Southbank Centre
Sebastian Scotney
Gabriela Montero stands out as different. She is an American-based improvising classical pianist of real quality. She has a courageous civil rights message to convey about the tragedy of unseen arrests and murders in her native Venezuela, but is nonetheless happy to take her curtain call draped in the colourful Venezuelan flag. That sense of difference is reinforced by the staid context of the Southbank Centre's International Piano Series: concerts which almost all start at 7.30 pm, with roughly half on Wednesdays. There's nothing inherently wrong with that predictability, given the Read more ...
David Nice
Valery Gergiev once described Yevgeny Svetlanov’s USSR - later Russian - State Symphony Orchestra to me as “an orchestra with a voice”. Then Svetlanov died and the voice cracked. Which are the other big Russian personalities now? Gergiev’s own Mariinsky? I don’t hear it. Yuri Temirkanov can still bend the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra to his own whim of iron. The Russian National Orchestra was never in the running. But the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, to give its full title, still sounds as deep and rich as it did when I last heard it live nearly 30 years ago.You can Read more ...
David Nice
When I last saw Vadim Repin in action, he was premiering a work of terrific energy and invention which is here to stay, James MacMillan's Violin Concerto. Tonight in Birmingham and on Monday at the Royal Festival Hall he is back on familiar territory with old friends – Vladimir Fedoseyev and the Tchaikovsky (formerly the Moscow Radio) Symphony Orchestra - in one of the pieces which brought him world recognition at 17 as among the handful of truly great violinists in the world today, the Tchaikovsky concerto. The contrast is enough to show the kind of questing player he is, a master Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Vasily Petrenko used his baton like a piratical rapier to galvanise the London Philharmonic violins in their flourishes of derring-do at the start of Berlioz’s Overture Le Corsaire. And the brilliance was in the quicksilver contrasts, the lightness and wit of inflection which lent a piquancy to the panache of this great concert opener. The arrival of the main theme - tantalisingly delayed - was almost balletic in its vivacity and even the final trumpet-led assault suggested a Byronic hero as French as he was feral. One of Petrenko’s great strengths as a conductor lies with the sharpness of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was the first of three Royal Festival Hall concerts during the first half of 2014 from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and its principal conductor Charles Dutoit, all three programmes consisting entirely of French music. The other two will be in May. In between the Swiss-born conductor, a sprightly 77-year-old, will have picked up a Lifetime Achievement gong at the International Classical Music Awards in Warsaw.The relationship between the RPO and Dutoit seems to work well, not least because the repertoire he is working with them on is abolutely his home territory. These were the works Read more ...
David Nice
Baleful prophecies were rife before the concert. Was Vladimir Jurowski right to let Mahler’s only total tragedy among his symphonies, the Sixth, share the programme with anything else, least of all a new viola concerto in which the solo instrument’s naturally pale cast of thought seemed likely to be indulged by James MacMillan – another composer not afraid of rhetorical angst?As it turned out, the concerto had as much of the healthily extrovert about it as MacMillan’s immediate predecessors in the form for oboe and violin, while Jurowski’s Mahler wasn’t, it seemed, out to blitz us after all. Read more ...
geoff brown
Readers who recall the 1872 Paris premiere of Offenbach’s Fantasio have had 141 years to wonder when its British debut would arrive. The long wait ended yesterday when Opera Rara, that valiant and necessary company dedicated to dusting off neglected beauties in concert versions and recordings, joined forces with its Artistic Director Sir Mark Elder and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. One flick of the baton and the overture began, with two limpid flutes gracefully dangling arm in arm over the unison cellos’ bass line.But the overture to what? Based on a play by Alfred de Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams’ millennial conflagration of musical poems about childbirth, destruction and the divine made manifest not only served as a seasonal farewell and a transcendent epilogue to the Southbank’s year of 20th-century music The Rest is Noise; it also stood pure and proud as a masterpiece.This is what maverick director Peter Sellars’ multimedia information overload had not allowed this already complex work to seem in the Barbican performance following the December 2000 Paris premiere (Adams soon came to admit the mistake of giving free rein to his usually trusty collaborator). God knows the Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Setting bankers, Baroness Thatcher, tax-dodging multinationals and Woody Guthrie to music? These days, it could only be a Billy Bragg gig. Reports of Bragg losing his political teeth, based on slightly guarded reviews of his latest album, Tooth & Nail, are on the evidence of last night greatly exaggerated. This is a songwriter who could no more detach his ideology than his right arm, and still play his guitar. He combined new songs and old favourites in equal measure. Many pieces used a pedal steel guitar, adding a delicious rustic wail. Bragg pre-empted criticism of the technical Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was a strange moment at the end of yesterday's recital when, having exhausted their repertoire, octogenarians György and Márta Kurtág began to look around anxiously, wondering what more they could offer us. They eyed each other, then us, arms outstretched, shoulders shrugging guiltily, like they’d been caught with an empty fridge. Another standing ovation and I felt they might have returned with a plate of fig rolls.This feeling of domesticity, as if we were visiting gran and grandad’s, that Márta and György's recitals inevitably evoke, is not an incidental element to Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Five minutes into this concert, at that stage a polite cello and piano duo, there was a raucous bellowing from the rear, so loud that the front stalls leapt. The delicate cello spiccato continued, despite the persistent bellowing. Gradually, the musicians adapted to the new sound, and to widespread astonishment, Senegalese singer Mola Sylla, chanting in Wolof, descended through the stalls onto the stage. It was shamelessly theatrical, but it set the tone for a highly original and technically skilful performance, if also self-consciously provocative, sometimes to the edge of self parody 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 ...