Classical music
Mark Valencia
Never review the audience. Thus goes the dictum, so there’ll be no word from me about the cacophony of coughers who conspired to ruin the concert, no complaint about the woman with a video recorder, unchallenged by Barbican staff until the end of the evening, who drove those sitting near her to distraction, and no mention of the damage done to A Ceremony of Carols by the sizeable faction who shattered its charm by clapping at random intervals – an act that may conceivably have pleased today’s advocates of applause between movements but was ruinous to Britten’s blissful structuring.No, the Read more ...
David Nice
It was a bright idea which, thanks to careful programming, has delivered – among other special events – two rich concerts in the Tower of London’s unexpectedly welcoming Tudor church, courtesy of the enterprising Spitalfields Music Winter Festival. Bach left behind an exquisite volume, the “Little Organ Book”, designed to contain 164 chorale preludes. He completed only 46; organist William Whitehead decided to commission composers to fill in the gaps, basing their inspirations on (hopefully) the music and/or the meaning of the words in the original chorales. The notion of pairing the preludes Read more ...
graham.rickson
When you're young, you think that liking Elgar is a habit you'll grow into later in life, like buying a set of golf clubs or following The Archers in detail. As I shuffle into middle age, I find that I'm beginning to love this music more and more. I've given up making excuses to younger, hipper friends. Richard Farnes' intense account of Elgar's disconcerting Second Symphony was a great performance, one in which intense dynamism served to accentuate the score's lingering, fin de siècle nostalgia.Elgar's own recordings are strikingly fast; Farnes (pictured below by Clive Barda) was a pretty Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It was ironic, yet seasonal, that the BBC Philharmonic’s conductor-composer H K Gruber, who is said to be a descendant of the man who wrote “Silent Night” (Franz Xaver Gruber), should take centre stage with a rip-roaring, roof-raising percussion work that guaranteed exactly the opposite effect. At the same time Chief Conductor Juanjo Mena went back to his roots to bring us a riot of dance music – flamenco, waltz, Latin American, Malambo, Charleston and even a cowboy ballet.Mena started with the Spanish influence in the form of Joaquĭn Turina’s Ritmos, a fantasia coreográfica originally Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Saint Nicolas, Hymn to St Cecilia, Rejoice in the Lamb Andrew Kennedy (tenor), Choir of Kings College Cambridge, Britten Sinfonia/Stephen Cleobury (Kings College)After beginning work on the cantata Saint Nicolas in 1947, Britten confessed in a letter that “it'll be difficult to write, because that mixture of subtlety and simplicity is most extending, but very interesting...” In the event, the two extremes were managed magnificently, and listening to this superb new recording makes one appreciate just how successful Britten was in mixing accessibility with compositional rigour. Read more ...
graham.rickson
There's an impressive guest list on Joshua Bell's Christmas disc. Vocalists include Renée Fleming, Plácido Domingo, Gloria Estefan and Alison Krauss. Cellist Steven Isserlis pops up, along with Chick Corea. Sony would have us believe that this is meant to sound like a spontaneous seasonal shindig held in Bell's Manhattan apartment, though the range of recording venues suggest that many of the performances must have been phoned in.But, against all expectations, there are some very sweet things here; the successes just about outweigh the stinkers. The instrumental tracks come off best: a lovely Read more ...
David Nice
There are probably more fine string quartets in the world than audiences to listen to them, or so a gloomy estimate from a major chamber music festival would have us believe. Fortunately the Wigmore Hall usually guarantees crowds to hear the best, and at the highest level too we’re spoilt for choice. After two outstandingly vibrant recent visitors, the Belcea and Jerusalem Quartets, the equally touted Pavel Haas Quartet merely seemed very good rather than great, though they upped the stakes when mercurial 22-year-old Daniil Trifonov joined them for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet.At first, there Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
If Pizza Huts could speak, the Huddersfield branch would have quite some tale to tell. It was here in the late 1980s, over a deep pan, that one of 20th century music’s great feuds was put to bed, John Cage patching things up with Pierre Boulez, in the presence of Olivier Messiaen. Art has Venice. Film has Cannes. New music has Huddersfield. And every sticky floor of the town’s many restaurants has become hallowed ground.The main draw this year was the UK premiere of what Simon Rattle has called the first masterpiece of the 21st century, Georg Friedrich Haas’s vast symphonic landscape, In Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There was a strange moment at the end of yesterday's recital when, having exhausted their repertoire, octogenarians György and Márta Kurtág began to look around anxiously, wondering what more they could offer us. They eyed each other, then us, arms outstretched, shoulders shrugging guiltily, like they’d been caught with an empty fridge. Another standing ovation and I felt they might have returned with a plate of fig rolls.This feeling of domesticity, as if we were visiting gran and grandad’s, that Márta and György's recitals inevitably evoke, is not an incidental element to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Diabelli Variations, Sonata no 32, Bagatelles András Schiff (piano and fortepiano) (ECM)Invest in a copy of Jeremy Denk's zingy new Goldberg Variations and you'll hopefully be prompted to purchase this rather special András Schiff Beethoven disc – or discs, as he gives us two performances of the Diabelli Variations – one on a velvet-toned 1921 Bechstein once used by Wilhelm Backhaus, and the second on a Franz Brodmann fortepiano built a century earlier. Schiff asks us to wonder whether Beethoven would have liked the Steinway, suggesting that the composer's response might be “ Read more ...
Humphrey Burton
The most intensive period of music-making I’ll ever experience, celebrating the 100th birthday of Benjamin Britten in and around his home town, ended on Sunday. I’m an Aldeburgh resident and I attended everything on offer. I thought the best way to provide an overview was to compile a diary of the past four days with a line or two about each event. Thursday 21 November (eve of the birthday) 3pm A stiff North-East wind is blowing down Crag Path and the rain is near horizontal: the Storm Interlude from Peter Grimes comes to mind. A brisk walk up the hill to pay respects in the Read more ...
Mark Valencia
There’s nowt so French as the mélodie and the chanson, but I’m not convinced they make ideal bedfellows. Nor, I suspect, is Anne Sofie von Otter, since she split the salon and cabaret halves of her Douce France recital with an interval (and the CD release of the same name with a change of disc). The art song and the popular tune may spring from the same national sensibility but they have little in common: the one is subtle and born of poetry, the other musically primitive and emotionally blatant. The francophile in me loves them both – an enthusiasm I probably share with the Swedish mezzo – Read more ...