Latest news with #GianandreaNoseda
Telegraph
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Nicola Benedetti makes a modern concerto take wing, plus the best of April's classical and jazz concerts
LSO/Gianandrea Noseda, Barbican ★★★★☆ It's been a good week for overstatement and triumphalism – and no, I don't mean Trump and his tariffs. I mean the musical kind inspired in Soviet composers by their country's victories over Nazism and those beastly capitalists, and the need to please their political masters. The London Philharmonic Orchestra gave us a fine example on Wednesday, with the ear-splitting Third Symphony by Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky. On Thursday night, the London Symphony Orchestra pinned us to the wall with Shostakovich's even noisier 12th Symphony, composed to celebrate the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. If I say Shostakovich's symphony was more successful, it's not because it had more moments of poetic subtlety to compensate for all the noise. The Ukrainian symphony was actually better on that score. Shostakovich's symphony was simply better paced and less clunkily symbolic. The performance under conductor Gianandrea Noseda certainly had its subtle moments. The slow movement had a beautiful far-away tenderness (step forward the LSO's principal clarinetist Sérgio Pires) that made the music seem more interesting than it actually was. As for the grandiose ending, where the same thunderous drum-and-trumpet affirmations kept coming round for what seemed like an eternity, it was thunderous and, yes, grandiose. The opening piece, Shostakovich's Festival Overture, was hardly more subtle, but it was irresistibly high-spirited and brilliantly played. The real musical interest of the evening was in the Second Violin Concerto by famed Scottish composer James MacMillan, which was receiving its first London performance. It always helps a new piece when the performer truly believes in it, and there was no doubt on the night of soloist Nicola Benedetti's fervent commitment. She gave the high lyrical effusions a piercing sweetness, and when the furious cadenza (solo spot) in the opening movement came round she strove to give the angry gestures a genuine musical shapeliness. That was one reason the work exuded a touching radiance. But the composer, too, is mellowing. For me, MacMillan's music has often seemed too overtly symbolic, with angry 'modernist' outbursts over here fighting with an age-old 'spiritual' hymn over there. And there were moments on Thursday when the music took on a parodic military quality that was hard to fathom. But the main idea, a succession of simple luminous harmonies, registered without effort on one's heart and mind. That effect deepened each time the harmonies returned, as Benedetti draped a new arching melody over the top. In this new more serene phase, MacMillan's music can admit all kinds of enriching connections with the past. I caught a whiff of Britten's Turn of the Screw at one point, and those luminous opening harmonies made me think of Wagner's Twilight of the Gods. And lurking in the background of the beautiful ending was the lovely farewell of Strauss's Four Last Songs, with its trilling flutes evoking birds at dusk, or perhaps two souls. For some, that evocation might be just too blatant; for me it showed the one-time Angry Young Man is now more at peace with himself. IH No further performances LPO/Vladimir Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★☆ After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the classical music world went into a brief agony of conscience. Should Russian music and musicians be banned? Should Ukrainian works be championed? Now, more than two years on, it seems like business as usual, but that's only from the perspective of this safe little island. For Russian artists, the issue is still a burning one, and some brave ones have risked their careers, not to mention their safety, by making their opposition to the war very public. One of them is the conductor Vladimir Jurowski, who on Wednesday, night made a return visit to the orchestra he led for 14 years until 2021, the London Philharmonic Orchestra. As if to make sure he has burnt all his bridges with Russia, he offered a programme that placed the spotlight on two Ukrainian composers, and a Russian song-cycle that contains a denunciation of the senseless slaughter of war. The first of those two composers, Sergei Prokofiev, is claimed by Russia as one of theirs. But Prokofiev grew up in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, and his opera Semyon Kotko is a celebration of the beauty of his native land and the bravery of his people in fighting off invaders. The orchestral suite Prokofiev drew from the opera has a picture-book charm that Jurowski was clearly keen to play down. He homed in on the serious moments: the militaristic rhythms, doom-laden bell-strokes and satirical brass, and gave them the sharpest possible edge as if to persuade us the work is more than a nostalgic picturing of Prokofiev's homeland. Less immediately appealing but much more weighty was the Third Symphony of 1951, by Ukrainian composer Boris Lyatoshynsky. It was subtitled 'Peace shall defeat War', but the defeat was very hard-won. You could feel the agonies of the recent Second World War in the jagged brass outcries, and the sturdy Ukrainian folk-melody that keeps coming back with peasant-like doggedness felt assailed by musical canon-fire. In the slow movement, lyrical consolation in the oboe was soon pushed aside by a repeated bell-like tolling, which grew and grew like an advancing army. Jurowski and the players had clearly worked hard to make all the warring, piled-up elements stand out clearly. It was worth the effort. They persuaded me and the enthusiastic audience that the symphony had moments of real eloquence, and a huge cumulative weight. Looking down on both these works with what felt like scorn was the evening's masterpiece, Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death. The bass who impersonates the figure of Death was Matthew Rose, who was simply magnificent. He caught the way Death assumes many forms: the seductive lover for the sick girl, the friendly drinking partner for the drunken peasant, and finally the Field-Marshall who surveys the legions of dead soldiers with contempt. Jurowski brought out the sinister, flickering colours of Edison Denisov's orchestral arrangement of the songs, but occasionally Rose seemed overwhelmed. The stark simplicity of Mussorgsky's original piano version is still the best way to hear these masterly songs.
Washington Post
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
In the hands of Noseda and the NSO, ‘Vanessa' is better late than ever
Before maestro Gianandrea Noseda sent the National Symphony Orchestra whirling into its dazzling performance of Samuel Barber's ″Vanessa' on Thursday night at the Kennedy Center, he led the audience into a stretch of complete silence. 'There are moments when it's difficult to find the words,' he said from the stage, 'so I think music will serve this purpose.'
