piano
Simon Trpčeski, Wigmore HallSunday, 20 July 2014
No man is a prophet in his own land – except possibly the Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski. In the UK he shot to fame upon winning the London International Piano Competition in 2001 and at home he has become a national hero, his efforts rebooting... Read more... |
The Dream/Connectome/The Concert, Royal BalletSaturday, 07 June 2014
The Dream has at its heart a great partnership. Not just the original, magical pairing of Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, for whom Frederick Ashton created the ballet fifty years ago (thereby launching one of the top couples in ballet history... Read more... |
John Ogdon: Living with Genius / You've Got a Friend: The Carole King Story, BBC FourSaturday, 07 June 2014
It's something of a cliche to regard concert pianists as mad geniuses or nutty professors, and John Ogdon fitted the formula only too well. Born in Nottinghamshire in 1937, he displayed absurdly precocious musical brilliance as a child, and in due... Read more... |
Khatia Buniatishvili, Queen Elizabeth HallThursday, 05 June 2014
A voluptuous dream in sequined silver, the nearly-27-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili sat down at the keyboard and instantly transcendentalised her mermaid look as Ravel’s Ondine. Even Brahms took to the life aquatic of her recital’s... Read more... |
Lugansky, Queen Elizabeth HallThursday, 15 May 2014
Am I alone in a readiness to sacrifice all four Rachmaninov piano concertos – though maybe not the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – in favour of the second sets of Preludes and Études-Tableaux? Probably not, after last night, when Nikolay Lugansky... Read more... |
Tippett Retrospective, Osborne, Heath Quartet, Wigmore HallSunday, 27 April 2014
For those of us who’d held fast to the generalisation that Michael Tippett went awry after 1962, it seemed emblematic that pianist Steven Osborne and the Heath Quartet were never to meet in a concert of two halves. After all, didn’t Tippett’s music... Read more... |
Uchida, LPO, Jurowski, RFHThursday, 17 April 2014
Vladimir Jurowski is a master of the through-composed programme. Yet at first this looked like a more standard format: explosive contemporary work (if 1966 can still be called “contemporary”) followed by popular concerto and symphony. On reflection... Read more... |
Vogt, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Jansons, BarbicanSunday, 06 April 2014
Can there be a conductor with a clearer and more affirming beat than Mariss Jansons with the Concertgebouw Orchestra when they're at their best? The listener can just marvel at his capacity to work in partnership with this fine orchestra, to... Read more... |
It's All About Piano!, Institut FrançaisSaturday, 05 April 2014
With tickets only a couple of pounds more than screenings in the Ciné Lumière, back-to-back – sometimes overlapping - concerts by world-class pianists of all ages, and a lively roster of weekend events around the recitals, what more could you ask... Read more... |
Gabriela Montero, Queen Elizabeth HallThursday, 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... Read more... |
Gerstein, LPO, Petrenko, RFHSaturday, 22 February 2014
Vasily Petrenko used his baton like a piratical rapier to galvanise the London Philharmonic violins in their flourishes of derring-do at the start of Berlioz’s Overture Le Corsaire. And the brilliance was in the quicksilver contrasts, the lightness... Read more... |
Pires, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Ticciati, Usher Hall, EdinburghFriday, 07 February 2014
This is more an excuse for celebration than a review. Six years after the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1974 – the birth year we were marking last night – I rolled up in a foggy Edinburgh one February day and chose it as my alma mater on... Read more... |
