TheSound
An Englishman in New York
I expect this topic will sink deep, and then be bumped up rather a lot over time, as even I, with a professional musician in the family, don't attend concerts every week by any means, I think my wife would view it as me checking up on her at work if I over did it!! But anyway, it's worth a thread imo as there maybe others here also who go to the odd 'classical' gig as well as all the rock concerts.
A quite superb concert yesterday in Liverpool, and quite a family occasion as it was ‘Mother’s Day’ here so we had a nice lunch with the kids too. The Philharmonic Hall was a sell-out, the young Russian phenom conductor Vasily Petrenko has just galvanised the place with some stunning live performances and recordings, you can’t get at ticket for anything he does these days unless you are quick of the mark, and the Tchaikovsky ‘Manfred’ Symphony – for which the RLPO won several awards for the recording they did of it in 2009 – was just electric, there’s a lot of light and shade in that work, it’s quite dark at times and very dramatic, quite absorbing.
Though best of all for me was the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 played by the french girl Helene Grimaud – I have actually seen her 2 or 3 times before, and not only is she very beautiful and with tremendous stage presence, but just a consumate musician, it isn’t actually possible to play the piano with any more grace and feeling than she does, and she gave an unforgettable performance, she took the beautiful slow adagio movement so slowly that at times it almost came to a halt, but it was all the more moving for it. She had the audience so enraptured that they wouldn’t let her go, after her 5th ‘curtain call’ she sat down and gave an encore of a piano transcription of the ‘Dance of the Blesses Spirits’ from Gluck’s ‘Orfeo de Euridice’, I got the feeling she was just improvising the whole thing off the top of her head, it was almost more astonishing than the concerto. Petrenko actually likes his encores too, the orchestra gave a breakneck-speed performance of the Tchaikovsky ‘Russian Dance’ from ‘Nutcracker’ as an encore right at the end, just a superb concert all round.
Didn't mention the Vaughan Williams 'Wasps' Overture which opened the concert, Petrenko is originally from Leningrad, but I have heard him conduct British music such as Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Britten a couple of times, and he seems to understand instictively that this music runs through the veins of an orchestra such as the RLPO, so he doesn't have to push them hard, and so he just lets them go, unlike the Russian repertoire which he stamps with his own very Russian character.
A quite superb concert yesterday in Liverpool, and quite a family occasion as it was ‘Mother’s Day’ here so we had a nice lunch with the kids too. The Philharmonic Hall was a sell-out, the young Russian phenom conductor Vasily Petrenko has just galvanised the place with some stunning live performances and recordings, you can’t get at ticket for anything he does these days unless you are quick of the mark, and the Tchaikovsky ‘Manfred’ Symphony – for which the RLPO won several awards for the recording they did of it in 2009 – was just electric, there’s a lot of light and shade in that work, it’s quite dark at times and very dramatic, quite absorbing.
Though best of all for me was the Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23 played by the french girl Helene Grimaud – I have actually seen her 2 or 3 times before, and not only is she very beautiful and with tremendous stage presence, but just a consumate musician, it isn’t actually possible to play the piano with any more grace and feeling than she does, and she gave an unforgettable performance, she took the beautiful slow adagio movement so slowly that at times it almost came to a halt, but it was all the more moving for it. She had the audience so enraptured that they wouldn’t let her go, after her 5th ‘curtain call’ she sat down and gave an encore of a piano transcription of the ‘Dance of the Blesses Spirits’ from Gluck’s ‘Orfeo de Euridice’, I got the feeling she was just improvising the whole thing off the top of her head, it was almost more astonishing than the concerto. Petrenko actually likes his encores too, the orchestra gave a breakneck-speed performance of the Tchaikovsky ‘Russian Dance’ from ‘Nutcracker’ as an encore right at the end, just a superb concert all round.
Didn't mention the Vaughan Williams 'Wasps' Overture which opened the concert, Petrenko is originally from Leningrad, but I have heard him conduct British music such as Elgar, Vaughan Williams, and Britten a couple of times, and he seems to understand instictively that this music runs through the veins of an orchestra such as the RLPO, so he doesn't have to push them hard, and so he just lets them go, unlike the Russian repertoire which he stamps with his own very Russian character.