| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 14-Mar-2013 La Maison Symphonique de Montréal | The human Requiem of Brahms with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal |
Carl Dahlhaus called Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem “one of those works in which the 19th century recognized its own identity”. This weighty statement was not only inspired by the great success the work found at its première, but also by the stylistic nature of the music and choice of text. Brahms was always stretching one ear backwards into the domain of the ancients, so to speak, and the other ever forward towards innovation.Read full review... | |
| 1-Dec-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Speech to song: The London Philharmonic Orchestra plays Brahms and Zimmermann |
A German Requiem and two German composers sounds like your standard concert menu, but this concert was an interesting juxtaposition of two very different halves, the first filled by German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s little-heard Ecclesiastical Action, and the second by the much-loved, much-performed German Requiem by Brahms.Read full review... | |
| 26-Aug-2012 Felsenreitschule | Zimmermann's Die Soldaten at the Salzburg Festival |
The German thinker Theodor Adorno once wrote that a musical setting of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, considered in its own literary right a masterpiece, may well have proved redundant. The reason Berg’s opera Wozzeck succeeded, he argued, was not simply because Berg was Berg, but also because he had acquired the necessary historical distance to begin adapting the text to his own musical ends. Almost a century separates the play and the opera, and as Adorno puts it, ‘what Berg composed is simply what matured in Büchner in the intervening decades of obscurity’.Read full review... | |
| 1-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 25: BBC Symphony Orchestra and BBC Proms Youth Choir with David Robertson |
The numerous links and connections between each of tonight’s pieces make this a very cleverly crafted programme, on paper at least. Unified by a theme of ‘reflection and questioning’, the concert is evenly balanced, with two open-ended, questioning pieces (Ives’ The Unanswered Question and Zimmermann’s Nobody knows de trouble I see are both left hanging, unable to find resolution) each followed by a more pensive piece (Barber’s immensely popular Adagio and Tippett’s contemplative A Child of Our Time respectively).Read full review... | |