piano
CD: Django Bates' Belovèd - ConfirmationTuesday, 11 September 2012![]() Django Bates has commented that he probably first heard the music of Charlie Parker while still in the womb. Parker's music has thus been part of his musical make up ab ovo, as it were. This brilliant follow-up to Bates' 2010 Parker tribute Belovèd... Read more... |
Murray Perahia, Barbican HallFriday, 08 June 2012![]() What an era for pianists it was in the four decades from 1800 to 1840, the era covered by Murray Perahia’s recital last night. Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Chopin all in full verdant flight, selected for a programme of much fantasy and dancing... Read more... |
CD: Paul Buchanan - Mid AirThursday, 17 May 2012![]() In the eight years since the fourth – and very possibly last - Blue Nile album, High, Paul Buchanan has seen his band disintegrate and a close friend die. Little wonder, then, that his solo debut is a reflective record. The most cinematic of bands,... Read more... |
CD: Keane - StrangelandSunday, 06 May 2012![]() To recap the Keane story so far: in 2004 three precocious middle-class boys stormed the charts with bland anthemic radio-friendly rock that used no guitars. Over the next six years, they then went on to experience the kind of growth that George... Read more... |
Yuja Wang, Queen Elizabeth HallWednesday, 02 May 2012![]() Let no one tell you that Chinese pianists can't play with passion. Yuja Wang ran the full gamut of emotions in last night's Queen Elizabeth Hall recital from the tender to the rhapsodic. But mostly she channelled her energies to delivering some of... Read more... |
Mitsuko Uchida, Royal Festival HallTuesday, 24 April 2012![]() Oh boy. More Schubert. Deep breath. I had flashbacks of last month's wall-to-wall Franzi on BBC Radio Three. Nothing's come closer to ending my lifelong love affair with the tubby Austrian than the endless stream of half-finished three-part drinking... Read more... |
Staatskapelle Berlin, Barenboim, Royal Festival HallTuesday, 17 April 2012![]() Lightness. Tenderness. Grace. These are not words you normally associate with Barenboim's pianism - not these days. But they were exactly the thoughts running through my head while listening to his performance of Mozart's C minor piano concerto last... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Falla, Rameau, Nikolaus HarnoncourtSaturday, 31 March 2012![]() De Falla: Nights in the Gardens of Spain, The Three-Cornered Hat, Homenajes Jean-Efflaum Bavouzet (piano), Raquel Lojendio (soprano), BBC Philharmonic/Juanjo Mena (Chandos)Spanish conductor Juanjo Mena has recently succeeded Gianandra Noseda... Read more... |
Maurizio Pollini, Royal Festival HallWednesday, 07 March 2012![]() Their bicentennial years may have been and gone, but even Mazeppa’s wild horse wouldn’t be able to stop the world’s top pianists playing Chopin and Liszt almost every month. Last night Maurizio Pollini and his aristocratic art returned to the Royal... Read more... |
Evgeny Kissin, Barbican HallSaturday, 03 March 2012![]() For more than 10 years now I have been waiting in vain for the pianist Evgeny Kissin to shatter the stereotyped image built around him by music critics who haven’t always liked what they’ve heard. You know the kind of thing: Kissin the visitor from... Read more... |
Richard Goode, Royal Festival Hall (2012)Monday, 13 February 2012![]() You couldn't imagine a less likely acrobat than avuncular American Richard Goode. But when it comes to the piano, there's no mistaking it. A nippy little tumbler he undoubtedly is. Today we saw his fingers bounce about the keyboard like a troupe of... Read more... |
Hough, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Alsop, Royal Festival HallThursday, 09 February 2012![]() Poor old Stephen Hough. The Liszt double. Again! Was he not at all Liszted out after last year's epic bicentenary? Were we not Liszted out by last year's epic bicentenary? Hough has been living, breathing and eating these two pieces for the past... Read more... |
