Strauss
Graham Rickson
This week we’ve a brilliant, budget-priced box of Beethoven symphonies played on authentic instruments. It’ll remind you of how much fun there is to be had with this most iconic of composers. A historical recording of a famous cellist reappears, but the best reason to listen to the disc is to hear a famous Czech conductor achieving miracles. And there’s an entertaining, educative DVD featuring a conductor who’s in his element when addressing an audience.Beethoven: Complete Symphonies La Chambre Philharmonique/Krivine (Naïve)
Beethoven symphonies played on modern instruments feel more and more Read more ...
David Nice
In a London Philharmonic season playing safer than before, principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski has earned the right to a few meat-and-two-veg programmes. Even in a concert containing more than a handful of your hundred best tunes, Wagnerian carrots and Straussian greens were presented pleasingly al dente, with a prelude to this crack team's longest ever impending Glyndebourne journey and the most secure of all living dramatic sopranos soaring assuredly. And Jurowski always serves up prime cuts of Tchaikovsky freshly, without rich sauce. After a discombobulating Pathétique Symphony a couple Read more ...
David Nice
Imagine a special two-hour-plus resurrection of that wannabe extravaganza Stars in Their Eyes. "So, young maestro André de Ridder, who are you going to give us?" "Well, in addition to showing my special flair for contemporary music in Ligeti, I'm going to be Herbert von Karajan conducting On the Beautiful Blue Danube to a ballet of spacecraft." With another rigorously calibrated turn of the screw, it can only be the unique counterpoint of music, sounds, speech and silence with vision that is Stanley Kubrick's 2001.Let me try and explain what I mean by de Ridder "being" Karajan. I'd completely Read more ...
David Nice
A glittering, gaudy surface and an epic, sometimes disturbing underbelly are what many of Klimt’s canvases and Richard Strauss’s autobiographical bourgeois comedy of marital misunderstanding have in common. It was the main idea of Wolfgang Quetes’s Scottish Opera extravaganza to bring those mythic resonances in harmony with the realist conversation-piece aspect of the opera. But you don’t do Intermezzo without a capricious heroine of huge charisma like Glyndebourne charmers Elisabeth Söderström and Felicity Lott. Any British opera-goers heard of Anita Bader? You will now.Bader makes very much Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps her greatest achievement on disc is a role she would never have attempted in the theatre, Wagner's Isolde. Supported by the great Carlos Kleiber, the sheer meaning and luminous tone colours Price brings to every line make this one of the glories of recorded history.Below, Margaret Price sings Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan und IsoldeAt the other end of the repertoire, Price excelled in Mozart. A distinguished voice coach I know singles out a radio broadcast of a Mozart mass as the most perfect piece of singing he's ever heard. The lyric quality could stretch from Susanna - on disc, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Once upon a time, composers ran Hollywood. As conductor John Wilson reminded us last night, 44-time Oscar nominee and movie composer Alfred Newman became so powerful as second in command at MGM that he had two security guards posted at his office door. Any directors attempting to enquire how the score to their movies was getting along were told to clear off. Big, bold orchestral scores were Hollywood's crown jewels. At the Barbican last night we got a rare chance to inspect them close up. And how they dazzled us.Erich Korngold was up first, the father of Hollywood composition. Wilson, a suave Read more ...
David Nice
Exactly an hour and a half after Wagner's first orchestral brew of sex and religion had raised the curtain on the Royal Opera Tannhäuser, the pilgrims and floozies were at it again over the other side of town. If there was hardly the whiff of elemental theatrics ahead in Jiří Bělohlávek's surprisingly staid conducting of the overture, different treats were in store: the most opulent and musicianly of all living sopranos, Christine Brewer, in cheerful love songs by a nearly forgotten Austrian composer, and a smells-and-bells pilgrimage up a mountain and down ennobling Richard Strauss's most Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The heroics came fast and fervently with Andris Nelsons and the Philharmonia Orchestra emerging from suffocating pianissimi to rip out the exultant fanfares of Beethoven’s Leonora No 3 Overture as if already limbering up to take on Strauss’s critics in Ein Heldenleben. That he saw them off so decisively didn’t, on his present form, come as much of a surprise. Nelsons doesn’t need anyone to fight his battles for him – not even the egotistical Strauss.This was an evening of much trumpeting, offstage and on. Indeed when Håkan Hardenberger came on to play the familiar Haydn Concerto it was as if Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Ariadne auf Naxos, according to its librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is all about fidelity: fidelity in love, fidelity in art, fidelity in spirit. Ariadne on her island, abandoned by Theseus, can give herself to Bacchus only by persuading herself that he’s a god. The actress Zerbinetta gives herself to every man in sight, including the Composer (played, incidentally, by a girl), who for a moment weakens in his lofty contempt for these comic actors who intrude on his high ideals with their vulgar songs and dubious humour.Hofmannsthal could seldom be parted from his deep meanings. All the same Read more ...
stephen.walsh
My abiding memory of the Berlin Philharmonic’s second Prom under Sir Simon Rattle on Saturday will be of 6,000 people listening with rapt, or at any rate silent, concentration to Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. Has it ever happened before? Perhaps in Boulez’s day, though I’m not sure even he ever filled this hall for these particular composers. And what does it signify? That we were the stragglers who failed to get tickets for the previous evening’s Beethoven and Mahler? That we would put up with anything to hear Karita Mattila sing Strauss’s Four Last Songs? Or possibly that, after a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
To be interestingly disappointed isn’t bad - it’s being uninterestingly disappointed that is. This was an intriguing Prom with a full house, possibly because of Hélène Grimaud’s presence in the Ravel piano concerto, as well as Vladimir Ashkenazy on the podium. Surely it wasn’t for Scriabin’s Third Symphony, unheard here for almost 80 years? Or perhaps Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier is so well beloved that even a dubious orchestral suite made from it lures the thousands?Whatever the reason, the point in such intriguing programmes is not to come out cursing at being served minor-league Read more ...
David Nice
The first time I saw David McVicar's production of Strauss's hypersensuous shocker, I gaped in horrified wonder at the Pasolini Salò-style mise en scène but didn't find the action within it fully realised. When it came out on DVD, the close-ups won greater respect but there was still the problem of Nadja Michael's singing, hardly a note in true. Now it returns with Angela Denoke, an even more compelling actress with a far healthier soprano voice.In league with Hartmut Haenchen's pacy conducting she makes you think first, what an incredible score, and only then, what a brilliant production. As Read more ...