Royal Albert Hall,London
Narek Hakhnazaryan displayed his outstanding musicianship with a technically impeccable (perfect, flawless) and distinctive account of Haydn’s First Cello Concerto[br]For its visit to this year’s Proms, the Ulster Orchestra and its chief conductor, or Rafael Payare,brought a original work by the English-born, Belfast-based Piers Hellawell, or who turns 60 this year. At 20 minutes long,Wild Flow consists of five pieces with faster outer sections framing a central unhurried movement.
Hellawell suggests that rather than developing organically, the result “offers a zigzag progression of mood and event”; he’s also distrustful of the notion of music being “approximately something beyond its musical meaning. So whether the piece itself registered as bitty – a sequence of diverse individual episodes without much sense of a larger picture – that was presumably deliberate, and though there were certainly moments of striking character,colour and texture along the way, with sudden bursts of manic activity offset by moments of uneasy stasis – though rarely of calm. This premiere performance felt entirely assured.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com