Classical music
Helen Wallace
Reading the line-up for Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival can be a bit of a //+DiGit<ijjjjjjjjjjjjj.ggiiigggggH1-RMXn4000// experience (and no, I haven’t invented those). There are flashing light warnings. Ear defenders are routinely handed out. The message is clear: prepare for a sonic assault course.So what delight to find oneself swept along the luminous stream of an expertly curated programme, whose narrative began with the minutiae of sound and grew into full-blown music theatre. This was Riot Ensemble, offering a string of premieres directed with authoritative poise by Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Music competitions are big in Poland. Every five years the classical music world turns its attention to Warsaw for the International Chopin Piano Competition, with much commentary and speculation, and a succession celebrity laureated to maintain its global reputation. But all bases are covered here, and in the intervening years, Warsaw also hosts the Moniuszko Vocal Competition, the Wieniawski Violin Competition is held in Poznań, and in the Silesian capital of Katowice, the main event in the city’s cultural diary is the Fitelberg Competition, named after the Polish conductor Grzegorz Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place last night showcased both the best and worst things about attending live concerts, with the pros outweighing the cons. Early on, extraneous noise made me long for the pure listening experience of a good pair of headphones, but elsewhere the immediacy and physicality of the live experience was genuinely exciting.This latest edition of Aurora’s multi-season survey of Mozart piano concertos featured the Labèque sisters, Katia and Marielle, who have been taking duet and two-piano repertoire around the world for over 30 years, in the concerto for two pianos, K. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Chaconne - Sofya Gulyak (piano) (Champs Hill Records)Traditionally, a chaconne is an instrumental piece in triple time with a continually repeating bass line. Sofya Gulyak, winner of the 2009 Leeds Piano Competition, gives us seven. Best known is Busoni’s extraordinary Chaconne in D minor, a bold reinvention of a famous Bach number for solo violin. Gulyak is terrific, her performance combining craggy grandeur and warm intimacy. The final major chord has rarely sounded so well-earned. An early Chaconne in G major by Handel is a friendlier affair, Gulyak making the work shine. The rapid Read more ...
Anneke Scott
The Prince Regent’s Band was formed in 2013 and, like very many chamber ensembles, was created when a group of us found that we shared a number of interests in common. The musicians that make up the ensemble are all specialist historic brass players and can be regularly heard performing in principal chairs with a number of leading period instrument orchestras. We all shared an enthusiasm for and a curiosity in brass chamber music from the long 19th century.This period, roughly from the French Revolution in 1789 through to the end of the First World War in 1918, encompasses an incredibly Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Before the age of photography, people and places were recorded in ink or paint or sound. The process of recording was not instant, could not be rushed, and produced by its nature an experience of layers. On the last leg of a brief UK tour, the Basel Chamber Orchestra brought to Cadogan Hall two landscapes and two portraits, in performances notably true to life and unified as harmoniously as a Rothko quartet by the ensemble’s own cultivated tonal palette.Timbres were applied neat and raw to Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture, and Heinz Holliger had left the canvas unprimed: the effect was not a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
STIMMUNG is always an event. Stockhausen’s score calls for a ritual as much as a performance, with six singers sitting around a spherical light on a low table, the audience voyeurs at some intimate but unexplained rite. Singcircle has been performing the work for over 40 years, and its director, Gregory Rose, clearly has an innate sense of its pace, structure and aura. This performance commemorated the 10th anniversary of Stockhausen’s death, but also marked the last ever appearance by Singcircle, a fitting end for a group associated above all else with this work.As with most of Stockhausen’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Herbert Howells: Music for Clavichord Julian Perkins (Prima Facie)Herbert Howells was at a low ebb in the 1920s. His energies were sapped by ongoing health issues and resultant medical treatment. A severe creative crisis followed the disastrous first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1925. Help arrived in the form of Howells’ friendship with the photographer Herbert Lambert, who sidelined as a maker of clavichords. This quirksome instrument delighted him. Inspired by collections of Tudor keyboard music, he began to assemble Lambert’s Clavichord: 12 short pieces, each one dedicated to Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla has such a rapport with her Birmingham public that she can silence a capacity crowd - 2000-plus audience members, spilling over into Symphony Hall’s choir stalls – with the tiniest of gestures. Into that silence she neatly placed the first chord of Messiaen’s Un sourire, and you could hear every fibre of the string texture.Un sourire was Messiaen’s contribution to the 1991 Mozart bicentenary; slight, by his standards, but entirely characteristic. Strings and woodwinds intone a sort of chant, in expansive paragraphs. They halt, and brass and percussion let loose a raucous Read more ...
David Nice
Only connect. As the Southbank Centre's International Chamber Music Series at St John's showcased supreme eloquence in two searing but perfectly-proportioned meditations from the Second World War, over the road at Smith Square Europe House was hosting a tribute to a name that may not resonate as much as Messiaen or Shostakovich, Hubert Butler. Nevertheless just before the Frenchman composed visions for himself and three fellow musicians in a German prisoner-of-war camp camp and the Russian did what he could to mark the horrors of the Holocaust, the Irishman had been in Vienna on his own Read more ...
Robert Beale
Intellectual rigour and emotional honesty are the rewarding qualities in András Schiff’s Bach playing. Virtuosity comes as standard, too. And you get value for your money – his programme all but filled two-and-a-half hours, and he was as completely in command at the end as he had been at the beginning.More so, if anything. If Schiff is not entirely satisfied with the way something comes out, he’ll play the whole section of the music again, just to show what it really can be like.It was the three big pieces (all published or labelled as "Keyboard Practice" by their tongue-in-cheek creator) Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Florian Boesch is a big man. He’s tall, stocky, and with his bald head and stubble could seem more like a gangster than a Lieder singer. His voice is beautiful, but it matches his appearance – big, weighty and imposing. He has subtlety too, though it is sometimes hard-won, and his affinity with the core Romantic repertoire is always apparent, so this programme, of Schubert, Wolf and Schumann was well chosen to showcase his strengths.Schubert’s nature-inspired songs are an ideal platform for the more turbulent and dramatic side of Boesch’s temperament. His voice is strongest in the low Read more ...