Classical music
David Nice
This was an evening of Iberian highways re-travelled, but with a difference. At the beginning of 2016, the centenary of Spanish master Enrique Granados's untimely death, two young pianists at the National Gallery shared the two piano suites that make up the original Goyescas; finally last night at the Barbican we got the opera partly modelled on their deepest movements. And back in 2008 Josep Pons and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brandished the revised, full-orchestral 1925 ballet score of Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo rather than the intriguing chamber orchestra original, making a virtue out Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos 1-6 Berliner Barock Solisten/Reinhard Goebel (Sony)This set’s arrival sent me scurrying back to listen again to Reinhard Goebel's 1985 DG set of Bach’s Brandenburgs with Musica Antiqua Koln: hyperactive, sharp-edged performances which still sound disarmingly fresh. The issue back then was Goebel’s propensity to adopt speeds on the edge of playability: I'm showing my age in remembering that I could squeeze his set onto a single C90 cassette. Happy days. The Third Concerto was the jaw-dropper, its second movement improbably, ludicrously swift. This new set Read more ...
Robert Beale
Alisa Weilerstein is making two visits to Manchester in just over three weeks. Last night it was with the Hallé, next time she’ll be guesting with the Czech Philharmonic. This one was to play the solo in Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, with Sir Mark Elder conducting. She played it here, with him and the Hallé, just over five years ago, and it was her combination of technical brilliance and expressive ability that impressed then and did so again.It’s a deeply emotional work (written originally for Rostropovich), full of both agonies and challenges, and Weilerstein's qualities combined Read more ...
David Nice
Living-museum recitals on a variety of historic instruments pose logistical problems. Telling The Arts Desk about his award-nominated CD of mostly 19th-century works for horns and pianos, Alec Frank-Gemmill remarked on the near-impossibility of reproducing the experiment in the concert-hall: playing on four period horns would need several intervals, and colleague Alasdair Beatson would hardly be likely to have the four pianos in the same room. Last October came a breakthrough, for me at any rate: Roman Rabinovich playing on three pianos in the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands, Surrey. Yesterday Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Say what you like about Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s partnership with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – and plenty has already been written – but sometimes the facts speak for themselves. At the end of this midweek matinee concert, an audience that had presumably been lured by the promise of Haydn and Max Bruch exploded in laughter and cheers at the end of a piece by György Ligeti.True, it was an unadvertised encore: the final movement of his Concert românesc (1951). But as Ligeti’s Transylvanian hoe-down hurtled onwards, with leader Vesselin Gellev’s solo violin spiralling ever more Read more ...
Robert Beale
Edward Gardner was back on familiar ground when he conducted in Manchester last night – his high-profile career began when he was appointed as the Hallé’s first-ever assistant conductor, early in Sir Mark Elder’s era – and his rapport with young audiences and ability to command his players has certainly not diminished.His five-item programme (part of the BBC Philharmonic’s “Journey Through Music”, designed to relate to younger listeners) blew the cobwebs away if any were remaining from the winter break. It was brisk, brash and exciting – a style of music-making the Philharmonic is not always Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Clarinet Sonatas, Janáček: Sonata (arr. Brill) Shirley Brill, Jonathan Aner (piano) (Hänssler Classic)Brahms's pair of clarinet sonatas are the epitome of autumnosity, were such a word to exist. Pipe-and-slippers music, which isn't meant to sound disparaging. If you’ve endured a long and tiring day, few chamber works possess such consolatory clout. Clarinettist Shirley Brill knows exactly when to tone things down: the F minor sonata’s opening a beguiling study in introspection, the soft, woody tone balm to the ears. But she's alive to Brahms's occasional sunnier moments, the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Cheers and huzzahs greeted the arrival of Sir Simon Rattle on the Barbican stage last night before the London Symphony Orchestra had even played a note. The 10-day festivities to open his tenure as principal conductor evidently worked a treat. The hall was full for a lengthy and – on the surface of it – unlikely splicing of Austrian Romantic angst with Baroque arias and dance.Joy and woe were woven fine throughout, but especially so in a tenderly moulded account of Schubert’s "Unfinished" Symphony. Rattle views the “Unfinished” in the context of a prose vision of paternal rejection and Read more ...
David Nice
Twelfth Night, Epiphany, call it what you will, is one reminder that there's continuity after the turn of the year. Another was Sakari Oramo's final Sibelius-plus concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra - a predictable triumph given that the previous four were all highlights of 2017, capping, at least for me, the "Rattle Returns" experience. Though an "in the beginning" myth was part of the programme, it seemed odd to start with the end, the miraculous one-movement Seventh Symphony. Still, C major marks a good way to kick off at the Barbican in January.That said, the symphony is rare, if not Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The “concert drama” is on the up, offering audiences a mingled-genre means to experience music and its context simultaneously. The author and singer Clare Norburn has an absolute peach of a story to tell in the "imagined testimony of Carlo Gesualdo, composer and murderer," the legendary musician who knifed to death his wife and her lover upon catching them in flagrante.Norburn's Breaking the Rules received its London premiere on Saturday (it has been performed before in various other venues) in the splendid new festival Baroque at the Edge, and it shows us the composer, on the last day Read more ...
Robert Beale
Seventy years old and still imbued with youthful flair and enthusiasm – that’s the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, which pioneered new territory in its first concert of 2018 last night. The flair and enthusiasm also apply to Sir Mark Elder, who conducted the event. He and the NYO, with help from Chris Riddell (former Children’s Laureate, creator of Goth Girl) and director Daisy Evans and her team, gave the first complete opera performance of the organisation’s history with Bartók's Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.It was the second part of their programme, and a concert performance, to be Read more ...
graham.rickson
Morton Feldman: Piano, Violin, Viola, CelloMark Knoop (piano), Aisha Orazbayeva (violin), Bridget Carey (Viola), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello) (Another Timbre)Morton Feldman's output can serve as a useful post-Christmas palate-cleanser. His is music stripped down to the barest essentials. Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello was Feldman's final work, an unclassifiable quartet where the participants communicate with the subtlest of gestures. The lack of conventional musical structure is liberating. Don't sit, pencil in hand, waiting for an emphatic recapitulation or a juicy cadence. Instead, there's Read more ...