Southbank Centre
igor.toronyilalic
Anything anyone else can do, we can do better, seemed the mantra last night. It's probably a bit churlish to accuse the finest orchestra in the world of arrogance - surely that's their job? But the first night of the Berlin Philharmonic's four-day stay in London (yesterday, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, tonight and tomorrow, the Barbican), in which three of the four pieces required conductorless chamber ensembles, did seem decidedly show-offy. Can these very fine orchestral members really rattle off a quartet as well as a symphony? Not without Simon Rattle, they can't.That's not to say that Read more ...
David Nice
It's hard to believe that Yannick Nézet-Séguin could ever turn in a less-than-electrifying concert. According to theartsdesk, he did just that a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't there so I can't comment (though I can credit a rough edge or two). What I do know is that last night was showbusiness as usual: the phenomenal urge to communicate, with a committed diva in tow; the rounding-off and energising of every phrase; and a danger to the music-making, meriting a pop-star reception from the audience at the end, which that live-wire maverick among composers, Hector Berlioz, would have adored.So Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Something of a bad boy in the Baroque world, Philip Pickett can generally be relied on to provoke discussion. Whether it’s by teaming up with one of Rolling Stone magazine’s Greatest Guitarists of All Time, or restaging Purcell’s The Fairy Queen with tumblers, jugglers and an excess of hand luggage, there’s always an angle. While collaborators, contexts and repertoire may change, what you can generally set your watch by is the quality of the musicianship – which made last night’s concert all the more of a puzzle.The Fairy Queen is something of an awkward work. Classed generally as a semi- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It was Leonard Bernstein who declared of English music that it was “too much organ voluntary in Lincoln Cathedral, too much Coronation in Westminster Abbey, too much lark ascending, too much clodhopping on the fucking village green”. Fey, whimsical and faintly patterned with chintz – English music doesn’t always get the best press. In the hands of the Britten Sinfonia however, it defies any notion of pastel prettiness, stepping out in only the feistiest and most glorious Technicolor.Any half-decent orchestra can start a note convincingly – just watch your local amateur symphony in action of a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Take one venerated living pianist and one venerated epic of the piano canon and what do you get? Two and a half hours of the most inert pianism imaginable.That there was a human with a pulse performing the first book of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier was only confirmed about half an hour in. A flicker of emotion, variety, suppleness, reared its head in the E-flat prelude. Character attempted to creep into proceedings briefly in the Fugue in E major. Any flashes of communication, generosity, warmth, rhythmic lightness or dynamic expression that one encountered were Read more ...
David Nice
"You have to start somewhere," remarked Debussy drily at the 1910 premiere of young Stravinsky's Firebird ballet. Even so, that was far more of a somewhere than the ultra-nationalistic Hungarian tone poem Kossuth, first major orchestral flourish of Béla Bartók, the Russian's senior by one year. In choosing it to launch Infernal Dance, the Philharmonia's 2011 celebration not of Stravinsky (as the title weirdly implies) but Bartók, principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen showed how far his main Magyar travelled to works like the hyper-percussive First Piano Concerto and the ballet-pantomime The Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The great thing about the paucity of Mahler compositions is that, when anniversary time comes, his late-Romantic buddies get to join in. And some of them, like Alexander Zemlinsky in his ravishing Lyric Symphony - being given a rare outing by the London Philharmonic Orchestra last night - sometimes seem to be better at Mahler than Mahler.The Lyric Symphony is cast in the mould of Das lied von der Erde, a symphony with voices, with an Oriental text. There is also a similarity in the musical arc of the two works, both of which begin boldly and end in blissful resignation. Differences, however, Read more ...
David Nice
Most of us don't object to experiments in concert presentation - the occasional one-off showcase to lure the young and suspicious into the arcane world of attentive concert-going, the odd multimedia event as icing on the cake. It's only those pundits obsessed with the key word "accessibility" who tell us that the basic concept of sitting (or standing, as they have at the Proms for well over a century) and listening with respect for those around us needs overhauling. It's a typical journalistic conception of "either/or" instead of "all approaches welcome" - a case of what an American academic Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The up - which I’m sorry not to have reported on before it ended last night - was the Spanish puppetry troupe Teatro Corsario, who made their hour’s strut and fret upon the stage in the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room a pleasingly diverting wee horror tale, La Maldición de Poe (The Curse of Poe), filled with gory corpses and spectral lighting and awful bloodthirsty characters.Mashing up three Poe stories - The Black Cat, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the ditty Annabel Lee - the little team of five came up with an impressively populated narrative where Edgar fell in love with sick Annabel Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Mahler, Mahler and anyone who even remotely knew Mahler. There is, of course, more to the South Bank's 2011 season listings than this but the great symphonic agoniser (and his many chums) forms the bedrock of the classical programming as we all go wild for the centenary of his death this year. In contemporary music big names such as Rumer, Elaine Paige and Brian Wilson will pack them in, while newcomers like Josh T Pearson and Melissa Laveaux have first Southbank exposure. The London International Mime Festival in January leads off dance and performance, which has a child-friendly look this Read more ...
Ismene Brown
London is a magical place at this time of year - so many streets with their individual lighting schemes and colours, and nowhere I think is lovelier than the new-look Southbank Centre, where from the side of the Festival Hall swings a spacious canopy of silver-blue trickles reflected in the glass of the new cafés alongside, a captivating, super-chic Thames-side installation. Into this urban grotto last night Kneehigh Theatre’s bouncy, folksy Hansel and Gretel came as welcome as a homemade mince pie.This is another ration of the ever-popular Brothers Grimm this Christmas, and very superior Read more ...
David Nice
Despite footsteps in the snow, as creepily characterised by Debussy's prelude of the same name, and sleighbells to launch a childlike symphonic journey, interior illumination should have been at the core of this concert. Sadly, given Colin Matthews's refined but fussy designer lighting in his Debussy orchestrations, a low-wattage Rimbaud/Britten zoo from one-tone soprano Christine Schäfer and hard sunbeams failing to probe the inner mysteries of the tomb-effigies Mahler envisaged in his Fourth Symphony's slow movement, it wasn't. Fortunately Vladimir Jurowski found novelty enough elsewhere to Read more ...