Classical music
Sergey Smbatyan
We’re touring across Europe in January 2020, visiting five countries to perform eight concerts with the world-class violinist Maxim Vengerov as our leading soloist. The tour has been organized by the European Foundation for Support of Culture.As Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra, I’ve always sought to combine the eastern and western musical traditions together when programming concerts for the orchestra, whilst also presenting new music to audiences.On the European Tour, the ASSO and Vengerov will pair Bruch’s heartfelt First Violin Concerto Read more ...
David Nice
Not everyone who flocked to Day Two's evening concert in Kings Place's year-long Nature Unwrapped: Sounds of Life celebrations will have realised that they were catching parts two and three of a trilogy. The masterpiece had come earlier, in a 5pm screening: Phie Ambo's poetic documentary Good Things Await, about the tenacity of eccentric Danish biodynamic farmer Niels Stokholm and the obstacles he faces from rigid authorities. There's choral music in there, from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, performed on the soundtrack by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, whose first soprano Else Torp Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9 Danish Chamber Orchestra/Ádám Fischer (Naxos)“I need to play the notes in such a way that we can recreate the feelings of the listeners which Beethoven would have wanted to invoke in his audience, rather than playing it exactly how we wanted it to sound.” Ádám Fischer's pragmatic, humane approach to performing and recording Beethoven’s nine symphonies makes this one of the most entertaining modern cycles out there. We should be grateful that this covetable box set exists at all. Six of the symphonies were recorded in 2014 with the DR Chamber Orchestra, before Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Alina Ibragimova’s solo journey (in 2015) through the peaks and abysses of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas gave me vivid Proms memories to treasure for a lifetime. The Russian-born violinist’s Bach abounds in both majesty and tenderness, as well as a consuming fire of intensity when the music so demands. She brought something of the same quality to her performance last night of Mendelssohn’s E minor concerto at the Barbican. Nathalie Stutzmann conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a menu of well-seasoned 19th-century favourites that began with generous chunks of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Read more ...
David Nice
Assuming the world holds together that long, there will be something we can rely on annually all the way to 2041, the 250th anniversary of Mozart's death: among the celebrations each year, a Wigmore Hall concert like this one, placing Amadeus among the other composers of his time, great and small(er). For very occasion we'll trust the brilliant Ian Page to assemble a crack team of players and to introduce us to new voices of outstanding quality.Last night it was the turn of soprano Samantha Clarke, not long graduated from the Guildhall School, taking its 2019 gold medal, and flagged up here Read more ...
David Nice
The devil wore all manner of outlandish attire in last night's chameleonic programme devised by Peter Ash, the London Schools Symphony Orchestra's challenging artistic director. There was searing verse from Marlowe, Milton and Goethe; music from Berlioz, Mendelssohn and Liszt to Penderecki and Schnittke featuring waltzes, marches, a galop and a Hammer-horror tango; and performers aged from 13 to 80.Holding it all magnificently together were the encouraging, unfussy guidance of master orchestral and conducting trainer Sian Edwards and the supreme authority of Janet Suzman, viscerally exciting Read more ...
Helen Wallace
When I mention Nature Unwrapped, a year-long series at Kings Place subtitled "Sounds of Life", the responses are often tinged with cynicism: "Oh, very 2020", "So, what’s the carbon footprint with all those musicians flying in?" There’s an assumption that the series is focused solely on climate change and current protest. In fact, its roots lie at a much deeper, older cultural level, and it’s all the richer for that. Ideas came from a multiplicity of different sources, not least from the female composers of Venus Unwrapped, our focus in 2019. It was when interviewing a host of these women that Read more ...
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, Martín, Barbican review - songs of protest and resilience
David Nice
In youth we trust. That can be the only motto worth anything for 2020, as the world goes into further meltdown.So it was startling, stunning and cathartic, two days after the big downer of 3 January – the American horror clown seemingly in competition with the Australian apocalypse – to witness 164 teenagers under a conductor they clearly adore, Jaime Martín, making their voices heard, sometimes literally, in 20th century music of fear, anxiety, protest, violence and just a smidgen of hope.Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem, short though it is in time-span, has long been overlooked as one of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Schubert: Symphony No 9 Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Maxim Emelyanychev (Linn)There’s a telling photo of Maxim Emelyanychev on page 11 of Linn's booklet, the conductor beaming at the camera, the body language suggesting he's having a hard time actually sitting still. This performance of Schubert 9 is impulsive and upbeat, an irrepressibly positive statement. Yes, this is a Ninth Symphony (or eighth, depending on your point of view), but it's still very much a young composer's work. It's possible to make this music sound like Bruckner, but Emelyanychev’s light touch feels entirely right, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Classical CDs are still with us, even if the shops that sell them are rarer than hens’ teeth. Maybe this article should be renamed Downloads of the Year, or Cream of the Streams? That people are still listening to good music at all is a cause for celebration, and there’s still an abundance of interesting material being pumped out by labels great and small. Much of what really tickled my ears this year was off the beaten track. Here, in roughly chronological order, are twelve releases which got my pulse racing:The first volume of Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s projected Sibelius cycle coupled Read more ...
David Nice
It says so much for the cornucopia of London's classical music scene alone that all five of the most recent concerts I've attended have made the long list for best of 2019. I'll settle for two. The anger and violence of Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony is still resonating after the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano tore into it with focused fire on election night. Shortly before that, beauty rather than ferocity was the keynote of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion as played in an intense Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert by Pavel Kolesniknov (don't miss his Wigmore solo Read more ...
David Nice
Arriving in Tallinn hotfoot from Paavo Järvi's inaugural concert as chief conductor of Zurich's Tonhalle Orchestra, and expecting the limelight to belong to composer Erkki-Sven Tüür on his 60th birthday, I found another Estonian bonus in store. Not only did 48-year-old Olari Elts, whose work I was witnessing live for the first time, conduct what turned out to be a Tüür symphonic triptych masterfully; he had just been unofficially appointed Neeme Järvi's successor as Music Director of the superb Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, to take effect in the 2020-21 season.News couldn't be Read more ...