Mahler
Françoise-Green Piano Duo, St John's Smith SquareFriday, 08 April 2016
Who wouldn't wish to have been a fly on the wall during those pre-recording days when composers and their friends played piano-duet arrangements of the great orchestral works? Any notion that we don't need such reductions anymore was swept aside by... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Wim Henderickx, Mahler, NielsenSaturday, 02 April 2016
Wim Henderickx: Symphony No. 1 At the Edge of the World, Empty Mind, Groove! Royal Flemish Philharmonic/Edo de Waart and Martyn Brabbins (Royal Flemish Philharmonic)Elliptical sleeve notes are a given with each new release of Wim Henderickx’s... Read more... |
Mahler 2, Coote, Tynan, RPO, Petrenko, Royal Albert HallWednesday, 23 March 2016
An auspicious debut with the Royal Philharmonic for Vasily Petrenko. Just watching him conduct, it is clear that he is a natural communicator, always giving a clear, generous beat and never missing a cue. No surprise, then, that the orchestra was on... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Oslo: Vasily Petrenko, the Leningrad Dynamo, comes to townWednesday, 24 February 2016
I've never thought of myself as a Shostakovich fan, tending to regard what I know of his output as bleak and forbidding. Photographs of the stone-faced composer with the mortuary attendant's demeanour haven't helped.All this changed after a night... Read more... |
Mahler 3, Fink, Philharmonia, Hrůša, RFHFriday, 12 February 2016
"It’s all very well, but you can’t call it a symphony". So said William Walton of Mahler’s Third, all six movements and a hundred minutes of it. Jakub Hrůša conducted the Philharmonia last night on fine if hardly infallible form in a performance... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Roger Doyle, Mahler, ProkofievSaturday, 02 January 2016
Roger Doyle: Time Machine (Heresy Records)Roger Doyle’s Time Machine is a suite of 11 linked pieces, its starting point being the composer’s archiving of telephone messages recorded while living in late 1980s Dublin. Younger readers won’t know what... Read more... |
Best of 2015: Classical ConcertsSaturday, 26 December 2015
The musical future looks bright indeed, at least from my perspective. There are more classical concerts than ever going on across the UK on most days of the year, so who can know with any authority what might have been missed? Yet each of... Read more... |
Orchestra of Opera North, Farnes, Leeds Town HallSunday, 06 December 2015
The few ensemble lapses and moments of insecurity during the first half of this concert had nothing to do with Richard Farnes’s conducting, or with the playing of an augmented Orchestra of Opera North. It’s in rude health; Farnes has refined and... Read more... |
Faust, RLPO, Petrenko, Philharmonic Hall, LiverpoolFriday, 13 November 2015
Four years ago, Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic embarked on a two-year project to play all the Mahler symphonic works over a couple of seasons. It was an ambitious project but it was one which, then, had hall staff dusting down... Read more... |
Ehnes, BBCSSO, Runnicles, Usher Hall, EdinburghMonday, 28 September 2015
Performances of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony are rare, at least in Scotland. The programme note for this series of concerts by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra records that the orchestra’s only previous performance was in 1978. Those I spoke to in the... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Haydn, Mahler, SchubertSaturday, 26 September 2015
Haydn: Symphonies 31, 70 and 101 Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Linn)Josef Haydn recalled his three decades spent working for the Esterházy court in the following terms: “I was cut off from the world, there was no one near me to... Read more... |
Cargill, BBCSO, Oramo, BarbicanFriday, 25 September 2015
In 2007, Jiří Bělohlávek set the distinctive seal on his leadership of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and their ongoing Mahler cycle with a riveting performance of the Third Symphony. The legacy he established of a deep, well-moulded string sound... Read more... |
