Classical music
stephen.walsh
Having started their tour at the Barbican on Sunday, I Fagiolini descended on Bristol with their Leonardo da Vinci celebration on precisely the 500th anniversary of the great man’s death, a fact that earned them an extra round of applause from the proud but sometimes neglected Bristolians in St.George’s. How, though, do you celebrate so great a painter through music? The easy answer would be in the music of his day. But I Fagiolini’s director, Robert Hollingworth, and the Leonardo specialist Martin Kemp had a more interesting, perhaps riskier, recipe. They assembled a hybrid programme of Read more ...
Classical CDs Weekly: Chaplin's Smile, Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments, Sollazzo Ensemble
graham.rickson
Chaplin’s Smile: Song Arrangements for Violin & Piano Philippe Quint (violin), Marta Aznavoorian (piano) (Warner Classics)By all accounts, Charlie Chaplin was an accomplished pianist and violinist, and his first credited film score was for 1928’s City Lights. Adding dialogue became an option while the film was being made, though Chaplin opted to keep it ‘silent’, adding just sound effects and music. Though he couldn't actually read music, his hums, grunts and whistles notated and arranged by a series of hard working assistants. You wonder what might have resulted had Chaplin Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Will Gregory (b.1959) is best known as one half of the alt-pop duo Goldfrapp but has a long career in music that dips into many areas. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he was a working musician who toured with multiple bands, notably, Tears for Fears, as well as playing on sessions for albums by artists ranging from The Cure to Portishead. He is a multi-instrumentalist valued for his saxophone and woodwind playing (from Moondog and Michael Nyman to Peter Gabriel and it’s him on Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies), but as much for his general studio and arrangement abilities.Since 1999 Read more ...
David Nice
Vladimir Jurowski is always a conductor for making connections, so one wonders why Brahms's Second Piano Concerto wasn't the first-half choice in this programme from the start (the advertised original had been the much stormier No 1). The sleight-of-hand wit of its effervescent finale came not only as the usual surprise after the philosophical reflections of its first three movements, but also made a bridge to two great portraits of very different wags, Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel and Elgar's Falstaff.It seemed almost too good to be true that Yefim Bronfman shared Jurowski's balancing act Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Among the greatest violin concertos in the repertoire, the Elgar is far too rarely performed. One of the reasons is its huge dramatic scale and almost hour-long duration – Sakari Oramo wisely programmed it here with Dvořák’s relatively modest Seventh Symphony, but this was still a long concert. Another reason is the superhuman demands it makes on the soloist, of virtuosity, but also of subtle structural thinking, and ultimately, of sheer stamina.So we owe Nicola Benedetti a debt of thanks for her advocacy here of (arguably) Elgar’s greatest work. Her reading was bold and forthright, but Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms, orch. Schoenberg: Piano Quartet No 1 in G minor, Parry: Elegy for Brahms Gävle Symphony Orchestra/Jaime Martín (Ondine)Schoenberg's flamboyant take on Brahms's G Minor Piano Quartet sounds less and less authentically Brahmsian the more I listen to it, but it's a work I can't imagine ever getting bored with. Schoenberg complained that the original was too densely scored (“the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and one hears nothing of the strings”), but still managed to produce a recasting that’s denser and thicker than any Brahms symphony. I'd point the curious in the Read more ...
Robert Hollingworth
Leonardo da Vinci died 500 years ago on 2 May this year. We all know he was a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, pioneer of flight and anatomist – yet according to Vasari, Leonardo’s first job outside Florence was as a result of his musical talents. We call him the "universal man," the ultimate polymath, but he would have called himself a “monomath” – bringing everything he did under one central embrace - the rational laws of God’s creation. These laws were mathematical, and it is on this foundation that he revered music as the only serious rival for his divine "science" of painting Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Just over a decade ago it was predicted by those supposedly in the know that Ilan Volkov would succeed Sakari Oramo as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. In the event, the gig went to Andris Nelsons, and it was probably for the best. An artistic temperament as inquisitive and uncompromising as Volkov’s probably wouldn’t have been well suited to the box-ticking and base-touching involved in planning full length seasons for an orchestra with the CBSO's civic responsibilities. Which is not to say that the orchestra doesn’t have a noticeable rapport with Volkov – or, Read more ...
Mitten wir im Leben sind, De Keersmaeker, Queyras, Rosas, Sadler's Wells review - Bach-worthy genius
David Nice
All Bach is dance, a teacher once told me. The justifiable exaggeration switched on a light; leaping to the Brandenburg Concertos followed. This great work of kinetic art is of a different order. Choreographer and performer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker represents the pure but vibrant mastery of the Cello Suites in the way that the soul moves with them, responsive to every hyper-dance form, key and modulation. Using only five dancers including herself from her Rosas company on the bare Sadler's Wells stage in equal partnership with the magisterial playing of Jean-Guihen Queyras, she balances the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Whips, scourges, sinews, blood and pus: where Bach’s two Passions lament from a contemplative distance, Handel’s plunges right to the bone, to the cruel, tortured death that is the heart of the Easter story.Perhaps that explains the work’s recent neglect. While Easter Week in London annually offers more Bach Passions than you can count on both hands, Handel’s – a model and influence for Bach’s later works – has been all but silent. But with this performance from the Academy of Ancient Music maybe the tide is turning – troubled times finally bringing the beautiful horror of Handel’s Passion Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For the final instalment of their three Matthew Passions this Holy Week, Ex Cathedra gave a large scale performance of Bach’s oratorio in their home town on Birmingham, after dates with lesser forces in London and Bristol. With an augmented orchestra and their regular chamber choir and orchestra joined onstage by Ex Cathedra’s Academy of Vocal Music - Ex Cathedra’s strand for young singers - and members of various community choirs in and around BIrmingham, the collective masses on stage made a full, fabulous sound, which filled Symphony Hall. That’s not to say that the increased number of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gabriel Jackson: The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ Emma Tring (soprano), Guy Cutting (tenor), Choir of Merton College Oxford, Oxford Contemporary Sinfonia/Benjamin Nicholas (Delphian)This Passion sets a libretto compiled by the Chaplain of Merton College, Simon Jones. He draws on each of the four Gospel accounts and adds to them poetry ancient and modern, each poet having a connection with the college. Bach’s surviving Passion settings are epic schleps, whereas Gabriel Jackson’s vibrant new one is in just seven sections and lasts 70 minutes. This is an unabashedly diatonic, very Read more ...