Showing posts with label BBC Music Magazine Awards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC Music Magazine Awards. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Tears, fears and healing at BBC Music Magazine Awards

The most touching moment of the BBC Music Magazine Awards, held last night at Kings Place, was when the Instrumental Award winner took the platform. Cellist David Watkin received his prize for his CD of the Bach Cello Suites from the hand of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, in some of whose orchestras David was lead cellist for around 20 years.

What was left unsaid was that this immensely-praised CD has had to be his last; in summer 2015 an autoimmune condition called scleroderma forced his retirement from the instrument. He continues to blaze across the early music skies, though, as conductor and devoted teacher.

In his acceptance speech he made the powerful point that if our field of music is to continue at all, we have to educate as many people as possible about it; and he gave his own children a special thank you. Storytelling, he said, is the single best preparation for giving a good musical performance, especially reading aloud to kids. His two have been treated to his rendition of the whole of Narnia and Lord of the Rings. "If you want to prepare, find some children and read to them. And do the voices!" he advised.

He accepted the award, too, on behalf of all undersung continuo cellists, those beings who often find themselves standing in the rain after playing every note of a long oratorio while a soloist who's sung for ten minutes of it swooshes by in a limo, splashing them as they go...

Just one highlight, there, of a terrific line-up to celebrate the best and most honest music-making on CD. Other winners included conductor Sakari Oramo, two of whose discs were nominated in Orchestral, and who won for his Nielsen Symphonies Nos 1 and 3 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic; Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque for their Vivaldi L'Estro Armonico; and the splendid young Schumann Quartet were there to perform a piece of Ives from the disc that scooped the Newcomer of the Year award.

Rosalind Plowright accepted the DVD award for Dialogue des Carmélites from Paris, directed by Olivier Py; she remarked that she was the only British cast member in a line-up of leading French singers as the doomed nuns, and had been asked to audition for the role to make sure her French was up to it. "I got the job," she declared. Record of the Year was the winner in the Opera category: Aida, starring Anja Harteros and Jonas Kaufmann, conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano. The fabulous baritone Ludovic Tézier stepped up as the cast's representative to collect the prize.

A special plaudit to the choir Tenebrae, who won for a disc of Brahms and Bruckner motets that was recorded in support of Macmillan Cancer Care. They were there and sang Bruckner's 'Christus Factus Est', and very gorgeous it was. We should all buy that CD.

You can see the full list of award winners and hear extracts from the discs here.

Many of the guest award presenters - including Ed Balls, Clemency Burton-Hill and James Naughtie - reflected on how playing the piano in public had proved far more frightening than standing at the dispatch box or broadcasting to three million people on the radio. But one award was presented by "Dr Christian" - the medical presenter of such popular-health TV programmes as Supersize Versus Superskinny - who made an impassioned speech about how important music is to him, and to so many of his patients as a veritable medicine for healing. Indeed, he thanked the music profession from the medical profession.

A beautiful evening, all in all, and one that left a tug at the heart. You realise the impermanence of things. You realise the dedication, effort, time, vocation and sacrifice that goes into the making of music and the vital nature of its support for our souls. It takes so long to build up that expertise and the structures that support its existence. It can all be swept away in the stroke of someone's pen. We can't let that happen if we want future generations to experience the joy and life-enhancing beauty we've been lucky enough to have ourselves. In Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has just earmarked nearly $1.9bn for culture and the arts. Here, though, music education is fighting for its life and entire communities stand to be deprived of it and of the performing arts due to local authority cuts. And meanwhile, this is happening... Let's get a grip now, once and for all. Factory reset of human values, please!

Thursday, April 09, 2015

BBC Music Magazine Awards: playing of integrity and passion

The BBC Music Magazine Awards took over Kings Place the other night and offered an evening that would in old-fashioned pop-psychology terms have been termed a "warm fuzzy". It was Leif Ove Andsnes's birthday, for starters, and he didn't only walk off with the Concerto Award, but also with Recording of the Year for his recording with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra of Beethoven concertos nos 2 and 4.

Accepting the prize, the Norwegian superstar - who, we're told, is now one of the country's biggest exports - explained that he had had to postpone the recording because at the time it turned out that his wife was having their twins three months early; they remained in hospital for two months. But all is well, the recording took place at a later point - and he says he is delighted with the results both of the recording and of the twins. Tony Pappano was there to present his prize, then sat down at the piano and struck up Happy Birthday. So now pretty much the entire UK music business can say it has sung with Tony Pappano.

It was a fine night for keyboard players, all in all. Benjamin Grosvenor won the Instrumental for his gorgeous album 'Dances'. Mahan Esfahani was Newcomer of the Year for his CPE Bach Sonatas (with his old record label, Hyperion) and he was there to perform a fabulous example from it on the harpsichord - as well as delivering an impassioned tribute to the inspiration he'd received as a lad listening to the playing of the person who presented his prize, Trevor Pinnock. And the inimitable Oliver Condy, editor of BBC Music Magazine, initiated the whole evening by telling us a story about the time he had to perform the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony in Cambridge recently and the digital organ malfunctioned...let's just say that Hoffnung could not have bettered this account.

The one person who nearly succeeded, if on video, was the pianist Alexander Melnikov, whose recording of Beethoven trios with Isabelle Faust and Jean-Guihen Queyras won the Chamber Award. "A lot of jokes probably begin with 'A Frenchman, a German and a Russian decide to play trios together'..." he began in the most deadpan of tones...

In person once more, we were treated to a performance of one of Elgar's Sea Pictures by the amazing Sarah Connolly in tribute to her recording of these plus The Dream of Gerontius with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sir Andrew Davies that scooped the Choral Award. Opera went to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg from Glyndebourne, with Gerald Finley as Hans Sachs and Vladimir Jurowski conducting; DVD was for Being Traviata, with Natalie Dessay in rehearsal; and vocal went to Joyce DiDonato for her 'Stella di Napoli' album. Premiere award was for Unsuk Chin's concertos respectively for cello, piano and sheng, and Orchestral was the late Claudio Abbado's Bruckner 9 with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

You can see the full list of winners and shortlisted discs, and listen to extracts, here.

Can't think of a single thing to argue with, really, so let's raise a glass, or a coffee (depending at what time you're reading this) to a roster of wonderful winners - devoted musicians every one of them, who deserve what little celebration this crazy world can give them. At a time when other pianists seem mired in controversy - Valentina Lisitsa being dropped from Toronto for political reasons, Gabriela Montero desperate to reveal the corruption of Venezuela and Khatia Buniatishvili causing fuss by bothering to respond to an iffy review - while we can't separate music and politics, because one never can, we can at least keep celebrating the music  first of all. Because if it wasn't for music, these would be grim times. Music can carry us to a better world. Here's hoping it always will.

Here's Benjamin.




Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Top ten happy things about the BBC Music Magazine Awards

1. It was a great honour that this year I was asked to be on the jury. I was only able to emerge around Christmas from underneath the biggest heap of CDs that has ever colonised my study (dividing brooms syndrome) - but there could be many worse things in life than listening to c250 five-star discs in quick succession and exploring them over copious quantities of tea with respected colleagues. We had a ball, really. Best, in most categories we pick three and it is you, the readers, who vote for the one you want to win.

2. Alisa Weilerstein's Elgar and Elliott Carter cello concertos - with the Berlin Staatskapelle conducted by Daniel Barenboim - won Recording of the Year. Very wonderful it is. Here's an introduction to it. (And here's an introduction to Alisa herself over at Sinfini.)



3. At lunch I "was sat" next to Igor Levit, who was voted Newcomer of the Year. Perhaps paradoxically, he is already jolly well known: his debut CD of late Beethoven sonatas for Sony Classical sparked the sort of superlatives you don't see too often. Last year I interviewed him for the cover feature of International Piano. He is one of a remarkable bunch of pianists currently zooming to fame in their twenties: youngsters who already know their own minds and musicianship so well that they play with the assurance of seasoned masters. It's arguably the most interesting crop of young pianists we've seen in a long time, also including Grosvenor and Trifonov - all very heartening. Presenting yourself on the recording scene for the first time with with Beethoven's last five sonatas indicates no small ambition, and in Igor's case gambling on this repertoire was clearly the right choice. He will soon be recording some Bach. And incidentally he has a very natty way with ties.

4. Plenty of accolades for Jonas Kaufmann, whose Wagner album won the vocal category, despite powerful competition from an amazing CD of Hanns Eisler by Matthias Goerne. JK wasn't there in person, but recorded a touching video message for us from somewhere on his Winterreise tour, in which he added that the fact that the choice comes from listeners rather than critics makes this the biggest prize of all. I was on Easyjet from Moscow while he was singing Winterreise here the other night, and am I sick as a parrot about missing it or what. (Below: spotted outside the Moscow Conservatoire the other day. Missed him there too.)

5. Additionally, that Tosca from the ROH starring Angela Gheorghiu, JK and Bryn Terfel, with Tony Pappano conducting, grabbed the Performance DVD category. Bryn, who's currently starring in Faust at Covent Garden, was there to collect the award and told us fulsomely about their week of rehearsals for the performances at the ROH at which it was filmed. Angela, he said, moved everyone to tears in the studio when she sang 'Vissi d'art'. Jonas had flown in from New York and promptly got sick, so Bryn didn't hear him sing out until they were on stage. We were treated to an extract of film from Act II, when Cavaradossi sings 'Vittoria!' and Jonas emitted the kind of long, high, off-the-leash note that can flatten the entire music business at a stroke. At that point, said Bryn, even his threatening Scarpia-stare turned into "a small, wry smile," which he was glad the cameras didn't pick up.

6. Chamber category winner: the Ebene Quartet's gorgeous, impassioned, searingly intense recording of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. You couldn't hope for a more convincing advocacy of the neglected sister in this family duo than this from the lovely chamber-music boy-band of Paris; besides, the F minor Quartet comes leaping off the page as Felix's musical mid-life crisis that should not have been his swan-song, but was. With my Mendelssohnian hat on, this was my Record of the Year.



7. Rachel Podger's fascinating and velvety solo album of baroque violin rarities, Guardian Angel, scooped the Instrumental category. The first time I encountered Rachel was nearly 20 years ago in a festival in Australia, when she and her ensemble played their way valiantly through more than three hours of Telemann in high heat... Since then we've been watching her growth as an artist and now she is in her prime and flowering. This is the album of hers I have enjoyed the most, ever; sophisticated performing filled with sensitivity, intuition, character and insight. Brava! I'd also like to put in a good plug for another shortlisted disc, Richard Egarr's Bach English Suites, which I adored (yes, you read aright: I loved a harpsichord album.)

8. Orchestral went to Riccardo Chailly's Brahms Symphonies with the Leipzig Gewandhaus. They don't come much better than that. Yet for some of us, the surprise wild card of the year was a blistering account of the Strauss Alpine Symphony from...the Sao Paolo Symphony Orchestra under Frank Shipway. Fair blew my socks off, that one.

9. Other highlights included a gargantuan quantity of Britten wins, a Premiere award for George Benjamin's opera Written on Skin, a vast film about Cavaillé-Coll and his organs, and the first-ever App Award, which went to the Touchpress/DG exploration of the Beethoven Symphony No.9. You can see the full list of winners on the magazine's website, here.

10. Last but not least, two dear friends and colleagues whom I've known separately for years told me that they're an item. This was the news of the whole day that made me happiest. Cheers, chaps!

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Anderszewski wins Recording of the Year at BBC Music Magazine Awards

Here's that exciting piano news we were waiting for: Piotr Anderszewski has won Recording of the Year at the BBC Music Magazine Awards for his CD of Schumann's Humoresque, Gesange der Fruhe and Studies for Pedal Organ. They dispatched me to Lisbon to interview him a few weeks ago and the
resulting feature is in the magazine that should be out about now.

Piotr is very good at winning things he didn't put in for - like this, and, about ten years ago, the small matter of the Gilmore Award (c$300,000) which lands on some unsuspecting pianist's head every couple of years from Kalamazoo. And the time he disqualified himself from the Leeds International Piano Competition by walking off stage without finishing the semi-final round, he more or less won the long-term outcome in any case. I first met him when he was studying at the International Piano Foundastion on Lake Como and watching his artistry develop in the intervening years has been a very great joy: he's an exceptional musician of rare sensitivity and true authority. Here he is talking about Schumann, aided and abetted by Bruno Monsaingeon, who's making a third (!) film about him: http://youtu.be/riNFNS_CoXM

As it happens, another pianist has triumphed today too, this time in the Newcomer's Award following a wowed JD review: Francesco Piemontesi, whose debut CD I certainly couldn't recommend highly enough. Pleased it's been quoted in the statement.

The full list of the BBC Music Magazine Award winners for 2012 is here.

Normally I'd have brought you some news, views and goss from the awards ceremony, which was held today at Kings Place, but I'm officially on hols.