Classical music
Boyd Tonkin
Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius is generally discussed and judged – and judgment, of course, stands at the heart of the work – by those who love, indeed revere, without any caveats this journey of the soul through death. For a long time, this reviewer could not. Even now, I can understand some Anglican bishops’ reluctance to have the work played in their cathedrals in the 1900s. Perhaps that revealed not simply small-minded anti-Catholic prejudice (the default critical position) but a credible resistance to the cruel doctrine of Purgatory. God has forgiven you, has already assured Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
I have to confess, I hadn’t been sure what to expect when I heard about The Art of Fugue staged with acrobats. This latest collaborative experiment in the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes 2026 season – the multi-arts festival with orchestral music at its centre – sounded somewhat counterintuitive; one of the Western canon’s most cerebral works twinned with an extrovert celebration of the human body.Yet the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and Circa have been collaborating since 2015, and Circa – under the guidance of South-African-born Yaron Lifschitz – is an acrobatic group unlike many others. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Messiaen’s Turangalîla, his sprawling 10-movement, 75-minute extravaganza, is garish, graphic and glorious. It is a full-bore, Technicolor, over-the-top, spectacular blast of orchestral fireworks from beginning to end. It is, as the kids say, “a lot”. But not enough for the curators of Multitudes, a multi-disciplinary festival at the Southbank Centre this month, who paired the it with a specially-commissioned animated film by 1927 Studios. Bad idea.I’m not sure any film would enhance the experience of Turangalîla live – how can the music alone not be enough? – but this one positively ruined Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sir Adrian Boult: Complete Stereo Recordings 1956-1978 (Warner Classics)
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This hefty box set contains 79 discs, the earliest taped when conductor Sir Adrian Boult was 67, the final one when he was 85. Some conductors’ late recordings are too idiosyncratic for general listening but these are mostly excellent. Think Boult and it’s impossible not to think Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams, all composers which the conductor knew, but there’s a wealth of other repertoire here; Boult gave the first British performances of works as Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ives’ The Unanswered Question remained unanswered when the BBC Philharmonic and John Storgårds performed it in the Bridgewater Hall in January, but on this occasion, with Thomas Adès, it was followed by Kurtág’s even briefer The Answered Unanswered Question. Spatial effects were very much part of the first half of the concert (I say “half”, but there were about 20 minutes of actual music; the rest was spent in platform re-arrangements), beginning with the 118-year-old Charles Ives piece, for which the solo trumpet was positioned in Stygian gloom on the organ bench at the centre of the Read more ...
David Nice
As those of us who were there at what turned out to be his unofficial inaugural concert with the Irish Chamber Orchestra will know, Henning Kraggerud dances, and makes sure his fellow players can follow suit without self-consciousness. His theory is that Mozart must have danced a lot, too; his music certainly does, even as it sings. This programme drawn from Mozart's earlier compositions took us from a vital symphony by the 18-yearold genius to the middle movement of a violin sonata which, Kraggerud argues, ushered in a deeper vein given the 22-year-old's grief at the death of his mother Read more ...
Benjamin Baker
For me, New Zealand has always felt like both a centre and an edge. It is a place people travel to, rather than through. That sense of distance brings clarity and space to explore, but it can also mean that New Zealand’s creativity develops slightly out of view of the wider world.At the World’s Edge (AWE) Festival grew out of that tension. We launched in 2021 in the Queenstown Lakes region of New Zealand’s South Island with a simple idea: to bring people together through the intimacy of chamber music, and to create a space where New Zealand artists and composers could be heard alongside Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Southbank Centre’s second Multitudes festival – which commissions artists ranging from filmmakers to acrobats to shine new light onto the orchestral repertoire – began last night in triumph with the Aurora Orchestra’s celebrated performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring from memory. As a musical feat alone this seemed the equivalent to building a human pyramid on a tightrope above the Thames, but the Aurora Orchestra heightened the challenge by sweeping us back to 1913 for a dramatised account of the Rite’s origin. Experiments fusing classical music and theatre are, perhaps Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Antonio Pappano’s pairing for last night’s Barbican concert intrigued – and, initially, baffled – me. Shostakovich’s Fifth: a clear choice, given the London Symphony Orchestra’s recent stellar accounts of the Russian’s major symphonies. Its preface, however, came in the unpredictable form of Korngold’s violin concerto, under the bow of the supremely elegant and tasteful Vilde Frang.Between Hollywood and Leningrad, however, Pappano and his high-achieving band struck up a truly engrossing dialogue. Questions of kitsch and sentiment, of freedom and compulsion, of authenticity and artifice, Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Northern Chamber Orchestra is unusual in that it plays almost always without a conductor. It’s been doing that for nearly 60 years, and there’s a unique frisson to be had from experiencing orchestral music-making done almost entirely through eye contact, careful listening and telepathy, as real chamber music always is.At the same time, with larger numbers of players and complicated scores, it’s a bit of a high-wire act. Its concert at King’s School Macclesfield was a demonstration of how well it can work and how testing the concept can be.A Haydn symphony is sure ground for the NCO: in Read more ...
graham.rickson
JS Bach: St John Passion Pygmalion/Raphaël Pichon (Harmonia Mundi)Handel: Messiah Irish Baroque Orchestra/Peter Whelan (Linn)
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Here are brilliant additions to the discography of the two of the greatest choral masterpieces, both of which I have listened to repeatedly over this Easter period. The French choir and ensemble Pygmalion, under its founder and director Raphaël Pichon, has been working its way through the biggies of the repertoire in recent years: in addition to their Bach (brilliant versions of the St Matthew Passion and the Read more ...
Robert Beale
A concert by the National Youth Orchestra is like no other. For one thing, there are 160 of them – you simply don’t get the kind of power and intensity they can create from a normal-sized orchestra. For another, they play with an enthusiasm and eagerness that even the most committed and devoted professionals would find hard to emulate. They want to share their music: they want you to feel it as they do. And the skill levels are right up there with the best of them, too.It’s a fact that in theatre or dance those whose bodies are still approaching maturity are necessarily unable to Read more ...