Reviews

Fazil Say, Lucerne Piano Festival, Lucerne (Rated 2/ 5 )

The Lucerne Piano Festival attracts an influx of pianophiles every November to the town's state-of-the-art lakeside hall. It has just been welcoming some of the piano world's greatest artists including Murray Perahia, Maurizio Pollini and a host of young up-and-comers. Plus one dud.

Inside Reviews

Kavakos/Lugansky/Tamestit/Capucon, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London (Rated 5/ 5 )

Wednesday, 2 December 2009

Leonidas Kavakos’ last concert as “An Artist in Focus” at the South Bank began with a postscript – a substantial one – to the recent Alfred Schnittke festival.

The Tsarina's Slippers, Royal Opera House, London
Cecilia Bartoli/Il Giardino Armonico, Barbican Hall, London

Sunday, 29 November 2009

A family show fails to live up to its sparkly promise at the Royal Opera House, but Bartoli is brilliant

Album: Schumann/ Dvorak, Piano Concertos (Pentatone)

Sunday, 29 November 2009

Martin Helmchen delivers a refreshing performance of Schumann and Dvorak's piano concertos.

Album: Satie, Works for Two and Four Hands (KML)

Sunday, 29 November 2009

Tiered cakes, pears and desiccated embryos.

Handel, Messiah, English National Opera (Rated 4/ 5 )

Saturday, 28 November 2009

Messiah has always been about the communal experience, the shared tradition – especially at Christmas. We dutifully stand for the “Hallelujah!” chorus, feeling but perhaps not really understanding the release it brings, and why.

Album: Faryl, Wonderland (Decca) (Rated 3/ 5 )

Friday, 27 November 2009

For her second album, the young mezzo-soprano has tried to develop an overall theme, loosely based around Alice In Wonderland, though listeners may struggle to discern a trace of it.

Album: Leif Ove Andsnes, Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition/Schumann: Kinderszenen (EMI Classics) (Rated 4/ 5 )

Friday, 27 November 2009

Though lacking an important element when separated from the visual settings devised by artist Robin Rhodes, Leif Ove Andsnes' performance here has much to recommend it. There's his delicate, fluttering touch, almost like a hammer dulcimer, on the "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle" section, and particularly the way the gossipy, chattering tone of "Limoges – Le Marche" is sustained until it founders on the funereal opening chords of the "Catacombs", in whose sombre progress can be glimpsed the promenading art-lover himself.

Cecilia Bartoli/Il Giardino Armonico, Barbican Hall (Rated 3/ 5 )

Wednesday, 25 November 2009

Cecilia Bartoli’s latest album and road show – "Sacrificium – La scuola dei castrati" – comes courtesy of an era characterised by the unkindest cuts of all. The composers' names are all but forgotten but those of the genitally compromised superstars are not. We have heard only simulations of the kind of sound these surgically adjusted males could produce but from all the documentary evidence it was bigger and more pungent than the undeniably engaging Bartoli is apt to produce. But where she does share a certain kinship with the castrati is in her ability to make a three-course meal of second-rate music. The album, the concert, was choc full of it.

Tchaikovsky The Tsarina’s Slippers, Royal Opera House, London

Monday, 23 November 2009

The words Tchaikovsky and Comedy don’t usually occur in the same sentence – and you may still be of that opinion after sitting through this expensively gift-wrapped but decidedly bland and singularly unfunny staging of the composer’s big-hearted Gogol adaptation.