Stravinsky
Bernard Hughes
Thomas Adès is an extraordinary polymath. Best known as a prodigious and multifaceted composer, he also has an international conducting career and – by the way – is a brilliant pianist. Last night at the Wigmore Hall was the first time I have heard him live at the keyboard and – having been in the past sometimes unconvinced by his conducting – would actually now place his piano playing as the second of the three strings to his bow. I would love to hear him play more.It was a beautifully constructed programme, with perhaps the exception of the first piece. Haydn’s Variations in F minor Hob. Read more ...
Stephen Walsh
Modern directors have little truck with the idea that particular operas demand particular styles of production, and they can often convince us they’re right. But there are exceptions. Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle is all about doors, doors that conceal, doors that reveal. The text is littered with the word; we want to see them opening. Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex was composed to a specific stage idiom, derived from Greek theatre. The whole structure of the piece depends on it.It says a great deal for the brilliance of Joe Hill-Gibbins’s Bluebeard - an English National Opera staging from two Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
After a century of trail-blazing Black musicians across every genre, it’s dumbfounding to discover that clarinettist Anthony McGill is the first African-American principal in the New York Philharmonic. He did have distinguished predecessors in the orchestra: in 1962 the remarkable violinist Sanford Allen became its first permanent Black member, and stayed until 1977. Without diminishing McGill’s signal achievements, it would be reasonable to say that, half a century later, he has had a slightly smoother path to follow.
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That path Read more ...
Graham Rickson
The Art of David Munrow (Warner Classics)
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An online search tells me that the most popular gap year activity (for those who can afford it) is backpacking, the most popular destinations being Australia, New Zealand and Thailand. Not for the 18-year-old David Munrow, who deferred a Cambridge English degree by signing up with VSO in 1960 and heading to Lima to teach. Already a recorder player and bassoonist, he spent his Peruvian Christmas exploring, travelling deep into the Andes and encountering indigenous musical traditions. In his Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Bach: Goldberg Variations BWV 988 Asya Fateyeva (soprano/alto saxophones), Eckart Runge (cello) Andreas Borregaard (accordion) (Berlin Classics)
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Bach’s “Keyboard exercise consisting of an aria with several variations for a two-manual harpsichord” from 1741 maintains its fascination, keeps on filling gaps and finding welcoming new places. Dmitry Sitkovetsky's string trio version (‘in memoriam Glenn Gould’) has become a staple of the repertoire. Wendy Carlos was the first of many musicians who might have been tempted to confess: “Forgive Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Hallé Orchestra is still in many ways the well honed, burnished instrument created by Sir Mark Elder over his near quarter-century as its music director, and his calm authority over it was apparent in almost every note of this, his second Bridgewater Hall appearance in the present season.Radio 3 listeners – the concert was broadcast live – will have been aware as much as those in the auditorium of the qualities of its playing under its now Conductor Emeritus: incisive articulation, intelligently balanced and unified ensemble, sweet and passionate string playing, rapier-thrust brass Read more ...
David Nice
Serendipity smiled on a lunchtime event you'd have been happy to hear any time, anywhere in the world. Edward Gardner's typically engaging short introduction told us that Royal Academy of Music string students were facing exams in a fortnight, so the brief was to find a programme predominantly for wind and brass. Quite apart from the fact that here were two amazing young soloists, RAM postgraduates, up to the mark of each work, the concertos in question were both created in 1924, both had divided double-bass parts - now that really was a coincidence - and (this bit I'm adding) Gardner had Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Southbank Centre’s second Multitudes festival – which commissions artists ranging from filmmakers to acrobats to shine new light onto the orchestral repertoire – began last night in triumph with the Aurora Orchestra’s celebrated performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring from memory. As a musical feat alone this seemed the equivalent to building a human pyramid on a tightrope above the Thames, but the Aurora Orchestra heightened the challenge by sweeping us back to 1913 for a dramatised account of the Rite’s origin. Experiments fusing classical music and theatre are, perhaps Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Lise Davidsen: Live at the Met Lise Davidsen (soprano) James Baillieu (piano) (Decca)
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This really is Lise Davidsen’s moment. At the time of writing, the singer often described “greatest dramatic soprano in the world” has just performed the opening night of a run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera as Isolde. She made her house debut in 2019 (as Lisa in The Queen of Spades) and has been frequently welcomed back: this is her ninth different role in a house which she is starting to call it her second home. The current production of Read more ...
Graham Rickson
An English Violin Geneviève Laurenceau (violin), Orchestre de Picardie/David Niemann, with Jean-Frédéric Neuburg (piano) (NoMadMusic)
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An English Violin, from French violinist Geneviève Laurenceau, consists of a superb and thoroughly recommendable new recording of the violin concerto from 1935 by English composer Guirne Creith (born Gladys Mary Cohen, 1907-1996), and a beautifully played selection of pieces for violin and piano: Elgar from the late Victorian era, Rebecca Clarke from the 1920s, right through to Walton Read more ...
Graham Rickson
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Stravinsky: Late Works Cappella Amsterdam, Nord Nederlands Orkest/Daniel Reuss (Pentatone)In 1952, his 70th year, Stravinsky had a compositional crisis. After completing his biggest piece – The Rake’s Progress – he felt unable to compose and didn’t know what to do. The route to a solution was laid out by Robert Craft, the young American conductor who had been helping Stravinsky with the English pronunciation of The Rake’s libretto. Craft led him to the serial music of the avant-garde – composers like Webern and Boulez – and this Read more ...
How to be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons, Teaċ Daṁsa review - a riveting account of a life in dance
Jenny Gilbert
Anyone who has followed the trajectory of choreographer-director Michael Keegan-Dolan and his West Kerry-based company Teaċ Daṁsa (House of Dance) will know by now to expect the unexpected. Such as a Swan Lake whose storyline, in part a searing attack on the abuses of the Catholic church, bore so little resemblance to the original that you might think you’d come to the wrong theatre until the spectacular finale seen through a blizzard of white feathers.His staging of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (a co-production with English National Opera) is up there with the finest, pitting Irish hare Read more ...