Classical Reviews

Classical CDs Weekly: Prokofiev, Schubert, Zemlinsky

graham Rickson Saturday, 22 March 2014

Organ Gala Launch Concert, Royal Festival Hall

Kimon Daltas Wednesday, 19 March 2014

The newly restored Royal Festival Hall organ was inaugurated in a celebratory atmosphere with this gala launch concert, which also marks the beginning of the Pull Out All the Stops organ festival.

Comment

St Lawrence String Quartet, San Francisco Symphony, Tilson Thomas, RFH

David Nice Sunday, 16 March 2014

A voyage around Beethoven by Ives and John Adams, and then beyond him by Berlioz, added up to a vintage San Francisco Symphony programme from its music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Forty years on from his first concert with SFS, he’s still youthful in demeanour, still flapping with seagull (or albatross) like flamboyancy. But is there a chill behind the showmanship?

Classical CDs Weekly: Alwyn, Sibelius, Tenebrae

graham Rickson Friday, 14 March 2014

Comment

Villa Lobos: Total Immersion, Barbican

Simon Broughton Monday, 10 March 2014

“This is not so much a total immersion, more of a quick shower,” said Simon Wright, biographer of Villa Lobos at the start of the day-long exploration of his music. With up to 1,500 works in existence – the exact number is unconfirmed – he promised we’d be “hacking our way through a tiny part of this immense jungle”, to use another metaphor that seems alarmingly appropriate with this composer.

Martinpelto, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

philip Radcliffe Sunday, 09 March 2014

No one could accuse Manchester’s musical forces of short-changing Richard Strauss on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Under the title Strauss’s Voice, over two months three orchestras, eight conductors and a dozen soloists have delivered eleven concerts and several open rehearsals and talks.

Classical CDs Weekly: Haydn, Weinberg, Battle for Music

graham Rickson Saturday, 08 March 2014

Comment

Gabriela Montero, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Sebastian Scotney Thursday, 06 March 2014

Gabriela Montero stands out as different. She is an American-based improvising classical pianist of real quality. She has a courageous civil rights message to convey about the tragedy of unseen arrests and murders in her native Venezuela, but is nonetheless happy to take her curtain call draped in the colourful Venezuelan flag.

Davislim, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

philip Radcliffe Sunday, 02 March 2014

It’s the thought that counts. That’s what we say about presents. But when the gift is a song by Richard Strauss it is that and more. He made a habit of gifting songs, particularly to his wife Pauline. Several of the Six Orchestral Songs on offer here, as the two-month Strauss’s Voice series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth nears its end, are taken from groups originally celebrating occasions such as their wedding day (10 September 1896).

Comment

Repin, Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra, Fedoseyev, RFH

David Nice Tuesday, 25 February 2014

Valery Gergiev once described Yevgeny Svetlanov’s USSR - later Russian - State Symphony Orchestra to me as “an orchestra with a voice”. Then Svetlanov died and the voice cracked. Which are the other big Russian personalities now? Gergiev’s own Mariinsky? I don’t hear it. Yuri Temirkanov can still bend the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra to his own whim of iron. The Russian National Orchestra was never in the running.