Southbank Centre
Maxime Pascal
Stockhausen stands alongside Monteverdi and Beethoven as a composer who exploded the understanding of his art. Stockhausen deeply changed the relationship between space, time and music; there’s a human, intimate dimension to his composition, and he predicted the future. If Edgar Varèse anticipated the invention of electronic sound, then Stockhausen imagined a theatre of the future, combining electronics with the metamorphosis of the space and the circulation of sound in the concert hall to explore questions of acoustic properties that much newer forms of technology are still probing today. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Visit Ainola, Sibelius’s woodland house by Lake Tuusula north of Helsinki, and you’ll be told the story of the green stove. It appears that the famously synaesthetic Finnish composer identified the shade of his heating installation with the key of F major. Asked to attach a colour to the lustrous performance of his D minor violin concerto given last night by Viktoria Mullova and Paavo Järvi with the Philharmonia, I’d plump for a rich autumnal red-brown, glinting with bright golden highlights at the top but grounded in earth tones of a sumptuous depth.Mullova, of course, has played this piece Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The last time Sergio Mendes, the Brazilian bossa nova legend, played at the Royal Festival Hall was in 1980 when he opened for Frank Sinatra. He shakes his head in wonder at the memory, though it’s not so long ago in the scheme of things – his career started in the late 1950s.The audience is an age-spanning mix: aficionados of his Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66 LPs from the Sixties and Seventies as well as fans of the recent Timeless and Encanto albums, on which he’s reinterpreted his songs with musicians like the Black Eyed Peas, Erykah Badu, India.Arie, Fergie and John Legend. Mendes has Read more ...
David Nice
Vladimir Jurowski is always a conductor for making connections, so one wonders why Brahms's Second Piano Concerto wasn't the first-half choice in this programme from the start (the advertised original had been the much stormier No 1). The sleight-of-hand wit of its effervescent finale came not only as the usual surprise after the philosophical reflections of its first three movements, but also made a bridge to two great portraits of very different wags, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel and Elgar's Falstaff.It seemed almost too good to be true that Yefim Bronfman shared Jurowski's balancing act Read more ...
David Nice
Expect no cliches about toreador pianism. Red-earth flamboyance is not Javier Perianes' style, and the seven dances he offered in his programme - eight including an encore - by fellow Spaniard Manuel de Falla were not the most consistently engaging part of the recital. The lucidity he brought to Chopin and Debussy proved of the essence, though, and something absolutely fresh and new.Perianes is serious but modest and likeable in demeanour, coming straight on to the stage to probe the interior worlds of Chopin's C minor and F sharp minor Nocturnes, Op. 48. Composed in what one can only Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Great conductors, like efficient auto engines, apply a lot of torque – they can use a little energy to achieve great surges of movement. Now aged 91, the American-born Swedish maestro Herbert Blomstedt sometimes hardly seems to raise his baton-free hands. His feet, meanwhile, remain more or less immobile. Yet, like some highly-geared sports car, last night the Philharmonia zoomed, boomed or swerved at the merest distant kiss of his fingertips.Quietly but completely in command for the second of his Royal Festival Hall Concerts with the orchestra, Blomstedt shares with his fellow- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Gilbert and Sullivan did the Bible it would sound a lot like Hubert Parry’s Judith. Premiered in 1888 and last heard in London a year later, the oratorio – whose principal claim to fame is as the original home of tearjerker hymn tune Repton, better known as “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind – has been lovingly restored to life by conductor William Vann and the English Song Festival, who will record it with Chandos later this year.Fire and lashings of Old Testament brimstone all come tied up in a hearty musical bow. The setting may be Judah but the bucolic clarinets and horns are pure Albion Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Mozart in E flat (the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro) and in G (the K.453 Piano Concerto), and Schubert in C – the “Great” C major Symphony, no less – ushered spring into the Festival Hall on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon.Slimmed down to a pocket Philharmonia during the first half, the orchestra sounded a touch scrappy and a size too small for the hall during the overture. Having fluffed the concerto’s opening line, they also took a while to settle and attune themselves to the supple and urbane manner of soloist Jonathan Biss.Not yet 40, Biss (main picture) plays with the relaxed and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
No successor has yet been named to Vladimir Jurowski as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic, so it is interesting to note that Edward Gardner is making several appearances with the orchestra this season. The two conductors are similar in their dynamic approach and brisk, efficient tempos. But where Jurowski focuses on detail, drawing exceptional clarity from the ensemble, Gardner seems more impulsive, structuring the music with similar care, but punctuating to greater dramatic effect with surprisingly emphatic tuttis. This concert, of Beethoven, Elgar and Mahler, demonstrated an Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Standing next to the warm brown beast of a piano built by Blüthner in Leipzig in 1867, Sir András Schiff advised his audience last night to clear their minds and ears of preconceptions. He told us that his rendering of Brahms’s first piano concerto – tonight, he will return to play the second – “should be like a first performance”. In reality, he added, that premiere (in 1859) turned out to be “a colossal failure”. In contrast, his own version – antique instrument and all – scored a triumph that pulled much of the Royal Festival Hall crowd to their feet.However, this “historically informed” Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Feelings run high at the Hayward Gallery in a fascinating pairing of two artists from widely differing backgrounds. Kader Attia muses on unhappy, conflicted relationships between cultures in visual meditations on variations of colonialism. Diane Arbus, who died at the age Attia is now, photographed people who were often at the margins of society.Once criticised for what might appear as an obsession with freakery, it is increasingly evident how her curiosity was flavoured with sympathy and empathy. Attia is mesmerisingly obsessed with the difficulties of groups and societies, while Arbus Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just as our brief, premature spring collapsed into the bluster of Storm Freya, the Enlightenment certainties of Haydn’s more dependable cycle of nature blew into the Royal Festival Hall. Perhaps because its lovely but (for the most part) serene music tends to occupy the sunlit uplands, The Seasons has never quite secured the automatic respect accorded to the cosmic and human drama of its immediate forerunner, The Creation. Sprinkled from first to last with imitative bird calls, hunting horns, babbling brooks, croaking frogs and an entire meteorology of weather-effects, the second great Read more ...