Martin Kettle's Blog, page 82
January 8, 2015
Brentano Quartet review – a masterclass in eloquence
This collegial quartet’s varied programme of Mozart, Bartók and Brahms was most gratifying in its more introspective moments
The Brentano Quartet present the listener with one of those unresolvable but intriguing paradoxes of chamber music dynamics: unlike some quartets, their sound is not overtly dominated by their first violinist. Yet the excellent Mark Steinberg’s purity of tone and precise articulation, which do so much to make the Brentano’s sound so satisfyingly collegial, is at the same time also one of this quartet’s defining characteristics.
This self-effacing interplay ensured there was never anything run-of-the-mill about this varied programme of Mozart, Bartók and Brahms. They began with Mozart’s “Hunt” String Quartet in B flat, K458, bringing a sprightly freshness and vigorous fullness of sound to the bouncing 6/8 opening movement that gives the piece its nickname. However, it was in the more introspective and harmonically precarious music of the adagio that the Brentanos produced their most gratifying playing.
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January 1, 2015
English radicalism needs to recapture the spirit of Blake | Martin Kettle
Not since the late 1960s has the gap between imaginative and practical politics – the politics of the soul and the politics of the brain – been as great as it is today. Most attempts to bridge the gap, as in the 1960s, are fantasies, doomed to fail in the short run. Yet the gap is a reprimand. It wounds our shared life.
Britain faces this divide in a particularly difficult way. In one part of the country, Scotland, the gap between imaginative and practical has narrowed. Many Scots feel close to living the political dream. Elsewhere, and in much of England in particular, the gap remains immense. The implications of this divide for the British project are very threatening.
Continue reading...December 29, 2014
Igor Levit review – this pianist has got it all
Wigmore Hall, London
Levit livened up the post-Christmas lull with a recital that showcased his huge technical range and lovely touch
The seasonal shutdown means noteworthy concerts of any kind are rare events in the days between the pre-Christmas Messiahs and the first New Year waltzes. Happily, no one seems to have told the Russian-born, German-based pianist Igor Levit about this indolent British custom. As a result, just two nights after Christmas, Levit arrived at the Wigmore Hall to unwrap one of the most demanding and stimulating London piano recitals heard there throughout the whole of 2014.
Levit’s playing fuses two striking qualities that ought not sit as well together as they do. On the one hand he is a force-field of concentrated musical energy, whose hyperactive attention to detail was a feature of Beethoven’s will-of-the-wisp two-movement F major Sonata Op 54, with which he began. On the other, he possesses the ability to sustain a structure and a musical argument, which, allied to a lovely touch, held Bach’s C minor Second Partita together, even though some of the contrasts seemed unduly forced.
Continue reading...December 26, 2014
Our debt to history’s radicals, right, left and centre | Martin Kettle
Christmas Day may be over, but there is still time for a seasonal quiz. The task is to pick the person who most deserves to be celebrated in this country’s radical history. Who, in short, is your radical hero?
There is a good reason why this question is freshly topical today. It is currently being asked by the People’s History Museum in Manchester. The museum has come up with a list of 100 radical candidates, and it is now inviting supporters to “sponsor a radical”.
Continue reading...December 24, 2014
Critics' top 10 live events: Alfred Hickling, Erica Jeal, Martin Kettle and Kate Molleson
Our classical critics select their 10 live events of 2014
Tim Ashley, Andrew Clements, Rian Evans and George Hall’s choices | Tom Service’s top 10
The Coronation of Poppea, Grand Theatre, Leeds
The first grand opera? Or the template for soap opera? Tim Albery’s deliciously amoral new version at Opera North suggested a bit of both. Read our review
December 18, 2014
It’s not Cuba that has just decided to rejoin the modern world – it’s the US | Martin Kettle
During the signing of the Versailles treaty in 1919, it is said that a delegate left the conference muttering: “What on earth will the historians say about all this?” When the remark was reported to the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau produced a characteristically good retort – Clemenceau was, after all, a journalist. “Well, one thing they won’t say is that Belgium invaded Germany.”
A modern version of Clemenceau’s robust comment applies equally pointedly in the context of this week’s news that the United States and Cuba are finally to normalise their relations. It is tempting to treat the half-century standoff across the Florida Straits as a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other. Yet one thing the historians cannot say is that Cuba ever attempted to invade or annexe the US. As in the first world war, the big power takes the big responsibility.
Continue reading...December 15, 2014
BBCSO/Oramo review – an unforgettable experience
Busoni’s gargantuan piano concerto was an irresistible draw in an adventurous programme of 20th-century rarities
Orchestral concert of the year? It would need to be outstanding to better this one. The evening brought together three important works from the early 20th century, culminating in Ferruccio Busoni’s gargantuan piano concerto of 1904 – an irresistible draw, as it’s a piece that seems to come around about as often as Halley’s comet. For Busoni anoraks, the fact that Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra were on blazing form all evening was simply a bonus.
But it wasn’t only the Busoni. Given the need for a chorus in the last movement of the concerto, the programmers took the opportunity to give a rare outing to Rachmaninov’s 1902 cantata, Spring. This mixes a bubbling evocation of nature with some heavily over-written brass and choral grandiloquence, setting a nasty Nekrasov poem in which the arrival of spring spares the writer the need to murder his unfaithful wife. Hmmm. Igor Golovatenko was the idiomatic baritone soloist.
Continue reading...December 12, 2014
English Concert/Davies review – ravishingly good
This chance to hear the UK’s pre-eminent countertenor, Iestyn Davies, in an ideal venue did not go unrewarded
Spitalfields Music’s annual winter festival generates an always-welcome December force field of imaginative musical events amid the surrounding seasonal excess in the City of London. That’s particularly true when its concerts take place in one of its prime venues, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Hanoverian church on the eastern edge of the Square Mile, which is one of the most agreeable musical venues in town.
There were respectful nods to the season in two arias from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at the start of this performance by the English Concert, directed from the harpsichord by Harry Bicket. And Locatelli’s Concerto Grosso in F minor, Op 1 No 8, is sometimes dubbed the Christmas concerto because it finishes with a shepherds’ pastorale not unlike the one Handel inserted into Messiah.
Continue reading...December 11, 2014
Could this speech on spending be Ed Miliband’s midwinter spring? | Martin Kettle
In the seasonal half-light of December days like those through which we are living, TS Eliot once caught a gleam of what he called a midwinter spring. Bright with hard frost and brief sun, the midwinter spring was its own season, offering an illusory appearance of blossom and bloom in the dark time of the year.
The Labour party’s current sense of an opportunity, which triggered and was reflected in Ed Miliband’s speech on government spending on Thursday, may prove to be a midwinter spring too. It may be the political equivalent of something bright amid the cold coming of the current opinion polls. But there is no disputing that Labour scents a chance of making ground at the moment. And it may be that Labour is right.
Continue reading...December 7, 2014
Belcea Quartet/Biss review – pain and pleasure
Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new work Contusion, based on the Sylvia Plath poem and premiered here by the Belcea Quartet, has the makings of a modern classic
The interest created in 2010 by Mark-Anthony Turnage’s first mature work for string quartet, Twisted Blues with Twisted Ballad, owed as much to the quartet’s Led Zeppelin influences as to Turnage’s own free-spirited writing for the Belcea Quartet. Four years on, Turnage’s new quartet, again entrusted to the Belceas, is another, much darker homage, this time to Sylvia Plath’s late poem Contusion, with which the new work shares its title. Plath’s bleak image of the flaring bruise, “the doom mark”, from which there can be no emotional recovery, is closely mirrored in the score.
This time, however, the musical voice is more wholly Turnage’s. Gone, though, is the often trademark eclecticism of some of his recent work. In its place comes an almost self-consciously disciplined side of the composer. Contusion is a concise, poignantly balanced one movement cry of pain. Its structure echoes classical sonata form, with its tight, numb and often repeated opening figure flowering into a much more anguished central section before the terse figure returns transformed yet unassuaged in a bleakly whispered ending in which the cello briefly takes wing. The Belceas played it with an intensity that suggests a modern classic. There will be plenty of opportunity to judge it more carefully when Contusion is played by all 12 ensembles taking part in the Wigmore’s international string-quartet competition at the end of March.
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