Cleveland Orchestra Miami principal conductor Giancarlo Guerrero led a moving reading of Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten and a blazing John Adams Harmonielehre.
Violinist Pekka Kuusisto and Britten Sinfonia succeeded in creating a dynamic and captivating programme at Milton Court, with a series of works conceived as a whole and leading up to Britten's Serenade.
It is pleasing to see concerts of music by living composers well attended, and such was the case at “A Timeless Beauty”, part of the Southbank Centre’s year-long celebration of contemporary music The Rest is Noise. This concert’s theme was “Politics and Spirituality”, and looked to the former Soviet Union for inspiration.Two composers on the programme provided contrasting examples.
On the night of 29 December, 1940, after a brief respite over Christmas, German bombers roared back over Britain. They dropped numerous incendiary bombs on the City of London, causing massive destruction, loss of life, and uncontrollable fires that raged for days. Miraculously, St Paul’s Cathedral survived the onslaught intact, even as much of the surrounding neighbourhood was reduced to rubble.
Embarrassing puns aside, the music of Arvo Pärt is hardly the staple fare of late-night revellers on Bristol’s Park Street, especially on a Friday. Tucked just around the corner, though, St George’s was celebrating the end of the long summer drought of live classical music courtesy of the Choir of Royal Holloway – fresh from their tour of the Balkan states – and the Bristol Ensemble.
Tonight’s Orchestre de Paris Prom was very much a concert of two halves, in the first of which they got to show their sensitive, introspective side, reflecting on the nature of life and lamenting too-early death, then becoming considerably more extrovert in the second for some free-spirited buccaneering, and what the programme notes describe as “vivid, prolonged and grand noise”.
Endeavouring to travel lightly through the world, I tend not to collect programme notes. However, such was the quality of Jo Kirkbride’s notes for this SCO Britten centenary celebration that scanning them for e-posterity is tempting. They prompted a consideration of the whole idea of programming.
As Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 9 ground to a halt last Thursday night, cellos and basses trailing off into silence, a few things came into focus. First, there was no missing the irony that Philip Glass, once among the outsiders of the musical world, should nearly a half century later find himself one of the American school of composition's most revered composers; perhaps its dean.
Imagine the first meeting between two young lovers, a couple who will eventually marry. As they walk through a forest in the moonlight, the girl reveals to her new friend that she is pregnant by another man.
Shostakovich's 5th symphony is a work of great power, great variety and uncertain meaning. Written in 1937 when the composer was in fear for his life after Stalin's violent reaction to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, there is no way of knowing for sure the extent to which the music is infused by irony or pain. If there was irony, Stalin didn't spot it.
