Classical music
Boyd Tonkin
Almost everything about Piotr Anderszewski's Wigmore Hall recital pleased, intrigued and even thrilled – except, perhaps, the order of the works. The Polish-born pianist opened with his selection of a dozen of Brahms’s late solo pieces, from the Op. 116 to 119 sets, and returned after the interval with the thunderous heavy cavalry of Beethoven’s final sonata, Op. 111. Compare, and contrast, the supreme leave-takings of both poets of the piano.Now, Anderszewski’s arrangement and performance of the Brahms works – several of them far from “miniatures” – lends them a dramatic and architectural Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The BBC NOW called this concert Echoes of France, which was both an understatement and a partial misnomer. Cardiff’s St David’s Hall being currently out of action, the orchestra is playing its regular concerts in the much smaller Hoddinott Hall, but with no concession to the acoustical trivia of decibels, balance and blend. Misnomer? We heard Ravel and Chausson - French certainly - but Sibelius’s Pelleas and Melisande incidental music is French only in the language of the play, which is by the Belgian Maeterlinck. It’s strange how that play captivated composers on either side of the year Read more ...
graham.rickson
An English Violin Geneviève Laurenceau (violin), Orchestre de Picardie/David Niemann, with Jean-Frédéric Neuburg (piano) (NoMadMusic)
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An English Violin, from French violinist Geneviève Laurenceau, consists of a superb and thoroughly recommendable new recording of the violin concerto from 1935 by English composer Guirne Creith (born Gladys Mary Cohen, 1907-1996), and a beautifully played selection of pieces for violin and piano: Elgar from the late Victorian era, Rebecca Clarke from the 1920s, right through to Walton Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Famously Handel and Bach never met, despite being born in the same year in the same country. So it was fun to see the programme for the English Concert’s delightful, vivacious performance in St George's Hanover Square playfully pit the two composers against each other by presenting works that they both composed in their thirties.When he wrote his Chandos Anthems, the still relatively fresh-faced Handel was working for the fiercely ambitious James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, who established a chamber ensemble that became known as the Cannons Concert at his estate in Middlesex. Though there Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Last week I saw Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, a play which behind its pyrotechnic wit affirms that sorrow and calamity can strike chaotically at the heart of any human idyll. At first glance, the programme presented at Kings Place by the ever-resourceful Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, with Vermont-born folk singer-songwriter Sam Amidon and a quartet from the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, looked rich in time-honoured pastoral pleasures. The launch concert for Kuusisto and Amidon’s new album Willows, on the Platoon label, it featured a string quartet arrangement (by Martin Gerigk) of Vaughan Read more ...
Robert Beale
Valentine’s Day was only a week gone when the BBC Philharmonic gave us a programme on the theme of love. And the most haunting memory of it all was the gentle, song-inspired and highly original Viola Concerto by Cassandra Miller. It’s subtitled "I cannot love without trembling" and was played by this orchestra at the Proms under John Storgårds on 31 July 2024, by all accounts leaving everyone mesmerized. This time it was conducted by Ludovic Morlot, the orchestra’s Associate Artist, and again the soloist was Lawrence Power, who commissioned it (through his Viola Commissioning Circle, along Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The legendary Jamaican-born bass Willard White made his New York City Opera breakthrough the year I was born, so he has been around a long time (I am no spring chicken). But any fear that time had diminished his powers was gone within seconds of him starting to sing in his recital last night at Kings Place. Willard White has still got it. But I was less convinced by the playing of the Brodsky Quartet, who have been around for about as long as White, and performed with him regularly for the last 20 years. Their playing, although much more secure in the second half, was quite ragged in the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Saul has lately been occupied by opera. Lauded versions, above all Barrie Kosky’s recently-revived smash for Glyndebourne, have claimed Handel’s mighty oratorio from 1739 as a virtual theatre piece with the stage directions mislaid. Yet its incandescent drama of rage, envy, betrayal, love and derangement lives in the blazing, epic music – trombones, carillion, harp and all – that partners every step of the Israelite king’s descent into destruction. For the opening event of this year’s London Handel Festival, Jonathan Cohen’s period ensemble Arcangelo deployed a 30-strong chorus, a full- Read more ...
stephen.walsh
I still retain a vivid memory of a concert in London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in December 2013 at which Hungarian composer György Kurtág and his wife Márta sat at an upright piano with their backs to the audience and played excerpts from his Játékok collection of progressive teaching pieces, interspersed with arrangements of Bach chorale preludes for piano duet (Pictured below). The audience might have been eavesdropping on an afternoon of private music-making. But what in fact took place was the distillation of the essence of music – its directness and detached spirituality – into a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sir Charles Mackerras: The Complete Warner Classics Edition (Warner)
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That Sir Charles Mackerras’s long recording career included releases on a slew of different labels means it’s unlikely that a complete box set will ever be compiled. Here’s the next best thing, Warner Classics’ hefty 63-disc set collecting the material Mackerras taped for EMI, Pye and Virgin Classics. Mackerras’s versatility is clear from the track listing; there’s an unfeasibly wide range of material here. Take a look at the ‘B’ section in the booklet – what other Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong is continuing to put his own stamp on landmark works of the mainstream repertory with the Hallé. This time it was Beethoven’s Third, "Eroica", Symphony. That’s not to say that his programmes are devoid of novelty for the orchestra’s Manchester audience. He’s made Unsuk Chin the “Featured Composer” for the present season, and her subito con forza, written as a tribute to Beethoven in 2020, represented her in this concert. It’s a piece of which the Hallé gave the UK premiere (in the BBC Proms of 2021, under Sir Mark Elder), but except for those listeners who attended its Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Bayard Rustin is a fascinating but little-known figure in US history: a civil rights organiser who worked behind the scenes on both the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, as well as campaigning for pacifism (he was on the British anti-nuclear Aldermaston March in 1958) and gay rights. He was also an accomplished singer and lutenist, and advocate for Elizabethan song repertoire. An unlikely but intriguing combination, and one that was at the heart of yesterday’s Night Shift concert by personnel from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Blues Read more ...