Classical music
Boyd Tonkin
For a small nation, with a population not quite comparable to Scotland’s, Georgia has for long packed a mighty musical punch. Any visitor will know the soul-wrenching power of its choral polyphony, but a post-Soviet generation of classical soloists now walks proudly across the world stage. Pianist Mariam Batsashvili, only just 30, won the Franz Liszt international competition in 2014 and has since been a BBC New Generation artist. Last night’s Wigmore Hall recital (not her first) put Liszt’s music at the heart of a programme that revealed the almost-symphonic textures and colours that a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Nobody likes a Messiah…”, deadpanned Robert Hollingworth, with the timing of a practised stand-up. After a pause, “…more than I do.” At St Martin-in-the-Fields on Friday evening, however, the seasonal blockbuster did not, just for once, feature on the festive menu. Instead, Hollingworth’s ever-enterprising ensemble I Fagiolini served up a savoury and well-spiced alternative to Handel’s ubiquitous staple.Over little more than an hour, the versatile group – fortified by a posse of agile string players from Brecon Baroque – spanned the late-16th to mid-18th centuries in half-a-dozen stylishly Read more ...
graham.rickson
Winter Breviary St Martin’s Voices/Andrew Earis (Resonus)The music at the St Martin-in-the-Fields in London has been reinvigorated in the last couple of years by new Director of Music, Andrew Earis, and St Martin’s Voices, the resident chamber choir of young professional singers, has been at the heart of that. Their Christmas offering is a selection of premiere recordings by predominantly women composers, a debut collaboration with the Resonus label: I hope there will be more. Olivia Sparkhall’s “All and Some” has a springy medieval feel, all drone textures and modal melodies, and is a Read more ...
David Nice
It could have been a winner: a charismatic star soprano of great emotional and interpretative intelligence, a top pianist given a little space to shine on his own, a programme that looked good on paper, of distinguished German/Austro-German women composers in the first half, French dark versus light in the second. But Milton Court is an unwelcoming venue, like being inside a dark-wood coffin, and the singer seemed uneasy between numbers to begin with.The voice itself, that bright but far from light soprano, had settled by the time we reached three songs by Clara Schumann; the first group, by Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
A decade has passed since Paul Lewis concluded an endeavour of a kind never previously undertaken: to perform, over two and a half years and across four continents, every work Schubert wrote for piano between 1822, the year he was diagnosed with syphilis – ergo, knew he was dying – and his death in 1828.It was quite an odyssey for those of us who followed those concerts (in my case, across two of those continents), and apparently for Lewis too, as he revisits selections from that programme, adding other, earlier, Schubert sonatas for a scaled-down version of those tours, this time across Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s a game called Whamageddon, where people see how deep into December they can go without hearing “Last Christmas”. I’m like that, but with the Bach Christmas Oratorio, and this year I made it four days. And who would want to wait any longer? Last night I was at the Voces8 Centre in London as part of a live audience for a concert also streamed in the ongoing Live from London series, started during the Covid summer of 2020 and continuing to flourish.The programme was titled “Christmas with JS Bach” but could equally have been called “Blackadder Goes Forth” for the determination to get Read more ...
Natalia Franklin Pierce
Despite my double-barrelled surname (my parents weren't married when I was born – so I was given both their names), a career within contemporary classical music definitely wasn't on the cards for me as a child. My Dad was a self-made man from a North London council estate, and while my parents loved music, classical music didn’t feature much and they regretted not being able to play any instruments.My Dad used to tell us he would’ve been the next Miles Davis were it not for the fact his trumpet (shared with another kid on loan) was vandalised with a ball-bearing, thwarting his career. I Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Frank Bridge’s Phantasie Piano Quartet was astutely described by his student Benjamin Britten as “Brahms tempered with Fauré”, so it made a lot of sense to programme it alongside the first piano quartets of those other composers. A “supergroup” of brilliant young soloists came together as an ensemble as tight as any that plays together every day, and made a committed case for each piece.All three were written by composers around their thirtieth birthdays – and the players at the Wigmore Hall last night were of a similar vintage. They put their all into the Bridge, even if this 12-minute Read more ...
Robert Beale
John Storgårds found himself literally facing both ways for the third item on the BBC Philharmonic’s programme on Saturday: towards the audience, with one music stand in front of him, as he played the solo violin role in Sebastian Fagerlund’s Helena’s Song, and frequently turning 180 degrees, with the full score in view, to conduct at the same time.It was one of two BBC commissioned works (in this case co-commissioned with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra) receiving their UK premieres in the concert – the other was the rather longer Shades of Unbroken Dreams by James Lee III, a piano Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It is not every day that a new choral work by a living composer can confidently be labelled a masterpiece. Yet this is what we have here. James MacMillan’s Christmas Oratorio is still sufficiently freshly-minted to be receiving its Scottish premiere, and from Friday night’s spectacular performance by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Chorus it deserves to sit alongside Messiah or Bach’s eponymous masterpiece as a staple of our future Christmas repertoire. From the first stuttering notes of the opening Sinfonia, with the celesta casting a fairy tale spell over chewy woodwind Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes all the stars align in musical performance. There’s no soprano more alive to the expression of musical joy and rapture than Louise Alder, no composer more levitational in his strange later adventures than Fauré, no instrumentalists strings better than pianist Joseph Middleton, the Doric String Quartet and double-bass player Laurène Durantel at being supernatural companions throughout his song-cycle La bonne chanson.Fauré's other miracles among his chamber works turn up with comparative regularity in concert, but for some reason I've not experienced his nine-song tribute to Paul Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottír found her work put under a strangely unforgiving lens when it was featured in Tár, the now infamous Todd Field film made in 2022 starring Cate Blanchett as a tempestuously exacting female conductor. In a scene where Lydia Tár is taking a masterclass at the Julliard, she savages a student who is conducting a string quartet playing Thorvaldsdottír’s music, saying it sounds like “tuning up”.Yet it’s part of the film’s sophisticated psychological narrative that this scene, far from condemning Thorvaldsdottír’s music, represents Tár’s divorce from the Read more ...