Classical music
Miranda Heggie
It remains some of the most terrifying music ever written. Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony - the composer’s portrayal of the fear and anxiety felt under Stalin's regime - is a horrifyingly brutal musical portrayal of life lived under a totalitarian reign. The Moscow Philharmonic under the baton of Yuri Simonov gave a phenomenally accurate and moving performance of this work at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on Tuesday night.The intense claustrophobia of the work was at once expertly captured in the orchestra’s strong yet subdued sound. Simonov slyly upped the ante with a gradual increase in both Read more ...
David Nice
There's something about the very opening of a Mahler symphony which gives you an idea of how the rest of the performance will go. In the case of the Second, the inescapable "Resurrection", it's the ferocity behind the upper string tremolo and the wildness of the uprush from cellos and basses. To kick off the first full Tsinandali Festival in the wonderful part-open auditorium recently constructed on a country estate in Georgia's wine-growing district, there was that special shock of the new you only get from young players experiencing the work for the first time.The Armenians, Azeris, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Dichterliebe is a song-cycle full of gaps, silences, absences. Where is the piano at the start of “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” when the voice enters first and so startlingly, ungrammatically alone? Where is the voice during the long piano postlude when the vocal line disappears but the singer continues to stand centre-stage? We even seem to join the cycle mid-conversation, unsure what has prompted the diffident, tentative harmonies with which it starts. Biggest of all however, are the gaps left by the four songs that Schumann excised between completing the manuscript version and publishing Read more ...
David Nice
Verdi, Elgar, Janáček, John Adams - just four composers who achieved musical transcendence to religious texts as what convention would label non-believers, and so have no need of the "forgiveness" the Fátima zealots pray for their kind in James MacMillan's The Sun Danced. Dodgily championed by fellow conservative Damian Thompson - ouch - as "fearless defender of the Catholic faith and Western civilization" (for which I read, no Muslims in Europe, please), MacMillan is rather nauseatingly cited as a composer with a direct line to his Catholic God (he doesn't claim that himself); but, dammit, Read more ...
David Nice
Two hours' drive from Tbilisi over a beautiful mountain pass, lushly wooded on the descent, the Tsinandali Estate has been central to Georgia's wine-growing district of Kakheti since poet-prince Prince Alexander Chavchavadze produced the first bottle in 1841. Natives and overseas tourists come to wander the English-style arboretum, described by Alexandre Dumas the Elder as the Garden of Eden, and visit the modest palace where rakish Russian writer Griboyedov putatively seduced his host’s 16 year old daughter Nino, married her and travelled with her to Iran, where he was promptly murdered in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You seldom expect to feel the breath of apocalypse and the terror of the grave amid the modestly rationalist architecture and passion-killer acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. In fact, before Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra set to work on the Verdi Requiem, I wondered whether – on a gloomy, rain-swept autumn night – any echoey, cobwebby, run-down Victorian church in south London might have suited the spirit of the piece better than this antiseptically clean, well-lighted place. By the time, though, that a lighting malfunction in the gantries above made the stage Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ed Lyon - 17th Century Playlist Ed Lyon (tenor), Theatre of the Ayre (Delphian)Lutenist Elizabeth Kenny describes this disc as a baroque mixtape, and it contains discrete songs, not operatic arias. Uniformly catchy, tenor Ed Lyon’s selection demonstrates that earworms aren't a contemporary phenomenon. Baroque composers recognised the importance of grabbing listeners’ attention within a few bars, in order that they would be “held by the ears”. Stefano Landi’s “Passacaglia della Vita” is a good example, the jaunty lute riff softening the blow of the anonymous text (message: we're all Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Handel’s Brockes-Passion is a curious piece - sacred but not liturgical, and with a strong influence from opera, though it is a concert work. Solo voices predominate, and the singers assembled at Wigmore Hall were mostly fine. Jonathan Cohen and his Baroque ensemble, Arcangelo, provided imaginative and sensitive accompaniment, the playing relaxed and accommodating. This isn’t music of the scale or emotional depth of the Bach passions, so the light touch from the performers seemed appropriate. And if Handel’s score sometimes underwhelmed, the quality of the singing usually compensated.Several Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The conductor Thomas Søndergård turned 50 on Friday. He marked the occasion, which coincided with the opening concert of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s winter season, with a short homily on the contradictions of age – “the young seek experience, adventure and wisdom, the old seek only one thing: youth” – addressed to the audience before a programme of three works whose composers were all in their early twenties at the time of writing: Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, Berg’s Seven Early Songs, and Mahler’s First Symphony.It was a bold start to a season that promises rich pickings from the Read more ...
David Nice
From the epic-lyric heaven storming of Beethoven's last three piano sonatas to the lyric-epic dances on the volcano of Schubert's two late piano trios isn't so big a leap, especially when you have the clairvoyant poise between colossal and intimate of the great Elisabeth Leonskaja. After her late-night solo turn at the Wigmore three Sundays ago, she was joined last night by two other superb instrumentalists who seem to have a direct and unshowy line to genius, violinist Liza Ferschtman and cellist István Várdai.It isn't clear which of the two trios was composed first, though both appeared on Read more ...
Jasper Parrott
Fiftieth anniversary? It seems incredible but also so exhilarating not least because these times we live in now seem to me to be a golden age for music of all kinds and in particular for what we label so inadequately classical music. This flowering is all the more significant and exciting as we see politics and governments around the world set on courses which can only damage and undermine the environments in which what is best about human talent and endeavour - and especially for young people and even more for children and the very young - should be encouraged to thrive.It is sobering Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphony No 3, Dvořák: Symphony No 8 Bamberger Symphoniker/Jakub Hruša (Tudor)Brahms 3 and Dvořák 8 make for an interesting pairing: Brahms at his most autumnal and introspective coupled with Dvořák in ebullient mood. There's a useful interview with Jakub Hruša in this release’s booklet where he describes the differences between the two symphonies and the challenges of performing them in the same concert. Hruša is a serious, thoughtful conductor and it's no surprise that the Brahms suits him so well. He gets the first movement’s opening just right, and how good to hear the low Read more ...