David Fay

Few live events could offer a more intense, visceral, grotesque experience than a performance of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, set to music by Richard Strauss. Wilde’s decadentist retelling of the biblical tale takes no prisoners. Similarly, Strauss’s score is relentless in its fin-de-siècle, over-ripe Romanticism; its raw, wriggling lasciviousness.

So much ink has been spilled over Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring since its riotous première 99 years ago that commenting on this seminal work, interpreted by the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev, seemed no mean feat. Little did I know that I’d struggle far more with Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex.

David Fay reviews the LSO, Peter Eötvös and Nikolaj Znaider in music by Bartók and Szymanowski at the Barbican.

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is a monumental piece of music, and any performance of the War Requiem is a momentous occasion. This remarkable performance saw Lorin Maazel conduct the Philharmonia Orchestra, Voices and Chorus, the Tiffin Boys’ Choir, soprano Nancy Gustafson, tenor Mark Padmore, and baritone Matthias Goerne at the Royal Festival Hall.

The Belcea Quartet was joined by exceptional clarinettist Michael Collins for these two behemoths of the quintet repertoire. As they took their seats in front of a packed Wigmore Hall audience, and the first notes of the Mozart rang out with vibrant serenity, it struck me that this really was the perfect sunny Sunday morning experience.

Experimental doesn’t have to mean mental: it can simply refer to something original, something done differently. Open Door Opera’s staged song recital Americana was an excellent example of such an experimental production, where the experiment enhanced, rather than inhibited, the music.

As I took my place in a more or less deserted Duke’s Hall for a concert of music by Sofia Gubaidulina, something strange happened. The rows of seats behind me appeared suddenly filled, by youngsters with the startled eyes of newfound freedom from the practice room. It was a beautiful, heart-warming sight, as was witnessing those performers engaging with, and truly feeling, Gubaidulina’s music.

This young Venetian pianist certainly knew how to tame the Steinway and harness the remarkable acoustic of Wigmore Hall, so that Bach’s contrapuntal subtleties flourished rather than vanished in a potentially glorious but destructive mush of sound. Even the most die-hard of early music evangelists could not question the beauty of Taverna’s performance.

It’s quite rare nowadays to rock up to a concert having absolutely no prior knowledge of the music you’re about to hear. And yet, there can be no truer place to discover a work or a composer’s voice than in front of a band of top musicians as they craft this unknown music out of nothing into something.

This was an important political occasion: a concert given in honour of the beginning of the Danish presidency of the EU. Still, the lasting impression of the performance was not one of ‘radical difference’, but rather one of emotional diffidence. The musical talent and communicative potential are certainly there, and certainly make for a very good show; to become great, boys must become men – emotionally so.