Classical music
graham.rickson
Schütz: The Christmas Story Yale Schola Cantorum/David Hill (Hyperion)Heinrich Schutz’s parents did their best to dissuade him from becoming a professional musician in 17th century Dresden, arguing that a legal career was a better option. Luckily, a wealthy patron sent him to Venice to study with Gabrieli, Schütz later recognising no conflict between his love for the music of Catholic Italy and his Protestant faith. His Historia der Gerburt Christi is a lovely work, concise and elaborately scored. A pair of chirping recorders accompany the shepherds, and Herod gets some suitably Read more ...
David Nice
Culturally, "the little country that could" - as Estonia's ex-Prime Minister and historian Mart Laar dubbed it - punches well above its weight. While it educates the young with a musical instrument made available to every child, Estonia continues to shine through its musical leaders. Grand old man Arvo Pärt continues with his jewel-like craftsmanship, shining in a blissful reworking of an early piece in Zurich; and while fellow octogenarian Neeme Järvi may just have handed over his post as music director of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (henceforth here ERSO, Eesti Riiklik Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
As they celebrate their 50th year, Ex Cathedra have brought their much loved Christmas music by candlelight concerts to churches all across England, before giving five concerts in the run up to Christmas at St Paul’s in the Jewellery Quarter, in their home town of Birmingham. Singing to a packed-out Coventry cathedral on Monday night - Ex Cathedra’s first time there - was a group of ten from their consort of professional choral singers, who performed a mix of new carols and festive favourites.Opening with founding director and conductor Jeffrey Skidmore’s arrangement of Hildegard von Bingen’s Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Why does music suddenly disappear? It is all the more heartening when a work as excellent and enjoyable as Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No 3 takes wing once more, but you do have to wonder how in the world such a terrific orchestral piece was permitted to sink and vanish in its day under a morass of dubious opera. The symphony formed the second half of the Aurora Orchestra’s latest concert in its Pioneers series, for Kings Place's "Venus Unwrapped" focus on music by female composers, and very welcome it was. Farrenc (1804-1875) was a highly successful and well-regarded musician in her Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Christmas Oratorio Thomanerchor Leipzig, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig/Gotthold Schwarz (Accentus)Another year, another new Bach Christmas Oratorio. This one is happily among the best, its plus points including a slimmed down Leipzig Gewandhausorchester as backing band, and the city's Thomanerchor, a group tracing its history as far back as 1212. The choir's bright, clear timbre sits very nicely against modern orchestral instruments, and Gotthold Schwarz’s flowing speeds invariably hit the mark. Patrick Grahl gives us a very human Evangelist, and there's sterling work from soprano Read more ...
David Nice
What a jolting coincidence that one of the 20th century's angriest symphonic beasts should have a rare unleashing on a night of high national anxiety. Whether Vaughan Williams spewed forth his Fourth Symphony in response to darkening European clouds in 1934 or as a sublimation of sexual frustration, given his unhappy domestic life at the time, it hit us all hard last night. There was even some release of tension in the sheer energy of embattled themes and grinding dissonances, thanks to Antonio Pappano's stupendous control of a London Symphony Orchestra on fire.Most surprising, perhaps, was Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s programmes in Birmingham are so personal – so utterly bespoke – that in the event of her being indisposed, they present something of a problem. That’s what happened this week. The programme was vintage Gražinytė-Tyla – opening with Elgar’s two partsongs Op.26 (a reflection of her blossoming relationship with the CBSO Youth Chorus), and ending with that ravishing Cinderella of the Brahms symphonies, the Third: a nice nod, in the CBSO’s centenary season, to Elgar’s particular love of this work. In between came the UK premiere of the new orchestral version – co- Read more ...
Robert Beale
Omer Meir Wellber may be the first chief conductor of a major orchestra to have begun his tenure with a children's concert. But the young new music director of the BBC Philharmonic was proud that this was how his first public appearance since officially taking the reins in Salford worked out. It was the launch of the BBC’s "Bring the Noise" school music streams and podcasts (followed by a studio concert live-streamed on iPlayer and the Philharmonic website). The Bridgewater Hall audience in Manchester can finally savour a big concert tomorrow. .On one level it's because he had existing Read more ...
David Nice
There is no mention of Marc-Antoine Charpentier in David Cairns's comprehensive Berlioz biography. It seems extraordinary that the master of the most intimate and moving of musical Christmas stories, L'enfance du Christ, knew nothing of the next best, Charpentier's Pastorale sur la naissance de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ composed 175 years earlier, with its similar move from darkness to light, its music of tender intimacy and childlike joy as well as sorrow, an elaborate metaphysical final chorus common to both. Charpentier's moments of seemingly small but potentially momentous drama were Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“How many times have you heard the conductor sing?” asked William Christie after the final number, but before the two encores, of Sunday night’s 40th birthday celebration for his ensemble Les Arts Florissants. Well, lovers of old recordings know that you sometimes get plenty of impromptu vocalisation from the likes of Bernstein and Barbirolli. But what the august founder of the Baroque super-group (and super-chorus) meant on this occasion was the bravura performance of his co-conductor, and assistant director, Paul Agnew. In several of the pieces he led at the Barbican, Agnew would turn round Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
“Hieronymus!” bellowed David Wilson Johnson from the Barbican Hall’s circle on Saturday evening. “Hieronymus Bosch!” Commissioned by Dutch radio for a big piece to mark 500 years since the passing of the Dutch painter in 1516, the German composer Detlev Glanert wrote a Requiem. There is a precedent for his grand design in the War Requiem of Britten, where poems of Wilfred Owen are interleaved with the text of the Requiem Mass. Glanert alighted on the Seven Deadly Sins, as described in the medieval collection of Carmina burana on which Orff drew for his barnstorming, perennially popular Read more ...
David Nice
It's a very big deal for musical Prague: Czechia's symphonic epic, the six tone poems that make up Smetana's Má vlast (My Homeland), launches every Prague Spring Festival at the Smetana Hall, but in the Czech Philharmonic's opulent home, the Rudolfinum, the work hasn't appeared in any of its seasons for 49 years. This is also an important test case for the orchestra's chief conductor and music director since the beginning of the 2018-19 season, St Petersburg-born Semyon Bychkov: will he give this hard-to-please audience the essence of what it expects?The answer seems to be a "yes," by and Read more ...