Classical music

Regarding Frederick Delius, how do we stand? In the 1930s, Sir Henry Wood believed that Proms audiences much preferred Delius to Holst, and most critics back then would have described him as a major British composer. Times change: if you took your music GCSE in the late 1980s, you’ll have sensed that the Bradford lad was no longer quite up there. But you might well have been taught by people who still remembered him as a giant, and there was also the legacy of that greatest of composer biopics, Ken Russell’s Song of Summer, in which Delius’s music explodes in sunbursts of passion and colour against Russell’s austere black and

Grade: C In the 1990s the young Italian pianist Giovanni Bellucci gave us a reading of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata whose thrilling athleticism bore comparison with those of Maurizio Pollini and Charles Rosen. A few years later Bellucci began a complete cycle of the piano sonatas – but, rather than include his existing Hammerklavier, he produced a version that was in keeping with the style of the cycle: deliberately perverse, reinterpreting (that is, ignoring) the composer’s precise instructions in the score. Only now has Bellucci finished the cycle, explaining in his pretentious liner notes that he was held up by his meditations on Beethoven’s true intentions. So, for example, the first

Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to be a train. It’s not that he’s a railway enthusiast (though Sinatra, like many musicians, was an enthusiastic collector of model trains). No, it’s written into the words and music of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s song ‘Blues in the Night’: ‘Now the rain’s a-fallin’, hear the train a-callin’ “whoo-ee”.’ And so Sinatra sings it, just as Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Louis Armstrong sang it. It’s an American classic, defined by the sounds that permeate the soul of American popular music: the sounds of the railway. Two hundred years

The Edinburgh International Festival opened with John Tavener’s The Veil of the Temple, and I wish it hadn’t. Not that they were wrong to do it; in fact it was an heroic endeavour. Drawing on three large choirs, members of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and a sizeable team of soloists, this eight-hour performance was the sort of occasion that justifies a festival’s existence – the kind that, done well, can transform your perceptions of a work or a composer. It was certainly done well, and it certainly transformed mine. I’d never much minded the music of John Tavener. By the fifth hour of The Veil of the Temple, I

On 17 June 1872, Johann Strauss II conducted the biggest concert of his life. The city was Boston, USA, and the promoters provided Strauss with an orchestra and a chorus numbering more than 20,000. One hundred assistant conductors were placed at his disposal, and a cannon shot cued The Blue Danube – the only way of silencing the expectant crowds. Estimates vary, but the audience was reckoned to number between 50,000 and 100,000; in all, there must have been a minimum of 70,000 people present. This month’s Oasis reunion only played to 80,000. The result, in an age before modern amplification, was much as you might expect. ‘A fearful racket

In middle age Alfred Brendel looked disconcertingly like Eric Morecambe – but, unlike the comedian in his legendary encounter with André Previn, he played all the right notes in the right order. OK, so perhaps I’m selling the maestro a bit short: I do think Brendel, who died on 17 June at the age of 94, was a peerless interpreter of the Austro-German repertoire, and for a time in the 1970s had a better claim than any other pianist to ‘own’ the Beethoven and late Schubert piano sonatas. But some of the media tributes have been embarrassingly uncritical, implying that Brendel was universally loved. He wasn’t, and he didn’t want

Grade: B+ These are gloomy days, so here’s a burst of melody and colour to cheer you up. Back in the LP era it wasn’t unusual for classical recordings to be put together like a concert that you might actually want to hear: a sequence of works by different but complementary composers, offering the possibility of a happy discovery. Come for the Strauss, stay for the Reznicek – that sort of thing. This lively new disc from the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic adopts the same principle. The unifying theme is early-20th-century eastern European nationalism – the folksong-collecting variety, not the Archduke-assassinating kind. But it’s the opposite of monotonous. The Bartok is

Last month I watched conductor Harry Christophers blow through what sounded like an arthritic harmonica but in fact was a pure-toned pitch pipe, which handed the singers of his vocal group the Sixteen their starting notes. Then the Kyrie from Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Missa Regina coeli unfolded inside the resonant splendour of St James’s Church in Mayfair and, 500 years after his birth, I grasped why Palestrina, maestro di cappella of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome from 1551-5, still has the capacity to surprise. Christophers and the Sixteen are celebrating this greatest of the late Renaissance composers in his anniversary year with three concerts promoted by the Wigmore Hall

Grade: A It’s clearance-sale time for the great classical labels of the 20th century. As streaming platforms drain the remaining value out of once-prestigious recorded catalogues, even B-listers are being pulled up from the vaults and remastered for one last re-release. Eleven-disc Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos edition? Walter Weller’s complete Decca recordings? Now’s your chance: everything must go! The Bavarian conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch, who died in 2013, was never exactly B-list. His name always commanded respect. But in the golden age of LP collecting he was regarded as a safe pair of hands rather than a blue-chip name. Listening to a mini spate of Sawallisch re-releases suggests that we underrated

A few years ago I had a panic-stricken phone call from a female friend. ‘Help!’ she wailed. ‘Remind me what classical music I like. I think I’m going to be a guest on Private Passions.’ I could understand her anxiety. The programme, which celebrated its 30th birthday this month, is BBC Radio 3’s lofty version of  Desert Island Discs. Eminent writers, scientists, artists and businessmen, plus the occasional book-plugging celeb, explain how music – mostly but not exclusively classical – is, well, one of their private passions. Even if, as in the case of my friend, it isn’t. It’s an honour to be asked on the show, which is presented

Grade: A Maurice Ravel was tougher than he looked. True, he dressed like a dandy and wrote an opera about a dancing teapot. But when he was rejected for military service in the first world war (he was 39 and 5ft) he practically forced his way to the front line as a lorry driver – sheltering for days in a forest near Verdun after his truck was disabled by shrapnel. Apparently, when he visited Vaughan Williams in London he went straight to the Victoria Station grill and ordered steak and kidney pudding. Just when you thought you couldn’t admire the man any more.  It’s the toughness that impresses in this

Once Igor Levit starts playing Erik Satie at 10 a.m. on 24 April at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, he can expect to be there for a long time. Satie’s Vexations is a piece that looks innocent enough, like butter wouldn’t melt in its composer’s ears. A doleful 18-note theme in the bass is filled in with stately, chorale-like notes in the right hand; the theme repeats, followed by the same chorale except turned upside-down. Nothing too strenuous so far. But Satie’s enigmatic inscription ‘To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities’ mixes up the variables.

It’s Arvo Part’s 90th birthday year, which is good news if you like your minimalism glum, low and very, very slow. Lots of people seem to. The London Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday night was a reminder of an earlier, less ingratiating Part: the dissident composer in Soviet-controlled Estonia. Hannu Lintu revived Part’s First Symphony of 1963, and there’s nothing remotely minimal about its opening. There’s a swagger of brass, machine rhythms and an onslaught of string chords in which the dissonances don’t feel aggressive so much as mischievous. This is a young composer taking a manic glee in piling on the wrong notes just because he can. A bold, obstreperous