Classical Reviews

Ohlsson, LPO, Alsop, Royal Festival Hall

alexandra Coghlan Saturday, 23 February 2013

The Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise Festival has reached the American leg of its year-long tour through 20^thcentury music, and with it safe musical ground. In the second of three concerts with the LPO, American conductor Marin Alsop showcased the two equally appealing sides of America’s musical history: its cleanly-scrubbed, western classical face in Copland and Ives, and the grubbier, jazz-infused gestures of Joplin and Gershwin.

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Gabetta, Philharmonia Orchestra, Ashkenazy, Royal Festival Hall

Edward Seckerson Friday, 22 February 2013

Death comes in many guises but in this ingeniously devised Philharmonia concert he most definitely did not have the last laugh. That was for Shostakovich and a curiously ticking time bomb of percussion which first surfaced in his Fourth Symphony when Stalin branded him a renegade but which later became a kind of defiant titter trailing to eternity in his fifteenth and last symphony.

Vengerov, Golan, Barbican Hall

Kimon Daltas Thursday, 21 February 2013

Maxim Vengerov’s four-year absence from the London stage is recent enough that any performance by him has the added value of having been clawed back from a jealous god. That a violinist of such explosive talent could have been permanently silenced by something as mundane as an injury sustained in the gym is barely thinkable, though the possibility seemed very real in the hinter years between 2008 and 2012.

Gerstein, Philharmonia Orchestra, Gardner, Royal Festival Hall

David Nice Monday, 18 February 2013

You don’t have to live under a totalitarian regime to write music of profound anguish. I was driven to argue the point at a Shostakovich symposium when an audience quizzer took issue with my assertion that Britten could go just as deep as the Russian.

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Pires, LSO, Haitink, Barbican Hall

alexandra Coghlan Wednesday, 13 February 2013

It’s not that Bernard Haitink’s tempos are universally slow, it’s just that they often feel that way. When it works the music can be magisterial, immense, but when it doesn’t you find yourself chafing against such unyielding allegiance to restraint.

The Sound and the Fury, BBC Four

Peter Culshaw Tuesday, 12 February 2013

As Julian Lloyd Webber combatively suggests of certain strands of 20^th-century music: “Let’s make a noise no one likes.

Die Meistersinger Act Three, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

philip Radcliffe Monday, 11 February 2013

The “Mastersingers of Manchester”, about 350 of them, were gathered together by Sir Mark Elder to celebrate the Wagner bicentenary with this performance of Act Three of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in its entirety. He also pulled in about 200 orchestral musicians, exploiting the city’s resources just about to the limit.

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Alexander Nevsky, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Brabbins, Barbican Hall

David Nice Sunday, 10 February 2013

Is Prokofiev’s 1938 score for Alexander Nevsky the greatest film music ever written? Not quite, if only for the fact that Sergei Eisenstein’s second sound-picture glorifying historical role models for the ever more tsar-like Stalin, Ivan the Terrible, is darker and more richly textured, and the music’s greater breadth reflects that.

Joyce DiDonato, Il Complesso Barocco, Barbican Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Thursday, 07 February 2013

It may look like a sure-fire hit to let Kansas mezzo Joyce DiDonato rip through the drama-queen repertoire of the Baroque. But last night’s exploration of the dustiest, most overgrown byways of 17^th and 18^th century Italian opera needed every drop of DiDonato’s star musical talents – not to mention those of her backing band Il Complesso Barocco – to convince us of the worth of these rarities. The audience bought it. I remain on the fence.

Total Immersion: Sounds from Japan, Barbican

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Monday, 04 February 2013

“Improvisation? That?” whispered a Japanese lady to her friend at the end of the afternoon concert. She was making a good point. Half the performers in this programmed jam were glued to their scores. It was the low point of a mixed day at the Barbican Centre that began with a very enticing premise of offering to immerse us in the “Sounds from Japan”. We barely dipped our toe. The problem wasn’t simply the variability of the music; it was also the laziness of the curatorial thinking.