Classical music

It’s always promising when the orchestra won’t fit on the stage. For the UK première, some 97 years after it was written, of the Danish composer Rued Langgaard’s Sixth Symphony (The Heaven-Rending), the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra filled every available inch of platform space, with four additional trumpeters perched in the choir seats. Everything was set for what the conductor Thomas Dausgaard described, pre-concert, as a ‘cosmic struggle between good and evil’. And god knows, it certainly made a fantastic noise. In a venue as compact as Glasgow City Halls, the onslaught of two sets of timpani had an almost physical impact. You felt the air wobble. Dausgaard had clearly

There’s a moment in the finale of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata when the frenzied piano writing turns unexpectedly jolly. The late Antony Hopkins described it as a bit of an anticlimax, ‘a little too near to the traditional Gypsy Dance that appears so often in the less probable 19th-century opera’. I’m not sure whether I agree — but one thing I can tell you is that this is the perfect moment to tap the Uber icon on your phone if you want to be whisked away during the first burst of applause, before the pianist has had the chance to play an encore. That’s the effect Maurizio Pollini’s playing has on

Nothing pleased Iannis Xenakis more than a great big rattling storm. The sound of a thunderclap would have him running out of his home half naked to join the elements. If he was at sea, he’d sniff out any lightning and sail his yacht directly at it. The Greek composer was what we might call a hard bastard — a musical Ray Mears. As part of the Greek resistance during the war — battling first the Nazis then the British — Xenakis lost an eye to shrapnel. His compositions betray the same traits: those of the adrenalin junkie, the adventurer, the kamikaze. What would happen if I composed a piece

It used to be said that Bruckner composed the same symphony nine times, whereas, thanks to the comparative frequency of performances now, we know that his nine numbered symphonies are as different from one another as Beethoven’s nine. Nothing could make that clearer than the performances of the Fifth and the Ninth given by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Andris Nelsons, three days apart, at the Royal Festival Hall. The Fifth, as befits its stature and length, was given alone. It is Bruckner’s most demanding symphony both to listen to and to conduct. Nelsons is still, I think, at an early stage in his Brucknerian pilgrimage, and his account of the

This week the Southbank Centre began its ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ festival — a series of concerts and talks claiming to explore the influence of religious inspiration on music. Last summer, after reading its miserably right-on publicity material, I wrote in this column that ‘Beyond Parody’ might be a better title. Jude Kelly, the Southbank’s artistic director, accused me of jumping to conclusions before the programme had been finalised. Well, now it has. In addition to concerts with no discernible connection to their composers’ faith, we’ll be treated to ‘How to be a Shaman’, ‘Mindfulness’, ‘What If God Was A Woman?’ and ‘Right to Die?’. Plus speeches from Mona Siddiqui,

Gerald Barry loved playing organ for Protestants as they allowed him a lie in. Then they found out he wasn’t Protestant and sacked him. When he moved to a Catholic church, he was forced up at the crack of dawn, so he punished the congregation by not giving them the chance to breathe between verses. He has a similarly cruel approach to the singers in his latest opera Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, whose voices he puts through the wringer, compelling them to squawk or chunter — or recite the ‘Jabberwocky’ in German. Barry has to be one of the most enjoyably contrary composers alive, but he is also, I fear,

‘Brahms and Liszt’ is a lovely bit of rhyming slang, but it doesn’t have the ring of authenticity. Can you really imagine cockney barrow boys whistling tunes from the Tragic Overture and the Transcendental Études? Also, the Oxford English Dictionary reckons it only dates back to the 1930s. It always made me snigger, though, because it conjured up an implausible vision of pompous beardy Johannes and the social-climbing Abbé rolling around legless. Not so implausible, it turns out. The other day I was reading a review of a new life of Liszt by Oliver Hilmes that reveals ‘hair-raising episodes of drunkenness’ in his later years. For some reason these were