Classical Reviews
Kate Royal, Spira Mirabilis, QEHThursday, 06 December 2012
The billing for this all-Schubert concert, "Spira Mirabilis and Kate Royal", was a little misleading, since they did not actually share the stage at any point, the two halves being clearly separate events. First came the hour-long Octet, played by members of Spira Mirabilis, followed by half an hour of songs with Kate Royal accompanied by Malcolm Martineau. Read more... |
Piemontesi, Karnéus, Reiss, Guildhall Symphony Chorus, BBCSO, Bělohlávek, Barbican HallSunday, 02 December 2012
Now the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s second Conductor Laureate, Jiří Bělohlávek was always going to deserve a hero’s welcome for taking his players to the finishing line of their six-year cycle through Mahler’s symphonies. As more superficially brilliant Mahler series like Gergiev’s, squeezed into a single anniversary season, seem a distant memory, many of Bělohlávek’s slow burn, deep vein interpretations live on in the mind and soul. Read more... |
Music of Today - November: Sonica, HCMF, Oliver Knussen, the Arditti Quartet and Heiner GoebbelsSunday, 02 December 2012
Arditti String Quartet, Wigmore Hall, 31 October **** November is always a good month for new music. This year saw the interest begin a day earlier. Whichever wag chose to hand over Halloween at the Wigmore Hall to two of the most uncompromising contemporary string quartets, however, was denied a fitting punchline. The young JACK Quartet were grounded in New York by Sandy, and the venerable Ardittis chose to programme works that weren't half as terrifying as hoped. Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Knussen, Weber, Alison BalsomSaturday, 01 December 2012
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Kim, London Symphony Orchestra, Schuldt/Gardiner, Barbican HallFriday, 30 November 2012
Any young composer who finds himself at the opposite end of a programme from Walton’s First Symphony had better be good. Edward Nesbit - whose piece Parallels was commissioned by the LSO Panufnik Young Composer’s Scheme - is certainly that. Read more... |
Kavakos, London Symphony Orchestra, Bychkov, Barbican HallMonday, 26 November 2012
Leonidas Kavakos was originally meant to be premiering a concerto by Argentinian composer Oswaldo Golijov, which had also been scheduled for Berlin in 2011 and subsequently for Los Angeles in May this year. The composer missed both those deadlines and the work apparently remains uncompleted – it was replaced on the programme by the Berg concerto. Read more... |
Crabb, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Hrůša, Barbican HallSunday, 25 November 2012
There are always risks involved in the uncompromising side of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s family-friendly concerts. Succulent slices of fox-meat in the form of a suite from Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen gave the kids a nourishing start, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade was always going to seduce them with her effervescent narrative, especially given Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša’s youthful instincts to paint big, bold pictures. Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Eight StringsSaturday, 24 November 2012
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Coote, Britten Sinfonia, Shave, Hetherington, Wigmore HallFriday, 23 November 2012
Benjamin Britten would have been 99 on the day of this concert. He died aged 62, nearly six months after the premiere of a masterpiece, the 15-minute "dramatic cantata" Phaedra, ruthlessly sifting key speeches from Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine. The compression of inspired, marble-hewn ideas, the like of which few contemporary composers come anywhere near in operas of two hours’ length or more, places Phaedra on a pedestal. Read more... |
Mørk, LPO, Nézet-Séguin, Royal Festival HallThursday, 22 November 2012
Mozart and Wagner were the opposite compass points of Richard Strauss’s classical-romantic adventuring, and Amadeus has often made an airy companion to the rangy orchestral tone poems in the concert hall. By choosing Haydn instead as the clean limbed first-halfer in two London Philharmonic programmes, Yannick Nézet-Séguin came armed with period instrument experience of the master’s symphonies in his dazzling debut concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Read more... |
Oliver Knussen: Violin Concerto etc Various artists/Oliver Knussen (NMC)
Prokofiev: Works for Violin Janine Jansen, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski, Boris Brovtsyn (violin) and Itamar Golan (piano) (Decca)Pages
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