Classical music
Liam Byrne
When you dedicate your life to studying and performing on a musical instrument that essentially went extinct at the end of the 18th century, nostalgia plays a certain unavoidable role in your daily routine. I don't mean fetishistic historicism - I'm very happy with plumbing and penicillin, thank you - but my job as a viola da gamba player is to try and absorb information about my ancient instrument and its historical repertoire in a sort of empathetic way. I try to understand how it works on both technical and emotional levels, so that I can perform beautiful and obscure old music for modern Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No 7 Budapest Festival Orchestra/Ivan Fischer (Channel Classics)“It is my best work and it has a cheerful character.” So said Mahler about his Symphony No 7, and on the basis of this exuberant, feisty performance, Ivan Fischer agrees with him (“…may this reading contribute to a revalidation!”). Fischer doesn't see the work as problematic, his love for the symphony expressed without a trace of indulgence. There's so much to enjoy here. The first movement's juddering opening is superbly done, the music's slow awakening rivalling the start of Mahler's 3rd. The jump cuts Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s 15 years since Benjamin Grosvenor first strolled onto our TV screens as a prodigiously gifted child in the BBC Young Musician Competition. Today he is a self-possessed young man of 26, in his element on the concert platform, yet without a hint of affectation; and unlike certain musicians who play the same type of music all the time, he ventures constantly into new and sometimes surprising musical territory.This recital was part of a Barbican series that also includes two chamber music concerts with the Doric String Quartet at Milton Court (the next is on 26 May). Grosvenor tackled an all Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When critics praise a first-rank string quartet, convention demands they claim that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts. True enough, maybe, but with the Takács Quartet, each separate element really does blaze with a soloistic, virtuosic flame. From the first bars of last night’s opener at the Wigmore Hall, as Haydn plays pass-the-parcel with an apparently straightforward tune at the start of his G major quartet Op.76 no. 1, the sheer class and distinctive voice of each instrumental contribution grabbed the ear.Remarkably, this group – first mustered in Budapest in 1975 but Read more ...
David Nice
First under Soviet rule, then in the remarkable flourishing of a liberated nation, Estonian contemporary music has held its independent head high and showcased it, under the aegis of the Estonian Composers' Union, first for a few days and now for more than a week in spring. In this, its 40th anniversary year, Estonian Music Days became World Music Days, hosting composers from 60 countries as the base for the 96-year old ISCM. Maybe it was partly because Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania understand the two aspects of its chosen theme, "Through the Forest of Songs", so well that they still came out Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There can be no questioning trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger’s extraordinary mastery: his big, unforced sound, mellifluous legato, athletic virtuosity and utterly controlled high notes. But his well-attested commitment to the avant-garde led the Wigmore audience to stay away in droves from his recital last night, leaving the hall insultingly empty for such a star performer.But the programme didn’t just look intimidating on paper, it turned out to be somewhat hard work in practice, not only for those Wigmore patrons who prefer Beethoven and Schubert, but even for those of us with an enthusiasm for Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Visit Ainola, Sibelius’s woodland house by Lake Tuusula north of Helsinki, and you’ll be told the story of the green stove. It appears that the famously synaesthetic Finnish composer identified the shade of his heating installation with the key of F major. Asked to attach a colour to the lustrous performance of his D minor violin concerto given last night by Viktoria Mullova and Paavo Järvi with the Philharmonia, I’d plump for a rich autumnal red-brown, glinting with bright golden highlights at the top but grounded in earth tones of a sumptuous depth.Mullova, of course, has played this piece Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Cellist Raphael Wallfisch thinks outside of the box. His concert repertoire spans the popular concerto choices – the Elgar, the Dvořák – but he doesn’t stop there, and makes a point of seeking out the lesser-known and the little-heard. He has a particular taste for English cello concertos of the 20th century, and his advocacy has revived the fortunes of cello works by Bliss, Bax, Moeran, and particularly Gerald Finzi, his performance of the Finzi Cello Concerto a surprise hit of the 2001 Proms.His recording projects are equally adventurous. By the end of this year, Wallfisch will have Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Cello Suites Alban Gerhardt (Hyperion)Alban Gerhardt looks as if he's hewn from granite in Adam Markowski’s superb cover photograph here. Even his Matteo Goffriller cello looks like it's been through the wars. Gerhardt tells us in his foreword that he’d originally refused to record the six Bach Suites before he turned 50, then realised that the date was fast approaching. He's disarmingly honest about the difficulties of playing these pieces now, notably in terms of how much notice to take of historically-informed performances. Plus, there's how to balance vibrato and Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly 17 years ago, Simon Rattle inaugurated his era at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic with Mahler's Fifth Symphony. It couldn't hope to possess the thrill of discovery which had marked his Birmingham Mahler – after all, the Berliners had long enjoyed a more organic view of the composer with Claudio Abbado – but eventually the team gave us a supreme Proms performance of the Seventh Symphony, the one best suited to Rattle's curious form of micro-management. The London Symphony Orchestra, on the other hand, must be so relieved to be free of Gergiev's superficial Mahlerian glut, and while Read more ...
Clara Mouriz, Roderick Williams, Joseph Middleton, Wigmore Hall review - the song recital as mixtape
Sebastian Scotney
It’s the age of the mixtape. And of the Only Connect sequences round. Last night’s Wigmore Hall song recital, under the curious strap-line “Basque Blood and the Folksong” was centred around Ravel songs – the Wigmore Hall has a focus on them this season – but was also in the habit of departing from Ravel and taking in a fair few whistle-stops en route: Britten, de Falla, Fauré, Jesús Guridi, Alessandro Scarlatti, Schumann and Trad. (Scots).The Ravel songs were focused on those with more exotic and folk-ish inspiration. They included some rarities, such as his setting of “Ye Banks and Braes”, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s a fair bet that more people now know Harmonielehre as the title of the 1985 orchestral blockbuster by John Adams than the composition manual written by Schoenberg in 1922. Even the title is “typically, ironically John”, as Sir Simon Rattle remarked in a pre-concert interview introducing the YouTube film of the concert. The piece has swallowed up its object of parody.Yet the composer’s old programme note, reprinted for this LSO concert, disavows ironic intent. Adams hides his well-chosen found objects of late Romanticism in plain sight – Mahler’s Tenth, Sibelius’s Fourth, Schoenberg’s own Read more ...