6 h. ago Nielsen: Clarinet Concerto; Helios; Symphony No 5 album review – suavity and elegance from Gardner’s Bergen Phil

(Chandos)The teeming textures of Nielsen’s 5th symphony are controlled with care and refinement by Edward Gardner, with the Bergen Philharmonic – and soloist Alessandro Carbonare – outstandingEdward Gardner’s nine years as principal conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic came to an end in July 2024, but their recording projects together continue to appear. This is the third instalment of Gardner’s Nielsen series with the orchestra, after previous discs featuring the third and fourth symphonies. Like its predecessors, the latest release pairs a symphony with one of Nielsen’s concertos, in this case the Fifth Symphony, completed in 1922, with the work for clarinet composed six years later.Both works, as well as the early Helios Overture, receive outstanding performances from the Bergen players, and Gardner controls the teeming textures of the symphony with great refinement. Perhaps there’s just a little too much control towards the close of the magnificent opening movement, when the sna...

Culture

51 h. ago Back to school season ushers in hunger for broadening musical horizons with 82 per cent of Scottish children interested in learning a musical instrument

New research from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) reveals that the public’s appetite to discover orchestral music has hit a record high - and, among school children in Scotland, the new academic year starts with a record number of children wanting to learn a musical instrument.

Culture

2 d. ago South Ayrshire Young Leader plays with National Guiding and Scouting Orchestra

Evelyn Butler represented Ayrshire South County at this year's event

Politics

3 d. ago Art and politics are not the same thing – but the Anna Netrebko case shows what happens when they collide | Martin Kettle

The arts and politics are bound to mix, but they are not the same thing. In the cold war, Soviet artists performed in the west. Should the Russian soprano, who has condemned the Ukraine invasion, be blocked from singing in London?It is one of my very earliest concert memories. In October 1965, my father drove us to Manchester to hear Mstislav Rostropovich play in the Free Trade Hall. Rostropovich played Dvořák’s cello concerto with the Moscow Philharmonic, who began the concert with a symphony by Tikhon Khrennikov and ended it with one by Brahms. I was smitten by Rostropovich’s noble playing. I had never heard a musician like him before.This was, though, a concert taking place slap-bang in the middle of the cold war. The Cuban missile crisis had taken place less than three years earlier. The Berlin Wall was still fairly new. The Vietnam war was deepening. That summer I had read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The movie version of Le Carré’s novel, with Richard Burton, was due out...

Politics

6 d. ago Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performance in London interrupted by pro

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performance in London interrupted by pro-Palestine protestors  The Guardian

Politics

6 d. ago Trumpeter Alison Balsom to retire from performing after Last Night Of The Proms

Balsom will play the Hummel Trumpet Concerto in E flat major.

Politics

6 d. ago Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, known for Anna Karenina ballet, dies aged 92

Composer, whose work ranged from opera to ballet to concertos, was married to ballerina Maya Plisetskaya for 57 yearsThe Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, who created the celebrated ballets Anna Karenina and the Carmen Suite, has died in Germany at the age of 92, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre said on Friday.He and his wife of 57 years, the legendary ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, dominated the Soviet and Russian cultural scene for the latter part of the last century. She died in 2015. Continue reading...

Events

7 d. ago ‘It’s a symbol of hope and defiance for Ume Sámi and its speakers’: singer Katarina Barruk on her Proms debut

Joiking comes to the Proms this weekend in a collaboration between Katarina Barruk and violinist Pekka Kuusisto. The two tell us how they have enriched each other’s musical worlds‘When I was growing up, I couldn’t listen to any bands or artists in my language,” says Katarina Barruk. She is one of only a handful of remaining speakers – and the only one of whom is an internationally celebrated singer – of Ume Sámi, one of the nine living Sámi languages that today is on Unesco’s critically endangered list. It’s spoken by a handful of Sámi communities living across the part of Sápmi (the territory of the Sámi peoples across northern Scandinavia) that’s now in north-east Sweden. “We have been working so hard to get to the point where you can hear the language at the Royal Albert Hall,” says Barruk. “It’s amazing.”And not only to hear the language, but experience it sung by Barruk in her own music, recomposed and remade with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. They’ll be led by the violinist...

Politics

8 d. ago Half of Brits have never been to art gallery as arts still seen as 'privileged'

A recent survey has found only four in ten Brits consider the arts to be inclusive - three quarters of us have never attended an orchestra performance and half haven't been to an art gallery

Politics

2 w. ago Danish National Symphony Orchestra review – punchy Prom reaches a triumphant conclusion

Royal Albert Hall, LondonThere was plenty to admire as a fine lineup of soloists stirred the emotions on a night that paired Beethoven’s Ninth with Anna Clyne’s subtle meditation on timeWhat do you pair with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? You might do worse than Anna Clyne’s The Years, a subtle meditation on the mystery of time set to words by Stephanie Fleischmann. Composed during the pandemic, its approachable mood of calm isolation survives a series of angsty intrusions to convey a message of quiet hopefulness. Like the Beethoven, it reaches a triumphant conclusion, though in Clyne’s case the victory is an eminently peaceful one.The Danish National Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Fabio Luisi gave it a relaxed and sensitive reading, warm string tones cocooning vocal lines that rose and fell, rendered with impressive clarity by the Danish National Concert Choir. The musical language, faintly reminiscent of Tippett or Barber, was built on simple melodies that blossomed into ta...

Politics

2 w. ago ‘No Russian words from my lips, no Russian music from my hand’: the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra hit the UK

With apps giving them air-raid warnings, the Kyiv-based musicians now see themselves as soldiers and their instruments as weapons. So what will they play when they arrive in Britain this month?‘People often ask me about my work with Ukrainian musicians,” says the Canadian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson. “They will say things like, ‘How are things out there? We don’t hear much about the war, I guess it’s all calmed down a bit.’ When I hear that I want to scream, ‘No, it really hasn’t calmed down!’.”Wilson established the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in the weeks after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With her husband, Peter Gelb, general manager of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, she contacted leaders of the world’s top international orchestras and located dozens of elite Ukrainian musicians – some working in western Europe, some who had fled Russia, others performing in Kyiv, Lviv or Odesa – to establish a 75-piece “battalion of culture” who would assemble for ...

Events

2 w. ago Florence And The Machine to release first album in three years on Halloween

The indie pop group’s last album Dance Fever was released in May 2022.

Politics

2 w. ago ‘I got a nosebleed in minutes!’ How the Wedding Present’s indie banger classics inspired a musical

They lit up the 80s and 90s with abrasive tracks that were like kitchen-sink dramas. But can the Wedding Present’s acerbic songs work on stage? We meet the team making it happen – and the ‘rock god’ who penned the hitsIn 2009, Matt Aston was watching the Wedding Present frontman David Gedge perform a “bizarre and brilliant” gig with the BBC Big Band when he was struck by a notion: that the combination of the singer’s conversational lyrics and brassy, orchestrated new arrangements felt a bit like, well, watching a musical.“I parked the idea,” says Aston, a theatre director and writer. “Then some time later, I saw David’s other band Cinerama with a 16-piece orchestra and thought, ‘This could be musical theatre!’” Aston had had a few drinks and remembers sitting afterwards, trying to convince his mate – screenwriter and playwright William Ivory, who hadn’t been drinking – that this wasn’t the daftest idea ever. “Billy said, ‘You can’t make a musical out of Wedding Present lyrics. It’s ...

Events

3 w. ago Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Hisaishi review – frothing strings and quacking brass as Studio Ghibli’s composer debuts

Royal Albert Hall, LondonSwitching between podium and piano, Joe Hisaishi’s suite from The Boy and the Heron sparked joy, but Reich’s demanding Desert Music was vibrant and hypnoticOne of the pleasures of the BBC Proms is that they bring some of classical music’s biggest names from around the world to the Royal Albert Hall. But celebrity is always relative – and, for better or worse, most Proms artists don’t also headline stadium gigs.But Japanese composer and conductor Joe Hisaishi does and, at 74, is a Proms debut artist like no other. He came on stage to waves of screaming and phones brandished to capture the moment. Never heard of him? You’re probably not part of the vast fanbase of the “cultural phenomenon” Studio Ghibli. Hisaishi is the John Williams of anime, responsible for the music in global hits from My Neighbour Totoro to The Boy and the Heron. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago Petrassi: Concertos for Orchestra Nos 7 & 8 album review – dramatic power from rarely heard Italian master

Tonda/Rome SO/La Vecchia(Naxos)Francesco La Vecchia draws out the fierce contrasts of Goffredo Petrassi’s later music in this new recording of his final two concertos.Though his music is rarely heard in the UK these days, Goffredo Petrassi was one of the most significant and influential Italian composers of the mid 20th century. Born in 1904, just a few months after Luigi Dallapiccola, Petrassi’s early works were firmly neoclassical, but after 1945 he began to incorporate elements from his younger contemporaries in the European avant garde. He was also a distinguished teacher; among the many who studied with him were Ennio Morricone, Peter Maxwell Davies and Cornelius Cardew.Petrassi’s eight concertos for orchestra are at the core of his orchestral output, and Naxos has now released recordings of all of them. The pairing of the last two, composed in 1964 and 1972, are typical of his later music, trenchantly argued, with fierce contrasts between strings and wind. It’s music of great ...

Events

3 w. ago Ravel: Complete Orchestral Works II album review – Mallarmé miniatures shine brightly

Barron/Duhamel/OBC Barcelona/Morlot(L’Auditori)Ludovic Morlot creates a shimmering web around soprano Fleur Barron’s lucid vocals in Trois Poèmes, on an album that also showcases Shéhérazade and Don QuichotteThe first disc of Ludovic Morlot’s Ravel survey with the Barcelona orchestra of which he’s been music director since 2022 appeared last year. That included two of Ravel’s best known scores: the suite Le Tombeau de Couperin and the ballet Mother Goose. At the heart of this latest instalment are Ravel’s three orchestral song cycles: the mezzo soprano Fleur Barron sings Shéhérazade, the 1904 settings of poems by Tristan Klingsor, and the 1913 Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, while between them the baritone Alexandre Duhamel is the soloist in the charming product of Ravel’s old age, which was originally intended as a film score, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, from 1933.For all the oriental beauty of Shéhérazade, delivered with suitably seductive warmth by Barron, it is the Mallarmé min...

Politics

3 w. ago Watery masterpieces from Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Proms

Watery masterpieces from Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Proms  Bachtrack

Politics