Outstanding solos, orchestral discipline and novelties in musical arrangement made for another quality symphonic experience from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Two young, widely championed string players – violinist/pianist Julia Fischer and cellist Daniel Müller-Schott – recently joined to perform an eclectic concert at the city’s stunning new concert hall.
Even before Müller-Schott struck his first note in Antonín Dvořák’s great Cello Concerto in B minor, the Zurich audience was stunned by an unusual visual: the instrument itself.
Julia Fischer and Daniel Müller-Schott demonstrate faultless command of Brahms' consumately crafted Double Concerto, which makes a telling contrast with Bruckner's wayward early Symphony no.2 in C minor in Jurowski's committed LPO performance.
Single-composer programmes can be risky affairs. It is possible to have too much of a good thing, after all. Fortunately, this all-Tchaikovsky programme from the CBSO contained three sufficiently contrasting pieces, ensuring that we did not tire of the melancholic Russian master’s works.
Concert programmes at the Proms often lean toward music of significant scale and heft. The requirement to fill the huge Royal Albert Hall, as well as capturing listeners’ attentions across the airwaves and in many different countries, means that huge expeditions, such as this year’s Ring cycle, are a perfect fit for the festival. Prom 44 was massive too, in its own way.
Andris Nelsons marked the second instalment in the Birmingham Beethoven cycle with two works of the earliest years of the 19th century, featuring a solid account of the Eroica and a superb performance of the Triple Concerto.The Triple Concerto is a strange work.
It’s hard to say who was more excited about Prom 19: Thomas Dausgaard, who conducted the whole thing with lashings of arm-waving vigour, or the Proms audience, who enjoyed the performance so much that they deliberately (and justifiably) clapped between the movements.
Blossom Music Center, summer home of The Cleveland Orchestra, is about 25 miles south of Cleveland, just to the north of Akron, in a beautiful wooded area nestled next to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Opening in 1968, Blossom presents a wide variety of concerts, both orchestral and popular, and theatrical events each summer.
Stravinsky’s Scherzo Fantastique, Op. 3 is one of his earliest works, as its opus number would suggest. There are very few composers who can truly create a fairytale atmosphere in their music, but Stravinsky was one of the best at it.
Tonight’s concert at the Concertgebouw started with the Romance from Shostakovich’s film score The Gadfly, as a tribute to the conductor Yakov Kreizberg, who sadly passed away last March. A popular piece with violinists, the Romance is a beautifully melodic work, perhaps one of Shostakovich’s most popular ones.
