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CD and Other Review

Review: Claudio Arrau: Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Schumann, Chopin and Brahms

As a young virtuoso, Claudio Arrau was renowned for playing long programs and tackling technically challenging works like Albeniz’s Iberia. From mid-life onwards he concentrated on the German tradition and mainstream repertoire. He reached his full maturity in the mid-1950s, when most of the recordings in the EMI box were made. This set contains the five Beethoven concertos, a selection of sonatas, and concertos by Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Schumann, Chopin and Brahms. Arrau was never a mere technician. In a 1970s broadcast
 of Brahms’s Second Concerto, he swayed and grimaced like a
 soul in torment. That is both the upside and downside of these recordings: he approaches each forte as if it was Mount Everest, and handles lyrical themes as if officiating at High Mass. Take
 the limpid piano melody in the second movement of Grieg’s concerto: its innate simplicity eludes him as he inflects every note with emotional significance. In his desire to make the instrument resonate he overuses the sustaining pedal, which would have been effective in a vast auditorium but turns muddy in the studio. By contrast, Alceo Galliera and the Philharmonia, who accompany most of the concertos, are a model of clarity. Arrau’s Beethoven is fascinating. Often…

March 21, 2013
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CD and Other Review

Review: Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9 (Bruggen)

In an interview for the long defunct ABC Radio National program The Score (for which I was Producer at the time), Frans Brüggen said of Mozart symphonies: “There is no such thing as ‘interpretation’.” While this might at first sound a trifle odd, I think after all this time I can see what he meant. 
He wanted the composer to speak
 for himself. Brüggen established
 the Orchestra of the Eighteenth
 Century in a very specific
 manner. He recruited Europe’s
 leading specialists in historically 
informed performance practice 
to make his band. It is in fact a
 combination of expert practitioners
 who are also are researchers and avid collaborators. He wanted it to be (and it still is) a sort of permanent workshop, where 
the members are always working together and listening to each other in the search 
for authentic sonorities. The goal in all this pursuit of sound colours is to allow the music to reveal itself. Previous cycles of Beethoven symphonies have had as their star not the composer, but the conductor. Herbert von Karajan’s cycles especially come to mind of course (as good
 as they are, they are completely different in intent and certainly in effect). The Dutch critic…

March 21, 2013
Film
CD and Other Review

Review: Amour: The Film Soundtrack (Alexandre Tharaud)

Tharaud plays the star former pupil of an octogenarian couple, retired music teachers both. He literally plays the soundtrack of their lives: a gentle, fluid touch in the Schubert Impromptu No 3 D899, then a buoyant, effervescent Moment Musical No 3, contrast with the more searching tone of Bach’s Chorale Prelude Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ. With the protagonists’ love for each other and for classical music so inextricably intertwined, these piano pieces are cherished memories, a visceral reminder of bereavement and a comforting balm all at once. And isn’t that what music means to us all? Read the film review here.

February 25, 2013
Instrumental
CD and Other Review

Review: Valentina Lisitsa: Live at the Royal Albert Hall

Behold the quintessential 21st-century classical musician, Valentina Lisitsa, an American-based Ukrainian whose homemade videos have garnered 50 million YouTube hits (and counting), and forged for the formerly unemployed pianist an international career that culminated in this recital in June at the Royal Albert Hall. Decca are the Johnny-Come-Latelys in all of this, but have given it the due sense of urgency, releasing the completed package online just a week after YouTube viewers had watched the whole thing unfolding live. Minor-league pianists making such a dramatic leap to major success usually have some marketable eccentricity, like a potty mouth or a tragic autobiography or a swimsuit model’s figure, but aside from a shock of blonde hair à la Claudia Schiffer, Lisitsa doesn’t. What she does have, though, is a sincerity about her playing and an ability to communicate with her audiences visually and emotionally, together with a refreshingly olde-worlde technique honed in the East European tradition of Josef Hofmann and Rachmaninov. Purists will still find plenty to hate about her playing, especially her stilted Chopin, but she has more than enough artistic credibility to take on the kind of repertoire featured here in this plebiscite concert programmed, naturally enough, by… Continue…

November 2, 2012
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CD and Other Review

Review: Lang Lang: Complete Recordings 2000-2009

It is the largest box I have ever been sent to review – physically speaking – even bigger than Karajan’s 82-CD collection, though it holds only 12 discs. It also contains a lavish 192-page booklet chock full of colour photographs and articles about the pianist’s inspiration and suchlike. The product’s dimensions reflect the phenomenon of Lang Lang, a young concert pianist whose discs have sold millions of copies in China alone. Lang recently decamped to Sony, announcing his arrival with an excellent Liszt program, so DG have sensibly decided to repackage the recordings he made for them between 2000 and 2009 in a new design splashed liberally with red. No one can say that Lang Lang does not deserve the acclaim. He is a remarkable musician: technically adroit and emotionally involved in the music at all times. In many ways a throwback, he adopts the approach and occasional mannerisms of older pianists like Horowitz and Arrau. He sometimes rolls chords, and has a penchant for emphasising lyrical moments with rubato and a hushed, pearl-like tone. I call this an “18th Variation” approach, because it particularly suits that famous movement from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Lang is also……

November 2, 2012
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Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth symphony is among the most popular and most frequently-performed orchestral works in the canon, and it’s fashionable to spend a lot of time and energy trying to describe what it is “about”. During the Soviet era there was an official line which was largely accepted without question in the West. Tchaikovsky was portrayed as a closeted, self-hating homosexual who tried to “go straight” by entering into a marriage with a suicidal nymphomaniac. This official line continues with Tchaikovsky attempting suicide soon after his marriage and pouring out his terror and turmoil in this symphony and the opera Yevgeny Onegin. With the fall of the USSR in 1991 and the opening up of Russian archives to musicologists, not to mention a more humane view of homosexuality, a more accurate picture of Tchaikovsky’s emotional state at the time of the Fourth symphony has emerged. Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality was an open secret in a Russia where attitudes to sexuality were much more relaxed than they were in, say, England at the time. He certainly wasn’t the only known homosexual in the Russian artistic world of his day. The available evidence indicates that Tchaikovsky’s marriage in July 1877 to Antonina Milyukova was not some…

September 7, 2012