Oper Berlin Orchestra - being one of the Read more ...
David Nice
So here’s where I join the ranks of Old Opera Bores by declaring this Salome, Nina Stemme, the best I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens in 1978, and this Salome as in Richard Strauss’s Wilde opera from Donald Runnicles and his Deutsche Oper Berlin ensemble categorically the most near-perfect. It’s also the first time I’ve had a group of very loud, rude people behind me shouting “sit down” when I stood at the end (and John the Baptist’s God knows I don’t do that often). To which the only answers were “stand up yourselves” and “what does it take?” Most of the arena stalls eventually followed suit Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
About 10 minutes into the Brahms Third Symphony I wanted to check a name in the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s programme. I dared to turn a page. Bad idea. Such preternatural stillness had settled over the sold-out Royal Albert Hall that the gesture could probably have been spotted from the balcony. A motionless, virtually breathless audience is a rarity even at the Proms, where quality of listening is venerated; still, to hold around 6000 people quite so rapt with attention is an extraordinary skill in orchestra and conductor. But then, the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer are no Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The first of this year's two Proms by the Budapest Festival Orchestra had looked like a rather strange confection, on paper at least. With eleven scheduled contributions, and only two of them destined to make it into double figures, its timings had even given it a passing resemblance to a short but eventful cricket innings (there were also three unprogrammed extra items, but more of those later). The evening's programme, which ranged through the centuries from Mozart and Schubert up to the 1930s and Kodály, by way of one piece by Dvořák and four from the Strauss family, showed off a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Even as orchestras began to sound more and more alike, there was the Czech Philharmonic. And many of its notable characteristics remain to this day: a modest, homespun quality, warm and engaging and full of bright-eyed distinction in the woodwinds. In the pithy but immensely passionate overture to Janáček’s last opera From the House of the Dead, under their current music director Jiří Bělohlávek, the rhythmic displacements and precipitously exposed string, brass and timpani writing combined X-ray clarity with a naturalness of expression; later Dvořák in Slavonic mode kicked up his heels Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Nothing has resonated through the unfolding First World War commemorations more than the poetry of Wilfred Owen; and in terms of its grim immediacy and enduring heartbreak nothing ever could. Benjamin Britten knew that when he set down his War Requiem for posterity, counterpointing religious posturing with Owen’s indisputable truths. One fought, the other chose not to, but both proffered conscientious objections, and both came at the reality - "the pity of war, the pity war distilled" - from essentially the same place. The truly astonishing thing about War Requiem - and this has been true Read more ...
David Nice
By the time we got to the end of this Prom, with four of the five encores – the whole of Bizet’s Carmen Suite – cannily crafted to bolster the short official programme, most of the rightly euphoric audience had forgotten the most unsatisfying first half so far this season. Perhaps I start from an ungenerous standpoint. Of course Barenboim’s orchestra of players from Israel and the Arab world is a beacon of light, communication and collaboration in the worst of times, and when I first heard it in 2004 the intensity was unrivalled; last night he seemed to be deliberately dampening it down at Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The Russians were coming - and the prospect of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, even without the added attraction of hearing it in Igor Buketoff’s questionable choral arrangement where the Tsarist hymn is taken at its word and does a Boris Godunov on us, had the promenade queue fast stretching towards South Kensington. And if ever music replicated the excited buzz of something in the air Stravinsky’s Scherzo fantastique did, raising the curtain almost imperceptively through the scurrying of muted strings and surprised woodwind punctuations.Here is music that redefines the idea of airborne until, Read more ...
geoff brown
Some things that spread like wildfire, like ebola and wildfire itself, are not good news at all. But performing Nielsen’s symphonies? That’s another matter entirely. In the next concert season, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia both begin Nielsen symphony programmes, while the LSO several years ago cycled through one of their own with Sir Colin Davis. Yesterday, the BBC National Symphony of Wales and their current Danish conductor – will it ever be someone Welsh? – bit off one of the mightiest in the set, the battle-scarred Fifth, with its disruptive side-drum. At this rate, Read more ...
David Nice
After the European Union Youth Orchestra hit unsurpassable heights last week, the Proms plateau of excellence remained available to another youth carnival of weird and wonderful 20th century monsters. If the EUYO showed us that Shostakovich’s bewildering Fourth Symphony, for all its grim trajectory and ultimate annihilation, is also an orchestral showpiece, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain demonstrated that the same could be said, with freedom and character encouraged by conductor Edward Gardner, for Stravinsky’s Petrushka before Lutosławski, following Bartok’s example, Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The levels of refinement now exhibited by the Hallé, the stylishness and elegance of the playing, define the special relationship that they and Mark Elder have cemented over the last decade and a half. The opening bars of Berlioz’s Le corsaire came off the page like a manifesto for French sensibilities with rapier-like strings parrying airborne woodwinds like the most flexible of swashbuckling foils. The whole overture was so light on breath and string as to be positively balletic. Elder’s work with period instruments had properly informed both characterisation and sonority; there wasn’t an Read more ...