Latest news with #concertos
Irish Times
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Kristian Bezuidenhout/Irish Chamber Orchestra review: Interpretative quirks too often interrupt Beethoven piano concertos' natural flow
Kristian Bezuidenhout/Irish Chamber Orchestra Whyte Recital Hall, RIAM, Dublin ★★★☆☆ It's all change at the Irish Chamber Orchestra. The Austrian violinist and conductor Thomas Zehetmair is being succeeded as artistic partner by the Norwegian violinist and composer Henning Kraggerud in September. And the South African-born keyboard player and conductor Kristian Bezuidenhout, who trained in Australia and the US and now lives in London, has been named the orchestra's associate artist. (Those job titles are so confusing that the orchestra's website also refers to Bezuidenhout its 'current Artist in Association'.) Bezuidenhout is no stranger to Ireland, having first performed here as a teenager back in 1998. He made his first appearances with the ICO in 2006, when he played both harpsichord and piano in concertos by Hertel and Mozart. His current ICO project is a cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos, directed from the keyboard, using a lidless Steinway concert grand. Tonight he plays the second and fourth concertos. Bezuidenhout is one of those players who bring the sensitivities and concerns of the world of period performance style to their work with modern instruments. In the dry acoustic of the Royal Irish Academy of Music's Whyte Recital Hall this makes for performances of great clarity and immediacy, though the textures do at times become a little cluttered, so that the strongest instruments are allowed to overpower those of lighter tone. His piano playing matches the high energy and vivid communication of his conducting. His approach is so articulate that intricate score markings that are often hardly discernible in performance can stand out with the musical equivalent of perfect elocution. We're talking here about the slurring of pairs of notes in rapid passages, the impeccable cleanness of virtuosic flourishes, and a general feeling in fast movements of high spirits unimpeded by stress. READ MORE In my experience Bezuidenhout's approach sometimes lean towards a kind of interpretative detailing that can seem intrusive. This can go beyond the often stimulating hits and misses from added embellishments, whether spontaneous or premeditated, into areas that can seem hard to justify based on what's in the composers' scores. The balancing of these issues is altogether more persuasive in the Second Piano Concerto than in the Fourth, where the orchestra is prone to sound too pressured, and Bezuidenhout's fondness for spaced-out arpeggiation is inflicted even on the poise of the solo piano phrase that opens this work. Bezuidenhout is not the first player to arpeggiate the opening chord. On disc the practice can be traced back at least as far as Steven Lubin's 1987 recording with the Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood. And the idea seems to have originated with the Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny, who proposed it in the mid-19th century, some decades after the composer's death. In the ICO performance it is definitely a case of 'Tain't What You Do (It's the Way That You Do It), with Bezuidenhout's interpretative quirks too often interrupting the natural flow of the music in spite of the otherwise often refined delivery.
The Guardian
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Ligeti: Violin and Piano Concertos, etc album review – As always, Faust's performance is perceptive and immaculate
The huge stylistic shift that György Ligeti's music underwent in the late 1970s and early 1980s was one of the most remarkable and unexpected changes of direction of any composer, perhaps only comparable with Stravinsky's shift into neoclassicism in the 1920s and his adoption of serial techniques in the 1950s. The language that Ligeti invented for himself, which invested tonality with a whole new set of relationships and incorporated elements from a variety of non-western musical traditions, was unveiled in his Horn Trio of 1982, but it was in the two major concertos that followed, for piano in 1988 and violin in 1993, that the full power of his new language was revealed. Both are remarkable works, which seem utterly fresh and original, yet identifiably remain part of the concerto tradition. It's no surprise that the violin concerto particularly has been taken up by a number of soloists, or that Isabelle Faust should have wanted to add her reading to the series she has made for Harmonia Mundi. It is a typical Faust performance, perceptive, technically immaculate, and just a little on the cool side, and it's paired with an equally accomplished, if a little more mechanical, account of the piano work with Jean-Frédéric Neuburger as soloist. Neuburger also includes Ligeti's early, Bartókian Concert Românesc, while Faust leads performances of two of György Kurtág's Aus der Ferne sequence, as exquisite interludes. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
ABC News
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Bach: Keyboard Concertos, BWV 1052, 1053, 1054 & 1056
Italian pianist Beatrice Rana explores the universal qualities of Johann Sebastian Bach's music with the Amsterdam Sinfonietta in this week's Feature Album on ABC Classic. Rana performs four of Bach's Keyboard Concertos, BWV 1052, 1053, 1054 and 1056, with the musicians of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta led by concertmaster Candida Thompson. 'For me, the universal quality of this music opens up the question of choosing between the harpsichord of Bach's own time and the modern piano,' Rana says. 'I sincerely hope Bach would have liked his concertos performed on the piano. Certainly, the evidence is that his music succeeds on every kind of instrument. We need only think of all the arrangements of his compositions for various ensembles and of those taken into the jazz repertoire, for example.'
