Classical music
Robert Beale
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass has something of the nature of what might have been called a “happening” at the time he wrote it. It was 1971, and it was created for and premiered at the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington.It’s set for very large forces: three choruses, two orchestras including a rock band and a blues band, a virtuosic baritone soloist (the “Celebrant”) around whom the whole drama of the piece is built, and at least 20 other soloists from a group designated “Street Musicians”.So it’s a happening that doesn’t happen very often – at least so far as 100 per cent professional Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It would seem unfitting to report on Nonclassical’s event – happening? – in the Barbican Conservatory on Sunday with anything resembling a conventional review. So instead I shall treat this free-form “experience” to a non-sequential response, in the form of 19 observations: things I saw, heard or noticed.1. Carola Bauckholt’s Doppelbelichtung required Linda Jankowska to produce a range of unlikely sounds from her violin, viz.: creaks, squeaks, whistles, swirls, swoops, wails, whines and rasps. They hung in the air, being broadcast in loops via speakers hidden in suspended violins. 2. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eleanor Alberga: Wild Blue Yonder (Navona Records)This is a belated review for an album that came out in 2021, but one well worth a retrospective appraisal. Eleanor Alberga (b.1949) is a British-Jamaican composer, perhaps best known for her 1998 setting of Roald Dahl’s version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She has also had a successful career as a pianist as well as composer, and is an important figure in the British musical landscape. The opening and closing tracks are duets for violin and piano, featuring the composer as performer alongside her husband, Thomas Bowes. The opener Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
This evening brought to mind those marathon 19th century concerts when Beethoven would unleash a handful of new symphonies and a couple of piano concertos on an unsuspecting public.The programme in Edinburgh's Usher Hall began at 6pm with a smorgasbord of delightful show pieces by the pupils of St Mary’s Music School, celebrating its 50th anniversary, and continued with a full programme from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, effortlessly squeezing in two diminutive saxophone concertos before the interval and Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition after – the latter embellished by a real Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Stefan Zweig once wrote that the difference between Busoni and every other pianist he had ever heard was the way the influential Tuscan-born Germanophile performer, composer and intellectual would always appear to be listening so intently to his own playing, “his uplifted face full of blissful rapture, which turns to stone in sweet awe at the Medusa-like beauty of the music.”Kirill Gerstein, who last night at Wigmore Hall gave the second of three concerts in a themed series “Busoni and his world”, is a superb pianist, and is similarly mesmerising to watch. He rocks gently back and forth and Read more ...
Harry Bicket
Of the many questions we asked ourselves during lockdown, I suspect that many of us looked at our lives and professions and asked, “Why?”.Perhaps a period of forced introspection is a positive thing if it helps clarify what is truly important and what isn’t. For musicians, whose work is by definition a communal event, it was a strange period; endless time to practise and study, but with apparently nothing to practise and study for. Many groups understandably decided to hunker down and reduce their activities and ambitions. The English Concert had a different concept: if our world was about to Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
After full orchestral performances of Brahms’s Violin Concerto and First Symphony, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra shone a more intimate light on the composer’s oeuvre with a recital of chamber works in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall on Sunday.Having made his SCO debut as the soloist in the Violin Concerto on Thursday and Friday, Russian violinist Aylen Pritchin joined a few members of the orchestra, as well as Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev (pictured below by Christine Kernohan) at the keyboard, for some smaller scale works. Pritchin gave a calm sensitivity to Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Paavo Järvi (Alpha)Parsifal Suite London Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Gourlay (Orchid Classics)There are many things to like about this sleek performance of Bruckner 7. The playing of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich under Paavo Järvi is polished, and the speeds are well-chosen, Järvi especially good at managing the transitions between the different blocks of music. He’s blessed with a fabulous brass section, and it’s a joy to hear the tuba quintet at the start of the “Adagio” singing so clearly, the individual voices so well delineated Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I was really looking forward to hearing music from Thomas Adès’s ballet The Dante Project again, after being so excited by it at the Royal Ballet last year. By contrast, I was seriously disappointed by his opera of The Tempest in 2003, and hoped to like it better in a new symphonic version.On both counts I came away from the LPO’s Festival Hall concert last night happy, with the bonus of discovering Sibelius’s incidental music to The Tempest.The programme was very nicely put together: the first half pitting Adès’s take on The Tempest against Sibelius’s, and the second, Adès’s take on Dante Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This recital was a welcome opportunity to hear songs by a panoply of black composers – many of them women – ranging from Amanda Aldridge (1866-1956) to Ella Jarman-Pinto (b.1989), performed with extrovert glee by Nadine Benjamin, accompanied by Caroline Jaya-Ratnam, with readings by Michael Harper.This programme would make the ideal basis for a recording project, as this repertoire is not only underrepresented in the concert hall, but also on disc. And yet it deserves to be heard, and drew a notably more diverse audience to Milton Court than would perhaps normally be the case for a vocal Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet mischievously described interpreting Haydn’s piano sonatas as “putting clothes on a rather naked skeleton… You have this joy of bringing it to life with all the tools you can imagine.”Certainly the French pianist is well positioned to talk about exhuming not just Haydn’s music but key aspects of his reputation following his release last year of an acclaimed recording of all 62 of his too often neglected piano sonatas.For his lunchtime recital at the Wigmore, Bavouzet opened with a version of Haydn’s 1773 Sonata No. 24 in D Read more ...
David Nice
It’s not often that the most bittersweet moment in a rich concert comes in the encore. Elisabeth Leonskaja had already played the generous extra in question, the Dumka movement of Dvořák’s A major Piano Quintet, with the Staatskapelle Quartet only a fortnight earlier. Here, fine-tuned with the Jerusalems, that moment when the joyfully flowing episode turns dark and the piano seems to call from a dark wood proved sheer magic.There wasn’t a moment in this concert where anyone in the audience could (or should) have lost concentration, The Jerusalems’ art is flexible, almost improvisatory in feel Read more ...