Classical Reviews
Prom 73: VPO, BychkovFriday, 11 September 2015
Every Proms season needs a late-romantic rarity to envelop its audience in a bewitching spider-web of sound. This year’s candidate was of more than passing interest, the incandescent Second Symphony of Franz Schmidt, scion of the Austrian Empire – born in what is now Bratislava, three-quarters Hungarian, an embattled cellist in the Vienna Philharmonic during Mahler’s tenure. The orchestra now wants to do him proud again, thanks to the very centred championship of Semyon Bychkov. Read more... |
Prom 72: Kraggerud, BBCSO, LittonThursday, 10 September 2015
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark attended Nielsen’s 150th birthday concert earlier this year in Copenhagen’s glorious new concert hall. Her grandparents were there at the premiere of Nielsen’s blithest work, his cantata Springtime in Funen on 1921. Read more... |
Prom 70: Lugansky, St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, TemirkanovTuesday, 08 September 2015
Russian classics evening at the Proms? It could be what Alexandra Coghlan, writing about Prom 69, described as “another night at the musical office”. But given the masters in charge of two masterpieces fusing storytelling with symphonic sweep and one deservedly popular standard, there was no chance of that. Read more... |
Prom Chamber Music 8: Benedetti Elschenbroich Grynyuk TrioTuesday, 08 September 2015
She is habitually called “the violin star” but this was Nicola Benedetti in the role of dedicated chamber music player, thoroughly prepared and hard at work. Any expectations that she might play in a flamboyant or limelight-seeking way proved completely misguided. Read more... |
Prom 69: Balsom, BBC Concert Orchestra, LockhartMonday, 07 September 2015
You can see the logic to the programming of this year’s Free Prom: famous opener with a good tune (Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre) to help wash down the new commission (Guy Barker, The Lanterne of Light), before we all get down to business with a nice choral shout (Carmina Burana). Read more... |
Prom 68: Yo-Yo Ma plays BachSunday, 06 September 2015
When was the last time you saw a classical soloist wearing a suit and tie on stage? It was the only formal thing about Yo-Yo Ma’s solo Prom last night – a delicious visual anachronism, at odds with the American’s laid-back performance style that is to cello playing what Western horse riding is to the stiffly upright English version. Read more... |
Prom 66: Uchida, LPO, JurowskiSaturday, 05 September 2015
After the broad, lyrical Shostakovich Tenth Symphony Andris Nelsons presented at the Proms last week, Vladimir Jurowski’s austere and unrelenting Eighth came as a shock. The two performances were equally fine, but at opposite ends of the Shostakovich spectrum. And the effect was intensified last night by a particularly terse programme, delivered with unrelenting intensity. Read more... |
Prom 65: Coote, English Concert, BicketFriday, 04 September 2015
What was a stunningly good Alice Coote recital doing trapped inside an A-level Theatre Studies project? I’m not sure that Being Both – the semi-staged sequence of Handel arias originally commissioned by the Brighton Festival – ever came close to answering, but by about ten minutes in the singing was just so damn good that I stopped worrying and learned, if not precisely to love, then to tolerate the foolishness going on around the music. Read more... |
Prom 62: Barton, OAE, AlsopWednesday, 02 September 2015
A concert of Brahms chamber music I could understand, especially given a balance between early and late. An evening of orchestral Brahms, with or without voices, needs much more special pleading. It didn’t get nearly enough last night. An expanded Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, including nine very vigorous double basses – where did the extra players come from? Read more... |
Prom 60: Denk, San Francisco Symphony, Tilson ThomasMonday, 31 August 2015
One astonishing creature was missing from the cavalcade of meerkats and whatnot featured in Sunday afternoon’s Life Story Prom introduced by Sir David Attenborough. I mean, of course, the species known as henricuscowelliensis. Read more... |
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