Music to my ears
What the classical world has been listening to this month
Beatrice Rana Pianist
Brahms’s Fourth Symphony is a favourite of mine. It tells me so much musically and it has been in the second half of concerts that have been very important in my life – my debut concerts at the Musikverein and at La Scala, for example. I was on a flight from Milan recently and I enjoyed listening to a recording by Claudio Abbado. There are a few recordings I enjoy, but I don’t have a favourite. I prefer to listen to it live.
It’s always difficult to get to concerts, but a recent one that I loved was in Rome with pianist Martha Argerich and the Santa Cecilia orchestra under Antonio Pappano. They were playing Liszt’s First Piano Concerto and
Schumann’s Second Symphony. I love the live experience and really try to enjoy the concert as a listener, but I’m always also interested in why a performer did something this way, or that – this is common for musicians!
I have recently been listening to Italian singers from 20 to 40 years ago, such as Francesco Baccini or Fabrizio De André, and I’m discovering a new world. De André was a real musician and a real poet too – the stories in his songs are heart-breaking and written so well. Being a pianist, I’m always used to the music being sufficient on its own, but this combination of words and music is very inspiring and moving.
I’m an avid reader and am currently exploring American literature – it has been something
I’ve wanted to do since spending so much time in the US over the last year. I’ve just finished American Pastorale, a novel by Philip Roth which I loved immensely. I read it in Italian, of course, which is not very philological, but I do like my language!
Beatrice Rana performs at Wigmore Hall on 7 February
Tito Muñoz Conductor
A colleague of mine was recently learning Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, so I pointed her in the direction of Maurice Peress’s The Birth of Rhapsody in Blue, a recording that reconstructs the Paul Whiteman concert in which the work was first played. It’s a really clean performance that takes you right back to the ragtime era and is free of the distorted rhythms and so on that has crept in over the years. It’s played by
Ivan Davis and is really wonderful.
One of my favourite regular musical collaborators is the violinist Patricia Kopachinskaja.
I love the way she makes incredibly creative projects out of little things that happen in her life, such as her Take Two album based on her daughter asking what it’s like to meet new people all the time. On it, she and harpsichordist Anthony Romaniuk play a remarkable spur-of-the-moment version of JS Bach’s Chaconne. It was originally meant for fun and just to test the microphones but, played with total abandon, it is one of the most effervescent, inventive performances I know of.
Sir Colin Davis’s live recording of Handel’s Messiah with the London Symphony Orchestra is, for me, one of the most ideal performances around. It’s a long work, but in his hands there’s an overlying arc that creates something very special from one movement to the next – everything is beautiful, noble and exciting when it needs to be. It’s by no means a historically informed performance, but it has become
the recording that I choose to go to out of all of those available.
And also…
I was recently in Belfast to conduct the Ulster Orchestra. As my partner and I are both Game of Thrones fans, I went to see a lot of the places where it was filmed. I also took time to go round the Northern Irish coast and visit sites such as the Giant’s Causeway. Whenever I’m touring abroad, getting to see the local area is something that I really like to do. Tito Muñoz conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a new work by Michael Hersch on 14 February Héloïse Werner
Soprano and composer
I’ve spent a lot of time with Britten’s Les illuminations, which I didn’t know so well until quite recently. I love its colours, and the piece is very visual and theatrical. The Rimbaud poetry is so abstract and advanced, and I was interested to see how Britten set it. I particularly like a recording by soprano Karina Gauvin and Les Violons du Roy, and I recently heard soprano
Ailish Tynan with the Aurora
Orchestra at Wigmore Hall. That was super-exciting.
I’ve been listening to the new Anna Meredith album Fibs.i loved her first album, and the second didn’t disappoint. It’s epic. I’ve seen her perform live with her band, and she’s amazing. She also writes these big orchestral pieces and chamber pieces. She writes a very wide range of stuff, and it’s all quite rhythmically driven, which
I love. She’s arranged one of her songs for my group, the Hermes Experiment, and it’s going to be on our album. It’s so beautiful.
I spend a lot of time on trains and planes. I always think I’m going to spend the time working, but then put on my headphones and just listen. Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Carole King. She writes such great tunes, and her songs have beautiful lyrics and a good groove. ‘You’ve got a friend’ is just so nice, and ‘Where you lead’ and ‘Beautiful’ are energetic
Les illuminations by Britten is very visual and theatrical and I love its colours
and positive. She’s a very good travel companion.
And also…
In Copenhagen I went to The Cleaner, an exhibition of the performance artist Marina Abramovi , and I bought her memoir Walk Through Walls. Every now and then I read it again, as it’s one of those books that opened my mind and made me realise that maybe I wasn’t as weird as I thought. It’s by my bed at the moment. It’s one of those books that you read little bits of at a time. I find it really inspiring. Héloïse Werner premieres a new work by Freya Waley-cohen at Conway Hall on 1 March