There was something extraordinarily powerful and moving about Saturday’s Beethoven commemoration concert by the BBC Philharmonic and its chief conductor, Omer Meir Wellber.
Beethoven for Three – Symphonies 2 and 5 Emanuel Ax, Leonidas Kavakos, Yo Yo Ma (Sony)
The Drama and Romance of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s promotional hook for this concert signalled a heady musical mix. Appropriate for the stark contrasts of mood central to Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, but potentially less so for Dvorák’s Symphony No. 8 that casts barely a cloud to compromise its predominantly sunny G major disposition shared with the outer movements of the Beethoven.
Two pianists; two concertos; two orchestras. It is not often that Edinburgh’s most venerable concert hall plays host, on consecutive nights, to two of our national orchestras offering strikingly similar programmes.
Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection (Warner Classics)
The Takács Quartet is hard to pin down. The group was founded in 1975 in Budapest, but since 1983 has been based in Boulder, Colorado. Cellist András Fejér is the only remaining founding member, and the violist, Richard O’Neill, only joined in 2020. They also have a British first violin, Edward Dusinberre. So what performing tradition can we expect from them?
Leo Sowerby: Paul Whiteman Commissions & other early works Andy Baker Orchestra, Avalon String Quartet (Cedille)
2016
This concert almost had me in tears before a single note was played because it marked (joy!) the first classical concert to take place in the Usher Hall since it was shut in March 2020. She has been closed for eighteen long months, but she hasn’t aged a day.
It’s easy to forget that what you see in a competition final isn’t always the full story, the jury members’ votes in this case based on what had gone on in the earlier rounds. The 20th Leeds International Piano Competition began its final stages in the city two weeks ago, the 63 competitors in the first round filmed earlier this year in 17 separate locations across the globe, the films streamed via Vimeo to the UK.