Classical Reviews
BBC Proms: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Barenboim (Concert 3)Tuesday, 24 July 2012
We’ve had more than our fair share of Beethoven symphonies in London recently. But with the Proms’s monolithic Daniel Barenboim cycle now midway through, memories of Riccardo Chailly and John Eliot Gardiner are being steadily blotted out. Gone are the frisky tempos, the lightness of touch, and in their place we’re being reintroduced to Beethoven the heavyweight. Read more...
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BBC Proms: Les Troyens, Royal Opera House Orchestra, PappanoMonday, 23 July 2012
Last night's concert performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens was not a Prom for the fainthearted. After all, if sitting through a five-hour opera had been a daunting undertaking for the Covent Garden audiences last month - who could also enjoy David McVicar's eye-catching staging - then it was inevitable that anyone seated in the Royal Albert Hall for the visually pared-down version was expecting to feel very culturally virtuous by the end of the night. Read more... |
BBC Proms: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Barenboim (Concert 1)Saturday, 21 July 2012
Last night was meant to be a celebration of Beethoven and Barenboim. But we had a gatecrasher. And at the opening concert of the first cycle of the Beethoven symphonies at the Proms for 60 years, the name on everyone's lips was neither Beethoven nor Daniel Barenboim, but that of Pierre Boulez. |
Classical CDs Weekly: Nielsen, Tchaikovsky, Reiko Fujisawa, The Dublin Drag OrchestraSaturday, 21 July 2012
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BBC Proms: Cooper, Juilliard Orchestra, RAM Orchestra, AdamsTuesday, 17 July 2012
One top student orchestra playing on its own can be exciting enough. Two playing together can produce a charge of dynamite that might not leave the building standing. Read more... |
BBC Proms: Pelléas et Mélisande, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, GardinerMonday, 16 July 2012
How silly an armchair looks in the Royal Albert Hall - like a rubber duck floating in the Pacific. Yet how right it was for those behind this excellent semi- staged Proms performance of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande to try to recreate a bit of fin-de-siècle intimacy for this most intensely intimate of operas. And how appropriate also for there to be a couch on stage in a work that is, and has always been, a psychoanalyst's dream. Read more... |
BBC Proms: My Fair Lady, John Wilson OrchestraSunday, 15 July 2012
“Let a woman in your life," roars Professor Henry Higgins, “and your serenity is through. She'll redecorate your home, from the cellar to the dome and then go on to the enthralling task of overhauling you.” It’s a scenario not unlike letting the winsome darling that is musical theatre loose among the club armchairs and smoking jackets of a classical music festival. Read more... |
First Night of the 2012 PromsSaturday, 14 July 2012
Two weeks to go to the Olympics, of course, but the Proms Olympics – 84 concerts in 60 days – have already taken off, with Britain placed first, second, third and fourth. For last night’s First Night concert was one where everything except Canadian singer Gerald Finley was British: the composers, the conductors (all four of them), the orchestra, certainly the weather. Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Britten, Miloš Karadaglić, Tom WaitsSaturday, 14 July 2012
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Christian Wallumrød, Karl Seglem, Garth Knox, LSO St Luke’sWednesday, 11 July 2012
It could have been a cow lowing in the distance, the sound drifting across a barren landscape. Its tone transformed after echoing through hillsides and ravines. Actually, it was Karl Seglem blowing into the horn of a goat. Suddenly, he stopped and began wordlessly chanting. The other two musicians on stage at St Luke's kept their heads down and continued providing the sonic wash knitting together this collaboration between the classical, jazz and uncategorisable. Read more... |
Bach, Beethoven, Schubert Reiko Fujisawa (piano) (Quartz)
Britten: War Requiem Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Choir, Netherlands Children’s Choir/Jaap van Zweden and Reinbert de Leeuw (Challenge)Pages
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