-
1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
In the two decades before he retired from concert-performances in 2008 at the age of 77, Alfred Brendel was arguably the best known classical pianist in the world. Yet regard for his playing was never by any means universal; what his many admirers found as searching, considered and profound in his interpretations, others heard as colourless and lacking in spontaneity.
-
2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
If Edward Gardner’s performances and recording of Peter Grimes had not already firmly established his credentials as an outstanding Britten conductor, then this collection, taken from Gardner’s concerts with the London Philharmonic at the Festival Hall in London and at Saffron Hall in Saffron Walden, superbly confirms them.
-
2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Though he claimed to dislike performing in a studio, Sviatoslav Richter became perhaps the most intensively recorded pianist of the 20th century. But while his studio work was extensive, it was the huge volume of recordings made officially and unofficially at his recitals across more than 40 years that really bulked out his discography, with multiple versions available of many of the core works in his repertory.
-
3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Wilhelm Furtwängler may have become one of the greatest conductors of the first half of the 20th century, but as a teenager his musical aspirations were focused firmly on becoming a composer.
-
3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
The huge stylistic shift that György Ligeti’s music underwent in the late 1970s and early 1980s was one of the most remarkable and unexpected changes of direction of any composer, perhaps only comparable with Stravinsky’s shift into neoclassicism in the 1920s and his adoption of serial techniques in the 1950s.
-
1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Béla Bartók: Complete Piano Concertos. Even though they are among the most challenging piano concertos in the repertory, there is no shortage of outstanding versions on disc of the three Bartók works, from Géza Anda in the 1950s to Pierre-Laurent Aimard two years ago. They are certainly ambitious works with which to launch a recording career on Supraphon, but Tomáš Vrána is undoubtedly dauntless; his performances are full of confidence, verve and faultless technical accomplishment.
-
1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
The 400th anniversary of the death of Orlando Gibbons has so far been one of the less prominently marked of this year’s significant musical dates. Gibbons, who was born in Oxford in 1583, was one of the last significant English madrigalists, and is often viewed as a transitional figure between Renaissance music and the baroque, though historically he has been overshadowed by the more prolific William Byrd, with whom he may have studied. My Days: Orlando Gibbons and Nico Muhly.
-
1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Almost all the major works from the second half of Pierre Boulez’s composing career developed in the same way: their starting point is a small-scale ensemble or solo piece that served as the kernel for the much expanded and elaborated later score. That was the process that led to the final versions of works such as Mémoriale, Anthèmes and …explosante-fixe…, and to the pair of substantial pieces that are played with fabulous precision and incisiveness on this disc. Boulez: Éclat/Multiples.
-
1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
As soon as the 2022 Van Cliburn piano competition in Fort Worth, Texas, was over, news travelled across the Atlantic that the latest winner was very special indeed.
-
1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
No lieder singer of the second half of the last century has cast a longer shadow on subsequent generations than Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Even singers who never studied with the great baritone acknowledge his influence, but for Benjamin Appl the link was much more direct: after attending a masterclass that Fischer-Dieskau gave in Austria in 2009, Appl became Fischer-Dieskau’s final pupil, working with him up to his death three years later.
