Pianist who has played for five US presidents says great composer taught her to incorporate colour in music
The greatest lesson Ruth Slenczynska learned from the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov was that sounds have colour.
Nearly 90 years ago, the nine year-old Slenczynska was practising one of Rachmaninov’s preludes when he asked her to join him at the window. It was springtime in Paris, and the avenues were lined with mimosa trees laden with fluffy, golden blossoms.
Continue reading...As the €866m Elbphilharmonie celebrates its fifth anniversary, what could have been a costly mistake has become a symbol of the German city. London, take note
Five years ago the world felt a very different place. Pandemics belonged to disaster movies; the UK was reeling from the divisive Brexit vote but, with Theresa May newly installed as prime minister, the hope was that she might succeed in a soft Brexit and, in London; Simon Rattle’s imminent arrival as the London Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor was eagerly anticipated and along with it the city’s transformative new Centre for Music.
Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie opened in January 2017 with a glittering gala attended by celebrities and dignitaries. The spectacular concert hall was praised for its bold design, its superb acoustics and its “exceptionally exceptional exceptionalness”. But in London the hope – back then – was that the city’s own new concert hall would one day also be a world-leading arts venue to compete with Hamburg’s.
Continue reading...Performer pulls Royal Albert Hall gig over decision he compared to musical segregation
Violinist Nigel Kennedy has pulled out of a concert at the Royal Albert Hall with only days to go after accusing the radio station Classic FM of preventing him from performing a Jimi Hendrix tribute.
Kennedy said the “culturally prejudiced” decision amounted to “musical segregation”, with the station he now calls “Jurassic FM” preferring him to play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in Wednesday’s show.
Continue reading...The Russian star brings his take on Bach’s Goldberg Variations to the Proms, having recently torn the piece apart with choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. He explains his new, ‘tree-like’ twist
“Like climbing an infinite stairway, one step at a time.” That is how Pavel Kolesnikov describes working on JS Bach’s Goldberg Variations, one of the outstanding releases of last year. On Friday 10 September, he will perform them at the penultimate night of the Proms.
“I’ve never had the chance to dedicate so much quality time to a piece before,” he says when we meet in a tiny cafe in central London. The city has been home since the Siberia-born Kolesnikov, now in his early 30s, came to study at the Royal College of Music. He had grown up listening to recordings of the Goldbergs by Glenn Gould and Rosalyn Tureck, but had never considered performing them himself – “I did not feel I had anything to add”.
Continue reading...Late in life, maverick composer Cage decided to stop finding ‘alternatives to harmony’. The results have been rediscovered by a new generation of musicians
In the summer of 1990 John Cage gave a lecture at the International New Music gathering in Darmstadt, Germany, and effectively admitted defeat. The then 76-year-old US composer announced that his philosophical ideas of freedom and collaboration, concepts built into his avant garde musical compositions since the 1950s, had failed to influence reality. The world had got worse, not better. It was “a life spent … beating my head against a wall”, he announced. There was, however, one consolation. “I no longer consider it necessary to find alternatives to harmony,” he said. “After all these years I am finally writing beautiful music.”
Cage was referring to his Number Pieces, around 40 late works named after the quantity of performers involved (from 1 to 101) in which individual musicians could choose when and how long to play (within designated time brackets) resulting in often quiet and meditative pieces, a marked contrast to the previous, often abrasive compositions he’d built his 40-year reputation on.
Continue reading...Interactive tool features more than 500 women who are often forgotten in the classical music world
Two siblings, both considered child prodigies, dazzled audiences across Europe together in the 18th century, leaving a trail of positive reviews in their wake. But while Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart went on to be celebrated as one of the world’s greatest composers, the accomplishments of his sister – Maria Anna – were quickly forgotten after she was forced to halt her career when she came of age.
However, a new tool is seeking to cast a spotlight on female composers throughout the ages, pushing back against the sexism, stigmatisation and societal norms that have long rendered them invisible.
Continue reading...Born disabled due to the effects of Thalidomide, the exuberant star rose to classical music’s pinnacle – then quit at the peak of his powers. Now he’s back – singing jazz
Thomas Quasthoff has been retired from classical music for nearly a decade now. The German bass-baritone was in his early 50s when he made the shock announcement – an age when singers of his type are still in their prime. His elder brother Michael had been diagnosed with lung cancer in 2010, and that diagnosis and his brother’s subsequent death had left Quasthoff temporarily physically incapable of singing.
“Three days after being told that my brother would not live longer than nine months I lost my voice,” he recalls. “Doctors looked at my throat and said: ‘Everything is fine.’ But my heart was broken, and if the heart is broken ...” he pauses. “The voice is the mirror of the soul.”
Continue reading...Some of you went classic rock; others Iranian ambient. And yet others took on epic challenges that will take years to complete … here’s what you’ve been listening to while working under lockdown
If I need to concentrate on something really thorny, I go for Bach every time. It seems to allow my brain to work at a high level and I do almost all my best work to Bach. András Schiff or Angela Hewitt playing keyboard works, and Hilary Hahn on violin. Beethoven’s late quartets and Schubert lieder are good for deep thought. If I’m just doing low-level stuff, then Radio Paradise is my go-to – it’s a commercial-free internet station, which I like because it mixes a lot of stuff I know from my younger days with music that I’m less familiar with. Edward Collier, software developer, Cheltenham
Continue reading...She’s played with everyone from Tony Allen to David Byrne. Now the Grammy winner is singing with a new generation of African stars, celebrating their continent while confronting its failings
On a video call from Paris, Angélique Kidjo, 60, shifts and leaps in her seat with the restive energy of a teenager. “I’m always changing and innovating and this album is no different,” she says. “Change brings life to things; it keeps me going. In life, you never know what to expect.”
Over a career that spans five decades, the Beninese artist has crossed paths with everyone from Gilberto Gil and Tony Allen to Talking Heads, Bono and Vampire Weekend. She has four Grammy wins in “world music” categories – second only to Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
Continue reading...He was a demonic emperor who stabbed citizens at random and let Rome burn. Or was he? We go behind the scenes at a new show exploding myths about the ancient world’s favourite baddie
Nero comes with a lurid reputation. “The main thing we know about him is his infamy,” says Thorsten Opper, curator of the first British exhibition devoted to the Roman emperor. “The glutton, the profligate, the matricide, the megalomaniac.” Also, the pyromaniac: famously, Nero “fiddled while Rome burned”, or at least strummed his kithara to one of his own compositions, The Fall of Troy, while a fire, supposedly begun by him, destroyed three of Rome’s 14 districts and seriously damaged seven.
His afterlife on the page and screen is certainly arresting. Nero inspired some of the greatest Renaissance and baroque operas, notably Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea and Handel’s Agrippina, which chart the emperor’s adulterous love for Poppaea, who became his second wife. In the epic 1951 movie Quo Vadis, Peter Ustinov played Nero as entirely unhinged: a mincing, purple-swathed toddler in a man’s body. Christopher Biggins took him on in I, Claudius, the classic BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’s novel, and made him power-hungry, baby-faced and quite, quite mad.
Continue reading...Musician Rebeca Omordia has spent years unearthing the classical music of a whole continent, culminating in the hugely successful African Concert Series
While the Wigmore Hall has rightly garnered plaudits for keeping classical music alive during lockdown, another pioneering concert series has also beaten the odds with its series of online live events.
The African Concert Series is the brainchild of my former duo partner, the pianist Rebeca Omordia. She has half-Romanian, half-Nigerian heritage. But while we would often discuss world-renowned Romanian classical musicians such as composer Georges Enescu, pianist Dinu Lipatti and conductor Sergiu Celibidache, when it came to Nigerian classical composers, we drew a blank. “There aren’t any,” said Rebeca. I told her there must be, and challenged her to find them. This was back in 2013, and her subsequent research has uncovered more than 200 composers of African art music, Nigerians among them.
Continue reading...It’s hosted opera greats, suffragette rallies, Hitchcock films, sports events, sci-fi conventions – and, of course, the Proms and countless rock gigs. Artists from Led Zeppelin to Abba recall their moments on the hallowed stage
The Royal Albert Hall is 150 years old today (and the Guardian was there to see it opened by Queen Victoria). With a design based on a Roman amphitheatre, stacked balconies pack the audience close to the action – and at a capacity touching 6,000, the number of visitors entertained at the London venue runs to many millions. But what is it like to play as a performer? We asked artists and sportspeople for their memories of being centre stage at the iconic venue.
Continue reading...From praise from Paul McCartney to writing music for Game of Thrones, the musician has had an extraordinary career so far. She discusses her next step - an album embracing the natural world through electronica
Paul McCartney knew Hannah Peel’s talent before the world did. He hands out pin-badges at every degree ceremony at Liverpool’s Institute for Performing Arts, which he co-founded, and where Peel studied music. In 2007, her graduation year, she’d been chosen to compose something to accompany each student walking on stage.
Peel had been advised to do a fanfare of trumpets, but refused; she wrote a minimalist miniature for vibraphone and marimba instead. “My principal hated it,” she says, laughing down the Zoom line. “But when I crossed the stage and shook Paul McCartney’s hand, he whispered in my ear, ‘I really like your music. Well done!’”
Continue reading...The renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma gives an impromptu performance in a vaccine waiting room in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, after having received his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine. He performs Ave Maria and the prelude to Bach’s Cello Suite No 1 to the small number of patients waiting to receive the dose. Ma, who played for about 15 minutes, is a part-time resident of the area and wanted to ‘give something back’ to his community, according to a local paper, the Berkshire Eagle
Continue reading...The Suede frontman on his latest musical discoveries, the brilliance of Michael Clark and the enduring appeal of mudlarking by the Thames
Born in Sussex in 1967, Brett Anderson founded alternative rock band Suede in 1989 with then-girlfriend Justine Frischmann and childhood friend Mat Osman. Billed by Melody Maker as “the best new band in Britain”, Suede released five albums including their self-titled debut and Coming Up, before disbanding in 2003. Anderson went on to front the Tears and release four solo albums. In 2010 Suede reformed and released a further three albums, the latest of which is 2018’s The Blue Hour. Anderson will perform with Charles Hazlewood and Paraorchestra as part of the Gŵyl 2021 festival, 6-7 March.
Continue reading...She has scored films, played with rappers, starred in a TV comedy, and performed for the dying. As the classical sensation releases three new works, she talks about the shock of playing arenas – and making the leap into opera
When Caroline Shaw became, at the age of 30, the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer prize for music, she described herself as “a musician who wrote music” rather than as “a composer”. Partita, her winning score, is a joyful rollercoaster of a work, encompassing song, speech and virtually every vocal technique you can imagine. It was written for Shaw’s own group, Roomful of Teeth.
Eight years on, she’s still wary of defining herself too narrowly. “Composer, for some people, can mean something very particular,” she says, “and I’m trying to make sure I don’t get swallowed up into only one community.” Not that Shaw’s range shows any sign of narrowing: even a small sample of her work over the past few years throws up an array of names not often seen together: rappers Kanye West and Nas, soprano Renée Fleming, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, pianist Jonathan Biss. She has written film scores, sung on others, was the soloist in her own violin concerto, and even managed a cameo appearance as herself in Amazon Studio’s comedy drama Mozart in the Jungle. A year ago, Orange, a recording of her string quartets, won the Attacca Quartet a Grammy.
Continue reading...Netflix drama’s use of string versions of Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish hits has tripled streaming figures for Vitamin String Quartet
The success of Netflix’s Bridgerton has produced some unexpected trends, such as huge increases in people searching online for Regency fashion items including corsets. But the latest is a dramatic rise in the number of people streaming classical cover versions of contemporary pop songs.
Vitamin String Quartet, the group that provide most of the classical versions of Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish and Maroon 5 songs in the modernised costume drama, have had a 350% increase in the number of people streaming their work since the show was released in December.
Continue reading...Conductor laments impact on UK musicians’ careers and describes application as ‘absolute necessity’
The conductor Simon Rattle, who announced this week that he was cutting short his tenure at Britain’s leading orchestra to return to Germany, has applied for German citizenship after Brexit.
The Liverpool-born musician lamented the barriers thrown up by Britain’s departure from the European Union to the careers of young musicians who had grown used to performing freely to the continent’s music-hungry public.
Continue reading...Best TV shows | The European Economic Area | ‘Bigly’ | Classical music | Renaming the Severn Bridge
While I thoroughly enjoy your annual lists of the best TV shows (The 50 best TV shows of 2020, 22 December), I cannot help noticing that non-English speaking programmes are never included. In recent years some of the most gripping and enjoyable shows have come from Germany (Babylon Berlin and Dark, for example), Scandinavia and other European countries. Perhaps, now that we are adrift politically, it is the time to embrace the wonders of European television.
Christina Neal
Cullercoats, Tyne and Wear
• However long it takes to rejoin the EU (Could Britain rejoin the EU? It seems like a hopelessly lost cause – but so did leaving, 1 January), the first aim should be to join the European Economic Area. That would at least restore some of the freedoms which Boris Johnson’s government has deprived us of.
Alan Pavelin
Chislehurst, Kent
The cellist believes that plans for a UK Holocaust memorial are ‘counter-productive’. What matters most, she argues, is education
Have you, I ask the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, ever seen a memorial to the Holocaust – or to any atrocity – that was effective?
“It’s difficult to say how effective it is on the person who looks at it,” she says. “I mean I was in it, after all, I’m a survivor of it. Nothing really can come anywhere near what actually happened, you know.”
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