Classical music
David Nice
If there’s a dud or a dullard among Sibelius’s 116 official opus numbers, I haven’t heard it. Yet catching even many of the outright masterpieces live in concert isn’t easy; the brevity that can show us a world in under 10 minutes makes some difficult to programme.All hail, then, to the BBC and scholar/biographer Daniel Grimley for mapping the Finn’s legendary universe in three concerts of wall-to-wall Sibelius and another placing his two main pupils’ choral music alongside his own.Missing Grimley’s morning introduction was excusable: at exactly that time I was submitting to the pneumatic- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
When Roberts Balanas was at the Royal Academy of Music he was asked to perform something “different” for an open day. The Latvian violinist already had a reputation for being as experimental as he was virtuosic. He began with a rendition of the Andante from Bach’s Sonata 2 in A minor – a tricky polyphonic piece in which the violinist must accompany the melody with repeated notes on the lower string. Yet as the piece progressed he started to introduce some of his own harmonies, gently shifting the polyphony till it sounded more like something from…ABBA.This witty, teasing musical hybrid Read more ...
David Nice
A double-sided A4 sheet is better than a programme online only – the default for several London venues now – but the Wigmore Hall missed a vital trick in failing to tell us what Boris Giltburg intended in a transcendental sequence which should have been headed “death and remembrance”, He’s an eloquent writer, too; his own note would have been much better than the disconnected observations we got about Bach/Busoni, Ravel, Chopin and Medtner.No matter: the unity in variety was both stunning and perfectly placed in a recital of two equally compelling but very different halves. Everything, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Colourise London Choral Sinfonia/Michael Waldron, with Roderick Williams (baritone), Andrew Staples (tenor), Elena Urioste (violin) (Orchid)Colourise, the latest album from by the London Choral Sinfonia, proved revelatory: I came for the Vaughan Williams, but got unexpectedly drawn in by the Lennox Berkeley. His Variations on a Hymn by Orlando Gibbons gets its premiere recording and is a piece I am very pleased to know: it grows engagingly from a humble beginning, solo strings quietly mimicking viols, before growing to fill its 19-minute duration without feeling a moment too long. Read more ...
Robert Beale
As Sir Mark Elder begins his penultimate season as music director of the Hallé, it’s clear that his command of, and communication with, the orchestra are as complete and purpose-driven as ever. It’s the first Thursday series concert of the new season, and at last a full set of concerts is in the offing, after three years of interruption and adaptation, but change is in the air.The orchestra’s new leader, Roberto Ruisi, takes his place and there are some guests in other principal roles as well. But this is still very much the orchestra Elder has moulded, with the sound he crafted and at least Read more ...
Elena Dubinets
Just as I was moving from the US to the UK to begin working as the Artistic Director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra last summer, the orchestra was emerging from the COVID-19 period and our audiences began coming back. During the course of the first few concerts, I realised over and over again that the LPO’s strategy should be based on creativity, flexibility and access – and on tying our work to the needs of the community.In the COVID years, when nothing was normal anymore, we all realised that orchestras have a broader role in civic life and in society and that we must strive to Read more ...
David Nice
“What about the communication with the audience?” asked violinist and impresario Bjarte Eike in his First Person piece for theartsdesk. “How can a 'normal' concert be turned into a special event?” Explaining how is one thing – but doing it to dazzle our senses is what counts. Though the Alehouse Session which followed out in the foyer was brilliant business more or less as usual, “Purcell’s Playhouse” took us further on the road of making the old absolutely new.The cue for our entertainment surely came from great Henry himself, purveyor of theatre music for curious hybrids as well as odes and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It probably tells you all you need to know about Igor Levit that when a mobile phone pinged just before his encore, he neither ignored it, nor seemed annoyed, but turned it into a seamless musical gag. After sending a ripple of laughter through the audience as his eyes widened in comedic shock, he played a responding ping on the piano at exactly the same pitch. But then, as the New Yorker article famously put it, Igor Levit is “like no other pianist”. Musically, politically and technologically he is so consistently on the pulse that frankly you would have expected nothing less.This moment of Read more ...
David Nice
Schoenberg’s “Song of the Wood Dove” takes up a mere 11 of the 100 minutes of his epic Gurrelieder, though it’s a crucial narrative of how King Waldemar of Gurre’s beloved Tove was murdered by his jealous queen. Last night, as in Simon Rattle’s 2017 Proms performance, stunning mezzo Karen Cargill came on stage, immediately in character, and with no reference to the score on the stand in front of her, showed everyone else how to do it.At that point temperatures finally rose. They were to do so again, fitfully, in the rest of the work, where God-challenging, undead Waldemar leads his vassals in Read more ...
David Nice
In its three weeks of world-class events, Muskfest Berlin has managed to be all things to all people – like a mini-Proms distilling the aspects of top international visitors alongside home-grown excellence, and of a focus on at least one relatively unfamiliar 20th century/contemporary work per concert. The Berliners deserved the cornucopia of very special guests, but to justify my visit, I went for the local – Berlin Phiharmonic, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and Berlin choirs on a par with very distinguished counterparts from the UK and Georgia.It was disappointing that my third train on the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mozart: The Piano Sonatas (Robert Levin, playing Mozart’s fortepiano) (ECM New Series)There is no doubt about the brilliant uniqueness of pianist, conductor, musicologist and one-time Nadia Boulanger pupil Robert Levin, an influential Harvard Professor for more than two decades until his retirement in 2014. Turn the clock back 30 years, and Levin’s presentational style was much more disputative back then than it is these days: in a memorable contribution to Derek Bailey’s 1992 Channel 4 series on improvisation “On the Edge” he railed against Mozart performances that were “ Read more ...
Tim Cumming
South-African cellist Abel Selaocoe is about to begin his third major concert in London in under a year. As the support artist for kora player Ballake Sissoko and cellist Vincent Segal at the Roundhouse in January, he received a lengthy ovation for his 30 minute set, having demonstrated an uncanny ability to play the audience as dexterously as he plays his cello.A few months later, he appeared with the Manchester Collective at the Southbank Centre, performing some of the pieces that make up his debut album on Warner Classics, Where is Home, alongside works by Stravinsky, Vivaldi and Read more ...