Buscador de críticas de conciertos de música clásica, ópera, ballet y danza | Fantasía cromática y fuga en re menor, BWV903

At the age of 88, pianist Paul Badura-Skoda continues to explore the central Viennese repertoire at Vienna's Musikverein through a distinctive and idiosyncratic approach. 

Core repertoire from across nearly two centuries formed the basis of a recital programme that forged a link from Bach to Ravel.

The penultimate concert in the Valletta International Baroque Festival series was a recital of Bach’s keyboard music. The venue for this concert was the Sala Isouard, part of the 17th-century Bonici Palace which now forms part of the foyer to the Manoel Theatre.

The eagerly awaited second Sydney concert in Angela Hewitt’s current Musica Viva tour began with the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, one of Bach’s most popular individual keyboard works. Both the improvisatory first section and the fugal section proper make extensive use of notes not found in the D minor scale, hence the description “chromatic”, meaning “coloured”.

I must admit that Bach through Brass, as this concert was entitled, filled me with a certain amount of trepidation. Bach, on instruments for which the music in the programme was not designed, on instruments which were not even around in Bach’s time (at least not in their modern-day form), did not sound immediately appealing; nevertheless, something drew me in, and I was pleasantly surprised.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, goes the familiar phrase, and that can be applied in life to any number of things, including music. Were the father of harmony, Johann Sebastian Bach, still alive today, he would be beyond flattered.

Pianist Joyce Yang, silver medalist in the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, returned to Fort Worth for a solo recital this week. The eclectic program, in her words a “collage,” consisted of a broad mix of styles, well balanced and thoughtfully organized.

In the last concert of the season at Sutton House, Penelope Roskell, acclaimed British pianist and Professor of Piano and Piano pedagogy at London's Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, juxtaposed the reason and intellect of Bach with the mercurial romance of Schumann in a fascinating and very well-attended concert.Sutton House is truly one of London’s ‘hidden gems’.