Classical music
graham.rickson
David Matthews: Symphony No 9, Variations for Strings, Double Concerto for Violin and Viola Sarah Trickey (violin), Sarah-Jane Bradley (viola), English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Nimbus Alliance)Ninth symphonies are usually big beasts, but David Matthews’, completed in 2015, whizzes through five movements in 27 minutes. This is easy music to love, a modern expression of the English pastoral tradition which never descends into easy pastiche. Nods to Vaughan Williams, Britten and Tippett never impede the music’s flow; instead, we're beguiled at Matthews’ ability to write defiantly Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Emanuel Ax here celebrated his 70th birthday with an all-Schumann recital. In fact, it was an all-Schumann marathon, a three-hour concert at Wigmore Hall featuring solo works, Dichterliebe with Simon Keenlyside, and, with the Dover Quartet, the Piano Quartet and the Piano Quintet. Ax has an unassuming stage presence, and blends easily into chamber ensembles. Even so, he remained the centre of attention here, with the other performers softening their tone and applying an extra level of grace in order to match the supple flow of Ax’s Schumann.The Arabeske, op. 18, began the concert, and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No 10, completed and arranged for chamber orchestra by Michelle Casteletti Lapland Chamber Orchestra/John Storgårds (BIS)Other Mahler symphonies have been downsized on CD: there are superb transcriptions of Nos 7 and 9 from Peter Stangel’s Taschenphilharmonie and the Camerata RCO respectively. Michelle Casteletti’s version draws most heavily on Deryck Cooke’s idiomatic performing version (rightly so; the various other completions don't sound like Mahler), played here by just 24 musicians: single winds and a tiny string section, backed up with harp, percussion, piano and Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Treatise by Cornelius Cardew is the defining work of the graphic notation movement. The score, completed in 1967, is made up of 193 landscape pages, each with two empty musical staves running along the bottom, with an array of graphic designs above, often incorporating elements of musical notation, but rarely specifying pitches or rhythms.Throughout the summer term at Goldsmiths, a series of concerts have presented different interpretations of an 11-page excerpt from Treatise (pp. 115-126), and this, the conclusion of the Treatise Project, brought six readings together. The Project, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The Barbican Hall hardly boasts the numinous acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral for which Vaughan Williams composed his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, but Sir Simon Rattle has long known how to build space into the architecture of what he conducts.No indulgences needed to be made for the students of the Guildhall School of Music next door. They slotted seamlessly within the ranks of the LSO to conjure a luminous halo of string sound, untroubled by the sense of loss which belongs to the piece in more lean and urgent performances. Their wind colleagues then filled the stage for Percy Read more ...
David Nice
You should not die or be born on Svalbard, 1,985 kilometres above Norway's northernmost coast, and at 18 you work or leave for the mainland. Hunting is over, mining nearly so. Tourism, carefully managed, and Arctic research are the future; the Global Seed Vault is also here, and Syria has been the first country to take from it. Excursions outside the biggest settlement, Longyearbyen, are advisable only with an armed guard; dangerous polar bears outnumber inhabitants and occasionally crash into town. A special Svalbardian variety of reindeer and arctic foxes seem comfortable ambling around Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Having played their first concert just four years ago, the Chineke! Orchestra gave a rousing, exuberant performance for an ensemble still in its infancy. It’s a young orchestra, not just in the sense of only being founded a few years ago, but one that comprises many young players too. Though its youthful passion and energy was very much to the fore, there were some points in Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No 1 when a lack of experience let them down. The violins’ tone in the opening of the third movement, "Anitra’s Dance", was a little coarse, and a distinct disconnect between the bassoons Read more ...
graham.rickson
Daniel Elms: Islandia (New Amsterdam Records)Composers have long taken inspiration from landscape, and much of Daniel Elms’ absorbing Islandia is rooted in the ambience, sights and sounds of his home city, Hull. If you’ve not been there, book a weekend break now: Hull is a fascinating, otherworldly place with some superb architecture and a very un-English sense of otherness. The title track is a ten-minute musical voyage, an excitable opening paragraph leading us into choppier waters before returning to a land of “home-cooked food and knitted tea cosies”. Radiant but unsentimental, it Read more ...
Roger Wright
The composition course founded more than 25 years ago at Snape by composers Oliver Knussen and Colin Matthews is in full swing. The scene is the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings on the Suffolk coast. Like Colin, Olly's connections to Aldeburgh and Snape are deep and long lasting, including his Artistic Directorship of the Festival. Young composers are having their work tried out by an instrumental group, also being mentored by Olly. The ink is still wet on their scores.The scores have been given to Olly and Colin and the run through of a new piece begins. After less than a minute, Olly shouts Read more ...
David Nice
With two German giants roaring - Brahms in leonine mode, Richard Strauss more with tongue in armour-plated cheek - it could have all been too much. Not in the eloquent hands of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's Music Director Designate, Vasily Petrenko, or pianist Denis Kozhukhin, the most musically disciplined of Russians.Indeed, you felt this team could have gone on to give us from Brahms's First Piano Concerto to give us the equally titanic Second. I've heard that pairing work in concert with the magisterial Elisabeth Leonskaja, and there's no doubt that when Yefim Bronfman played the Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
It wasn’t really the orchestra’s night. Nor the soloists'. Nor, even, the conductor's. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir totally stole the show, well surpassing the incredibly high standards which they already regularly attain and performing not as a large symphonic chorus but as a something akin to one of the highly specialist choirs with which this country is blessed.That is not to say that all the others on the platform at Philharmonic Hall were at all under par – indeed, they were far from it, setting not one foot wrong in a performance which evidently stirred the audience. Sir Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia kicked off their series of concerts devoted to the edgy culture of the Weimar Republic with a programme that featured three works (out of four) derived in some way from the musical stage. That included, as a rip-roaring finale, the conclusion to Shostakovich’s football-themed ballet from 1930, The Golden Age. Given the theatrical energy that drove the evening along at the Royal Festival Hall, it felt at the outset slightly disappointing that we would see no (non-musical) drama on stage. Until, that is, Salonen got into his skipping, gesticulating stride Read more ...