Sir Simon Rattle's intriguing return to the London Symphony Orchestra podium after years away threw up a curious thought: what happens after Berlin? The fate of six of his eight predecessors at the Berlin Phil has been death on the job. Was last night a first step to finding another way out?
Whether it’s consolation, stimulation, or just some old-fashioned romance you’re after this Valentine’s Day, theartsdesk’s team of writers (with a little help from a certain Bard from Stratford) have got it covered. Exhibitions to stir the heart, music to swell the soul, and comedy to help recover from both – we offer our pick of the most romantic of the arts. So from Giselle to Joe Versus the Volcano, from Barthes to the Bard, theartsdesk celebrates the many-splendoured thing that is love.
Valery Gergiev’s survey of the Tchaikovsky symphonies began here on a chilly January night with youthfully idealistic Winter Daydreams thrown into the sharpest relief against a disillusioned and angry Shostakovich whose own journey into the bleak mid-winter was, by the time he penned his Second Violin Concerto, very much a one-way ticket. Two revealing performances, one remarkable young violinist.
This season's LSO artist-in-focus, violinist Viktoria Mullova, is an incorrigible off-roader. The rougher the terrain the better. Early, modern, rock, folk: she'll absorb their shocks, vault their bumps, relish their pitfalls and come out without so much as a scratch. So Mullova's opening concert last night was intriguing. Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto isn't exactly smooth terrain, but its roughness is pretty suburban.
Will the real Rodion Shchedrin please stand up? At 77, the man himself still can, unlike fellow Russians Shostakovich and Schnittke into whose much larger shoes some think him worthy to step, and he stood last night both to take his own bow and for Valery Gergiev's compelling Musorgsky-Ravel. His music, though, can lie prone under the weight of its unmemorable, patchwork self-importance. Given heavyweight performances, it could well have driven the Barbican Hall a few inches further under ground. Fortunately there were Ravel's fantastical orchestrations and Gergiev at his most elastic to lift us out of the musical mud.
Will the real Rodion Shchedrin please stand up? At 77, the man himself still can, unlike fellow Russians Shostakovich and Schnittke into whose much larger shoes some think him worthy to step, and he stood last night both to take his own bow and for Valery Gergiev's compelling Musorgsky-Ravel. His music, though, can lie prone under the weight of its unmemorable, patchwork self-importance. Given heavyweight performances, it could well have driven the Barbican Hall a few inches further under ground. Fortunately there were Ravel's fantastical orchestrations and Gergiev at his most elastic to lift us out of the musical mud.
"There is not one idea," wrote that intemperate critic Eduard Hanslick about Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, "that does not get its neck broken by the speed with which the next lands on its head." Rather a compliment, I've always thought, and certainly so as applied to James MacMillan's new Violin Concerto. As soloist Vadim Repin and conductor Valery Gergiev whirled us tumultuously through its hyperactive songs and dances, there was so much I wanted to savour, to hear again. That won't be a problem.