Classical music
David Nice
You haven't lived until you've witnessed Viennese maverick H(einz) K(arl) Gruber – 75 today (3 January, publication day) – speech-singing, conducting and kazooing his way through his self-styled "pandemonium" Frankenstein!!. Composed for chansonnier and chamber ensemble or large orchestra, it's a contemporary classic nearly 40 years young. To witness his performance with players from the Royal Swedish Opera in the beautiful, neo-Renaissance Grünewald Halll of the art deco Stockholm Konserthuset last November was, I imagine, a stroke of luck akin to seeing Mahler or Richard Strauss conduct Read more ...
graham.rickson
CPE Bach: Tangere Alexei Lubimov (tangent piano) (ECM)The term "tangent piano" suggests something hard-edged and angular, but no: the latin word tangere means "to touch", and the mysterious-sounding tangent piano was an expressive, short-lived successor to the harpsichord. Popular in the second half of the 18th century, very few survive today, the instrument quickly superseded by the more versatile fortepiano. Here, Alexei Lubimov plays a restored tangent piano built in 1794 by Späth & Schmal of Regensburg, describing in the booklet introduction how well its idiosyncratic personality Read more ...
David Nice
Power and intelligence combined make Sarajevo-born British pianist Ivana Gavrić stand out from the crowd. Bass lines are clear and strong; right-hand melodies move in keenly articulated song. The first half of her recital progressed with well-earthed, dancing energy to a strong clincher in Chopin's B flat minor Scherzo. What a pity, then, that the transcendence we hoped for didn't emerge in Schumann's Kreisleriana.It may well be that Schumann's eight pieces, strongly connected here, reveal both the troubled, manic side of the composer's personality and a poised inwardness. But they do, Read more ...
David Nice
Did Simon Rattle's return to the UK as Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra live up to the hype? Mostly, and when it did, the music-making was superbly alive. But it's vital to observe that another orchestra and chief conductor have been carrying on equally important and sometimes groundbreaking work in the same hall. The two other main London orchestras over at the Southbank, and the rest around the UK, all in excellent hands, have continued to deliver at the highest level. We're currently living in the strongest times, artistically speaking, for classical music across the Read more ...
David Nice
Faced with yet another new work premiered by the Borodin Quartet, Shostakovich asked a daunting question: "but have you played all of Haydn's quartets yet?". Of course they hadn't, and felt justly rebuked. As a listener and sometime performer, I feel the same anxiety about living long enough to experience Bach's 200-plus sacred cantatas, the largest, most ingeniously varied and certainly greatest body of religious music in the western world - and if there's a dud, I haven't heard it yet.Planning your audio adventure should be easy enough: resolve to take in a cantata on every Sunday and other Read more ...
graham.rickson
The John Adams Edition Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by John Adams, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Kirill Petrenko and Sir Simon Rattle (Berliner Philharmoniker)That the Berlin Philharmonic can release a lavish four-disc collection of music by a contemporary American composer is testament to how much the orchestra has evolved since the Karajan years. Claudio Abbado kickstarted the ensemble's rejuvenation, the process continuing under Rattle’s leadership. John Adams was the orchestra’s Composer in Residence during the 2016-2017 season, and conducts a winning reading of his vast, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Even for a singer as driven, communicative and self-reliant as Joyce DiDonato, the song recital with string quartet is a bold step. Whereas an endless repertoire of songs with piano exists, there is virtually nothing off-the-peg for singer and string quartet; it is a case of commissioning the arrangements, and to some extent building your own art form.Monday night’s programme at Wigmore Hall by DiDonato and the Brentano String Quartet (pictured below by Christian Steiner) naturally received the kind of adulation that will always greet opera stars when they step away from the big stage to Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Just when you can scarcely move for Messiahs, two Christmas Oratorios came along at once on Saturday night. That’s London concert schedules for you. While John Butt and his Dunedin Consort unwrapped four of the cantatas at the Wigmore Hall, Vladimir Jurowski presented all six. Was it too much of a good thing? You’d never say the same of an incomplete St Matthew Passion – at least, I hope you wouldn’t.What Jurowski uncovered was the degree to which the cantatas hang together as a hexaptych – and the extent to which they don’t. To serve for Christmas in Leipzig in 1733, Bach adapted the music Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This time of year lots of choirs give lots of Christmas concerts that are more or less the same: traditional repertoire perhaps sprinkled with a few novelties. But Tenebrae’s concert on Saturday at Kings Place broke the mould with some imaginative programming, giving us just enough Christmas but no more, and some quite stunning choral singing.Although scheduled as the final concert in the year-long "Cello Unwrapped" series, this was really a choral concert with obbligato cello items and a couple of solo cello numbers. But the occasional presence of the cello was enough to offer a distinctive Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Leonard Bernstein is 100 already. Actually, he’s not – his centenary falls in 2018, but the LSO, an orchestra he conducted many times, is building up to the anniversary with a series of concerts featuring his three symphonies. This performance of the Second completed the cycle, but the concert also showcased another side of Bernstein’s work with Wonderful Town, one of his early Broadway shows. It was cut down to a concert version, but was still an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza, regularly overspilling the packed Barbican stage.The big news in the first half was a rare appearance by the Read more ...
David Nice
To compose a masterpiece in your teens is rare enough; to choose the most elaborate form in chamber music, an octet for eight strings, ensures a peculiar kind of immortality. George Enescu, a still-underestimated genius described by protege Yehudi Menuhin as "the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician...I have ever experienced", thought in complicated and unique ways at 19, leaving to posterity a difficult and elusive work. 16-year-old Mendelssohn, on the other hand, served up a feast of sheer delight, which can't fail in a good performance to leave you feeling buoyant. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Magnificat in E flat, Missa in F Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)John Eliot Gardiner first recorded Bach’s joyous Magnificat in the 1980s. This revisit gives us the work’s less familiar original incarnation, scored slightly different and pitched a semitone higher. It's tempting to think that all music sounds better in E flat, and Gardiner’s approach oozes warmth and geniality. The trumpet writing is phenomenally difficult: there's a stratospheric high note at the close of the ”Fecit potentiam” which had me spontaneously applauding. Baroque Read more ...