Sibelius
Graham Rickson
William Alwyn: Piano Music Mark Bebbington (Somm)William Alwyn was a Suffolk-based composer who died in 1985. He dabbled in painting and writing, and held the post of Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music for nearly 30 years. His output included a cycle of symphonies and the music to several well-known British films. Curiously, he was related to the actor Gary Cooper, even providing the score to Cooper's final screen appearance. Alwyn's piano output, as represented here, more than deserves an occasional hearing. Mark Bebbington gives us graceful readings of Alwyn's 11 Read more ...
David Nice
Among the diaspora of younger-generation Russian or Russian-trained pianists, there are at least four whose intellect and poetry match their technique. Three whose craft was honed at the Moscow or St Petersburg Conservatories – Yevgeny Sudbin, Alexander Melnikov and the inexplicably less well-feted Rustem Hayroudinoff – have made England their home. Boris Giltburg - the youngest of the group with a fifth, Denis Kozhukhin, close on his heels - left Moscow for Tel Aviv when he was a child and has had a different training. Coltish and capricious at times, his imagination may yet turn out to be Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Legends, myths, and Nietzsche’s Superman - which for the purposes of this London Philharmonic Prom was none other than Vladimir Jurowski himself. His extraordinary ear, his nurturing and layering of texture, was a constant source of intrigue and delight and at least one performance - that of Sibelius’ tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter - was revelatory in its musical insights. That began distinctively with a strange little serenade for cello (Kristina Blaumane) and took us to wild and wonderful places in the hinterland of Sibelius’s imagination.But on a blind listening who might we have supposed Read more ...
David Nice
Concert programmes are designed to make the mind flexible with constant contrasts. More often, though, the great is the enemy of the good-ish. Last night an Elgar masterpiece was always going to overshadow its second-half predecessor, a hazily pleasant piece for strings and – novelty value – six harps by the colleague Elgar called “dear old Gran”, candidate for this Proms season's resuscitation attempt Granville Bantock. And earlier, Sibelius bopped a BBC commission on the head with supernatural noises that could have been conjured yesterday.Always beware – I’ve written it several times Read more ...
David Nice
Once in a blue moon, the judges would seem to have got it wrong. I can think only of 2001, when stunning Latvian mezzo Elina Garanča failed to win the coveted goblet but has since gone on to deserved fame as one of the top half-dozen singers on the international stage today. This year, though, it was business as usual: the panel lit up by a gracious Dame Kiri, three of the singers who didn’t make it to the final,sound telly opera trouper Mary King and I all agreed that regal American with a twinkle Jamie Barton deserved the palm.How so, given that all five finalists – not to mention the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
In its ebbs, flows and final grand flourishing, the career of Sir Colin Davis was reminiscent of some of the great musical masterpieces with which he became closely identified. From Mozart to Tippett, Berlioz to Beethoven and Sibelius, Davis proved himself one of the major international conductors of the post-war era. If in his earlier years he acquired a reputation for being fractious and confrontational with his musicians, the Davis of the last three decades was wise and unruffled, finding in music an almost transcendental refuge. "It amounts to an alternative reality," he told Tom Service Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier András Schiff (ECM)András Schiff was a finalist in the 1975 Leeds International Piano Competition. He came third – presumably having confounded expectations by playing Bach’s D minor keyboard concerto instead of Rachmaninov or Tchaikovsky. Schiff has remained a connoisseur’s pianist – defiantly unshowy, softly spoken, cerebral. This is his second Well-Tempered Clavier (an earlier version was taped by Decca in the mid-1980s). The sense that Schiff is playing primarily for himself remains. We’re more than welcome to eavesdrop, but there’s no performing to Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Many years ago in Helsinki I met Sibelius’s daughter, Margareta, and her husband, the conductor Jussi Jalas. He used to come to Manchester to conduct the Halle. And it was he who rescued from obscurity his father-in-law’s only completed opera, The Maiden in the Tower, composed in 1896. This he did in 1981 on Finnish radio, not long before he died. I can’t help thinking how thrilled he would have been to know that the work was at last receiving its UK premiere at the Buxton Festival.It is linked in a unique double bill with another neglected one-act opera, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kashchkei the Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
There’s always a bit of a buzz around a premiere, even one which may seem slightly off-the-wall. Jan Sandström’s Echoes of Eternity is a concerto for two solo trombones – unusual in itself, given that there are precious few concerti for just one solo trombone – and symphony orchestra. Add to that the fact that one of the soloists is also the conductor and it’s easy to see that this piece is beginning to get complicated.Even more odd was the fact that it started last night with neither conductor not the other soloist on the platform. One moment, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra was Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Havergal Brian: Symphony No 1 The Gothic BBC National Orchestra of Wales, BBC Concert Orchestra etc/Martyn Brabbins (Hyperion)The performers involved are too numerous to list above; Hyperion do include the names of every instrumentalist, soloist and choir member in the booklet, more than 800 of them. This is a recording of the 2011 Proms performance, recorded with spectacular definition by the BBC on 17 July last year. Where to begin? This is a hugely impressive record of a great performance, but I’m not convinced that this is great music. But you can’t help feeling thankful Read more ...
David Nice
Is it ever a good idea to programme two symphonies by one composer in a single concert? Maverick Valery Gergiev is likely to stand alone in applying the rule to Mahler. Yet curiously his Prom marathon of two big instalments made more sense as stages on a journey than yoking together the outwardly less time-consuming symphonic adventures of Sibelius. Jukka-Pekka Saraste's attempt last night to run the opposing approaches of the last two Sibelius symphonies head to head worked no better than usual.Maybe it partly felt that way because I have too fixed an idea of how much there is behind the Read more ...
Graham Rickson
William Mathias: Piano Concertos 1 & 2; Vaughan Williams: Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra Mark Bebbington (piano) Ulster Orchestra/George Vass (Somm)Welsh composer William Mathias’s first two piano concertos are the most enjoyable things on this disc. The earlier work was written in 1955 while Mathias was still a student, winning him a scholarship to study composition with Lennox Berkeley in London. It’s a really engaging piece – spiky and rhythmically interesting. Granted, it’s not as challenging as anything by Bartók or Stravinsky, but it’s acerbic, exciting and striking. There’s Read more ...