Conductor Robin Ticciati and pianist Javier Perianes are an odd couple. Ticciati is forthright and disciplined, while Perianes is reticent but erratic. But they demonstrated last night that Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto can accommodate those extremes, and even draw on the resulting tensions.
Considering the possibilities, we got off lightly when the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, always fearless in the face of the outrageous, performed Percy Grainger’s “music for an imaginary ballet”, The Warriors. The orchestra could have contained 30 pianists seated at 19 pianos, a prescription once followed when Grainger, the Australian wild boy of music, conducted it in concert in Chicago. In fact, we had just three of each.
Al Murray is celebrating 20 years as his brilliant invention the Pub Landlord, an autodidact, xenophobic sexist with misogynistic undertones. Who better then, you may think, to run for a certain political party in the forthcoming election? You'd be wrong, because the Pub Landlord has founded the FUKP (the Free United Kingdom Party) and he, its sole candidate, is standing for the Thanet South constituency, where Nigel Farage of Ukip just happens to be running.
Over the past two Saturdays, Vladimir Jurowski and a London Philharmonic on top form have given us a mini-festival of great scores for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
Through symphony, opera and orchestral fireworks, Julian Anderson’s music can usually be guaranteed to bring his audiences plenty of meaty listening. But the British composer’s golden aura faded somewhat during the London Philharmonic’s world premiere last night of In lieblicher Bläue, a quasi-concerto (“poem” is Anderson’s preferred term) for violin and orchestra. Some of its troubles might lie in the composer's source of inspiration, a crazy-quilt German Romantic text, hovering between poetry and prose, written in the early part of Friedrich Hölderlin’s long mental decline.
Andrew Manze chose an all-English programme for his debut with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Clarity of texture and disciplined, propulsive tempos are the hallmarks of his conducting, the results of many years as a violinist and ensemble leader in the period instrument movement. They may not seem ideal qualities for the early 20th century romanticism of Elgar, Ireland and Walton, but all of the works responded well to Manze’s treatment, each in its own way.
For the headliners of the Women Of The World Festival at London's Southbank Centre, there is less feisty feminism put on for show than you might expect. It's a nod to how far things have progressed - that other than the obligiatory thanksgiving for "being a loud woman on a stage of loud women plus a man who loves women", it's strength of self belief in the artists of tUnE-yArDs that lets us know what they believe in - and it's truly inspiring.
Now that opera houses mostly lack either the will or the funds to stage the more fantastical/exotic pageants among 19th century operas – the Royal Opera production of Meyerbeer’s mostly third-rate Robert le Diable was an unhappy exception – it’s left to valiant concert-performance companies like Chelsea Opera Group to try and trail clouds of kitschy glory. Which, thanks to the usual astute casting of world-class voices for the solo roles and a remarkable semi-professional orchestra under Royal Opera chorus master Renato Balsadonna, they did last night.
Even by trumpeters’ standards, Håkan Hardenberger is a flamboyant figure. He sports a sharp, tailored suit and a wing-collared shirt, and his stage presence is all swagger and pomp. HK Gruber has captured his spirit perfectly in his jazzy, experimental trumpet concerto Aerial, which has become the trumpeter’s calling card. That proved the highlight of the evening here, though, as it was followed by a lacklustre Mahler Five, a rare disappointment from the usually reliable conductor Andris Nelsons.
It’s all over: the final note of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s London Residency, for which many music-lovers bought tickets about a year ago, has risen into the ether, leaving most questions concerning Sir Simon Rattle’s future plans as yet unanswered. Following a red-hot Sibelius cycle at the Barbican, the Berliners came over to the Royal Festival Hall to complete the weeklong residency with Mahler’s Symphony No 2, which sold out twice on two consecutive evenings.