Classical music
Bernard Hughes
Having not heard a Passion live for several years I decided to do two in close succession, to compare pieces from different ends of the musical spectrum.Bach’s 1724 setting, a masterpiece of the baroque, dramatises the story through emotional engagement and expressive characterisation. Arvo Pärt’s Passio (completed 1982) is by contrast severe and minimalist, its declamation deliberately flat and detached, until a blazing climax, one of the hardest earned releases in all music.I borrowed the CD of Passio from my local library as a teenager, when the Hilliard Ensemble’s premiere recording first Read more ...
graham.rickson
JS Bach: Magnificat, CPE Bach: Magnificat Gaechinger Cantorey/Hans-Christoph Rademann (Accentus Music)Coupling this pair of Magnificat settings on a single CD makes so much sense. JS Bach’s 1723 Magnificat is wonderfully served here, Hans-Christoph Rademann’s Gaechinger Cantorey turning in a performance which marries lyricism with rhythmic zest. Rademann’s 19-voice choir make a thrilling sound at full pelt (listen to them in the “Fecit potentiam”) and there’s some exquisite orchestral playing from recorders and natural trumpets. Solo voices, drawn from the chorus, are exceptionally good Read more ...
Ian Julier
The last of this season’s Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concert series Voices from the East featured music from Azerbaijan with Kirill Karabits focusing on works by the contemporary composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh and her teacher Kara Karayev.Born in Baku in 1918, Karayev spent hard times in Moscow in 1942-46 as a student of Shostakovich before returning to his homeland to become one of its most distinguished composers. Although he died in 1982, he remains renowned there and in the countries of the former Soviet Union for opera, ballet and symphonic works as well as ensemble, instrumental and Read more ...
Robert Beale
At first sight, Vaughan Williams’ Second and Seventh Symphonies might seem to have a lot in common. Both are quite programmatic and pictorial, the second (the London) including music that might have finished up as a tone poem, and the seventh (Sinfonia antartica) adapted from his score for the film Scott of the Antarctic (1948).But it seemed that John Wilson, conducting the first of two contributions to the Hallé/BBC Philharmonic celebration of Vaughan Williams (the second is with the Hallé on 21st April) found more real symphonic qualities in the earlier work than the later one.Rightly so, Read more ...
David Nice
Dublin is feted as the city of the word, peaking on Bloomsday, 16 June, in celebration of Ulysses’ centenary. Yet its concert and opera scene is broadening in brilliance. Had I known before yesterday that the vivacious Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra were performing Bach’s B minor Mass in Christ Church Cathedral, I might not have chosen to hear what until recently was called the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland – and wouldn’t have known what I’d missed.As it happened I got almost the best of both worlds, admitted to the late afternoon rehearsal of the Bach, further Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eric Nathan: Missing Words (New Focus Recordings)“Inspired by words from Schottenfreude by Ben Schott” reads this double album’s tagline, a high-concept project based on Schott’s 2013 lexicon of newly-invented German compound words. Words like “Rollschleppe” ("the exhausting trudge up a stationary escalator"), or “Brillenbrillanz” ("the sudden clarity afforded by new glasses"). Six collections of these "missing words" are assembled here, variously scored, Schott’s booklet introduction thanking Eric Nathan for taking “a superficially frivolous idea, and treating it with a seriousness Read more ...
David Nice
Three Beethoven quartets, early, middle and late, in a single evening – inevitably as part of a cycle, like the Jerusalems’ Wigmore Hall triptych last night – is demanding on the audience, supremely tough on the players.We could have left this concert enriched and on a high at the half-way mark, open-mouthed at the brilliance of the tumultuous fugal finale in the third “Razumovsky” Quartet, Op. 59 No. 3 in C. Never was an interval needed more before the four players returned to the awesome challenge of the great, seven-movement C shap minor Quartet Op. 131 (one of Beethoven's sketches Read more ...
David Nice
Kudos, first, to Edward Gardner for mastering a rainbow programme of 21st century works in his first season as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Principal Conductor. Three Americans and a Berlin-based Brit, two women composers and two men, one of them a Pulitzer Prize-winning Afro-American who wrote the work in question in his nineties, all had the benefit of committed, clearly well-prepared performances, enthusiastically received by an ideally mixed audience.The concert kicked off a five-day Southbank Centre celebration of new and newish music from around the world, SoundState (though Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
This recital of love songs by Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, devised by the pianist Helmut Deutsch and sung by the megastar duo of soprano Diana Damrau and tenor Jonas Kaufmann, looked on paper like the Lieder event of the year. In practice, it left a good deal to unpick.Deutsch had pulled together 40 songs – yes, 40 – by the two composers, exploring aspects of love from myriad angles. Each half was arranged in three groups of songs (six by Schumann, seven by Brahms, etc), the idea being to build a narrative of sorts from number to number. The first half was the darker (Damrau Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The history of Estonia has been described as “a story set to song”. The Estonian activist Heinz Valk called singing “our nation’s most glorious form of self-expression.” There are, of course, other nations where singing is seen as an expression of national identity, but probably none more so than the Baltic country.The fully professional Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, founded in 1981, is one of the great choirs of the world. In Kings Place Hall One, directed by their genial founder Tõnu Kaljuste, they could use the wonderfully lively acoustic to allow their unique European-yet-Slavonic Read more ...
Mason Bates
What do Beethoven and Pink Floyd have in common?Narrative – ingeniously animated by music.From the Ninth Symphony to The Wall, narrative music has brought a new dimension to the forms and genres it has touched.Musical storytelling is on my mind this month as the London Philharmonic Orchestra performs Liquid Interface, my first large-scale exploration of musical narrative in the form of a “water symphony”. Premiered at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2007, the work features watery orchestral textures and electronic sounds that range from field recordings of glaciers calving, to Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This concert started with a heartfelt and moving speech from the Festival Hall podium by Vasily Petrenko, half-Ukrainian, brought up in St Petersburg. “What could I have done? What could we all have done? I have no answers.” The only answer he provided was music-making of driven intensity, ferocity alternating with anguished lyricism in Shostakovich's First Cello Concerto, testimony from a composer well acquainted with Russian oppression.The soloist in the concerto was the youngish Spanish cellist Pablo Ferrández (pictured below), whose slightly brittle sound in the opening movement gave way Read more ...