Classical music
Boyd Tonkin
In today’s Britain, too many concert reviews have to begin with the vandalistic threats of damage or extinction that hang over their performers. Last week, it emerged that the BBC’s bosses may be open to negotiate an alternative future for its Symphony Orchestra that does not involve 20 per cuts in the personnel.We shall see: what’s beyond doubt is that Saturday’s programme at the Barbican saw a full-strength BBCSO, under their stalwart champion Sakari Oramo, display an exhilarating level of prowess and flair in every department. Others can, and will, ask why Britain’s national institutions Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
One can only admire the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland for its steadfast indifference to the laws of box office gravity. A little known contemporary guitar concerto allied to a relatively unpopular Mahler symphony would be a hard sell even in an Edinburgh Festival context. On a distinctly chilly April evening in Edinburgh, it fell to a small but vocal audience of camp followers to make up for the disappointing rows of empty seats in the admittedly cavernous Usher Hall. The evening had a slightly unusual format. At 80 minutes, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is long enough to stand alone Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In the kerfuffle over the proposed decimation of English National Opera, the BBC Singers and the BBC orchestras, the removal of all Arts Council England’s funding for the Britten Sinfonia has slipped a bit under the radar, but is no less egregious. This 30-year-old ensemble seems to be doing everything to tick ACE boxes: regionally based in the East of England (an area not oversupplied with music), a full programme of community and educational work, a young composers development scheme – all alongside the main ensemble giving thoughtfully-programmed concerts at the highest standard.The last Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nadia & Lili Boulanger: Les Heures Claires - The Complete Songs Lucile Richardot (mezzo), Stéphane Degout (baritone), Raquel Camarinha (soprano), Anne de Fornel (piano), Sarah Nemtanu (violin), Emmanuelle Bertrand (cello) (Harmonia Mundi)This 3-CD set of 63 songs and instrumental pieces by the Boulanger sisters, Nadia (1887-1979) and Lili (1893-1918) really is a treasure-trove. It is claimed that it is the first “intégrale” of the songs by both sisters; these are occasionally interwoven with instrumental pieces. To over-generalize, the first two CDs give an insight into the level of Read more ...
David Nice
In search of relatively rare fabulous beasts like César Franck’s Piano Quintet – given a fantastical performance last night – you often have to take in the ubiquitous Shostakovich specimen, the modest work of a master using simple means to his own creative ends that doesn’t bear too much repeated listening over a short space of time.That won’t have been the case for most of the audience last night, who would have been rightly satisfied by the fire and poetry in the partnership of the Belcea Quartet – with a rare visitor as second violinist, the compelling Paweł Zalejski of the equally fine Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
London concert life is infinitely varied, especially if you dig below the surface. So after spending Tuesday evening in the lofty Royal Albert Hall, on Wednesday I was 16 metres below ground, in the tunnel shaft of the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe for a multi-media event celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space, 62 years ago to the day.The Brunel Museum and the Royal Albert Hall represent two sides of Victorian London: the celebration of high culture and of engineering and “progress”. And although it has none of the elaborate decoration and fine boxes, the Thames Tunnel is an Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The recently re-branded National Youth Choir was founded in 1983 as a single choir of about 100 voices, and in those 40 years has grown to be a family of four, ranging from the nine-year-olds at the bottom of the boys’ and girls’ choirs to the 25-year-olds at the top of the NYC proper.Several hundred young singers in total, further augmented at the Royal Albert Hall last night by an alumni choir and even, in the last number, by the entire audience. In a time of unremitting bad news in the classical music world it was a much-needed tonic, a truly heart-warming celebration of singing and its Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The turbulence and agitation of betrayal could be felt from the word go in this galvanising performance of the St John Passion, which administered a jolting urgency to Bach’s radical portrayal of the Easter story. The work will be 300 years old next year, yet this Polyphony Good Friday performance – a fixture at St John’s Smith Square for slightly fewer years – delivered a version as fresh and discomfiting as if the crucifixion had taken place yesterday.That was in no small part due to Nick Pritchard (pictured below), who as the Evangelist narrated the story with a vibrancy that suggested he Read more ...
David Nice
Tenebrae in tenebris: put more plainly, a top choir that’s anything but shadowy, except when it needs to be, doing its bit for the darkness of Maundy Thursday. The thoughtful plaiting of Bach motets with three Tenebrae Responsories and other works by our top choral composer, James MacMillan, worked well until the last work on the programme. Then they had to go and spoil it all by premature ejaculation.Personal context: as an agnostic, I value this stage in Easter week as a time for meditation on suffering, compassion and death, never more needed than now. Two year ago, when concert halls were Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Facade Ensemble is an interesting chamber group of young players dedicated to exploring 20th repertoire, in this case John Cage, Arvo Pärt and Gavin Bryars, who celebrates his 80th birthday this year. The programme, put together by founder and conductor Benedict Collins Rice was contemplative in tone, and an interesting opportunity to hear these experimental and minimal works in a pared-down scoring.I had not come across John Cage as a choral composer until this year, when I reviewed the Latvian Radio Choir’s disc for theartsdesk. It is, unsurprisingly, not like most other choral music – Read more ...
David Nice
This Palm Sunday served up an epiphany. Previous encounters with Handel's Messiah, in whatever version, and whether listening or performing, turned out to have been through a glass darkly. And here we were face to face with undiluted genius, served with total consistency by 26 musicians running the gamut from intimacy through fury to great blazes, all guided by the extraordinary spirit of IBO artistic director Peter Whelan.You’ll perhaps have noticed that the choir is without a name. Clearly the Irish Baroque Orchestra needs one of its own, and these 12 would be the dream team – perhaps eight Read more ...
Robert Beale
An evening of “scenic orchestral works”, according to the programme booklet, was on offer from the BBC Philharmonic on Saturday. Scenic was certainly true of the Seven Early Songs of Alban Berg and Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. But Tom Coult’s Three Pieces That Disappear was something else.The high romantic word setting and vivid orchestral picture painting of Berg and Strauss are in familiar aesthetic modes: the music (and the words of nature poetry, in the Berg) animate your imagination, and something visual may well pop into your head, aided of course by the composer’s own descriptive Read more ...