Is listening to four baroque operas in concert versions on successive nights, each starting at 10.30pm and finishing in the earliest hour of the next day, a pleasure or a form of musical masochism? Surprisingly, mostly a pleasure, even after a long day of (in the case of your correspondent) writing and listening to a lot of other performances in very different genres…
Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra may now have achieved the status of a modern classic but it is still special to be able to hear a pair of remarkably different but equally admirable and beautifully played interpretations as Lawrence Foster’s in Bucharest and Daniel Barenboim’s at The Proms …
If ever there was a week to show up the differences between early nineteenth and early twentieth century piano concertos, this was it. Whereas in Beethoven and Chopin’s time piano and orchestra had a conversation, in Prokofiev’s and Rachmaninov’s it was a shouting match with occasional lulls to catch the breath and spin a melody, at least in the view of the performers playing in Bucharest…
One of the joys of this festival is that you can hear three very different violinists, in very different repertoire, between tea and suppertime. It is revealing not just in terms of relative quality but of their attitudes to music-making…