Classical music
Ian Julier
Even with a chill wind blowing from the Sussex Downs, this copper-bottomed Overture-Concerto-Symphony Sunday matinée was guaranteed to entice concert-goers to Eastbourne’s Sunshine Coast, which duly dazzled both outside and inside the hall.Beethoven’s blazing Egmont Overture, the heady romanticism of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and Brahms’ sunny Second Symphony, each with their celebratory finales, proved to be ample fare to warm the cockles of the audience's heart.This was also a great opportunity to catch the striking talents of conductor Catherine Larsen-Maguire in her debut with Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
On a night when any brooks running past the Wigmore Hall might have frozen almost solid, Imogen Cooper’s recital travelled on sparkling waters of the highest purity across almost a century of pianistic innovation.As well as the streams and fountains that both Liszt and Ravel descriptively channelled into their Jeux d’eaux, Dame Imogen (absurdly, she has only just acquired the handle) found a rippling liquidity even amid the monumental gravity of Schubert’s great A minor sonata. Piano generations touched hands, too, in Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales of 1911. They carried the Viennese Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
What happens in an orchestra when your designated conductor for three gigs at the end of the week phones in with Covid on Monday morning? By Monday afternoon, when he was writing his introduction to the programme notes for this concert, Alistair Mackie, chief executive of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, still didn’t know. He didn’t know who would conduct or even if the repertoire would change. By Wednesday we knew that the American conductor Jonathan Stockhammer (pictured below by Marco Borggreve) would be replacing the indisposed Finn Eva Ollikainen. With the first concert on Thursday Read more ...
David Nice
Dara McAnulty’s Diary of a Young Naturalist (14 at the time of writing) is a total vision, effortlessly poetic where the likes of Rober Macfarlane sometimes seem to strive for effect. Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s 26 songs, with a text drawn from the journal by the late Amanda Holden, offered only a partial panorama at its world premiere.That’s not the problem of the work or its first-rate performers. The fact is quite simply that these often exquisite fruits need a different soil in which to thrive.Southwark Cathedral, unfortunately, doesn’t allow for enough of the crucial text to be heard. That Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphony No. 4, MacMillan: Larghetto for Orchestra Pittsburgh Symphony, Manfred Honeck (Reference Recordings)Brahms 4 originally opened with four bars of soft wind chords. Thomas Hengelbrock reinstated them in his 2017 Sony recording; though interesting to hear, Brahms’s decision to delete them was wise, even if it made the symphony’s opening harder to conduct. This new Pittsburgh Symphony recording starts beautifully, Manfred Honeck lingering imperceptibly on the upbeat, an unmannered and affecting touch. ‘Unmannered’ sums this performance up; Honeck’s Brahms 4 is consistently Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé were making something of a statement in this concert. Gone was the extended platform, gone the distanced orchestral seating of the past 18 months or so (strings now back to shared music stands), and the programme (also a live broadcast on Radio 3) was both adventurous and, one hopes, attractive, with a star soloist and a barn-storming finale.Boris Giltburg, the soloist in Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto, was for elbow-bumping as he greeted the leader of the night, Jan Schmolck, but Elder seized him and others by the hand to share his enthusiasm. So was this, Read more ...
Cheryl Frances-Hoad
In the darkness my dreams are interruptedI see the blackbird in my mind and the whirring of my brain beginsScenes from the Wild begins at dawn on a spring day, at that moment between sleep and wakefulness where dreams and reality are intermingled. During the writing of this 70-minute song cycle for tenor and chamber orchestra, I'd often find ideas coming to me at this time of the day, musical fragments waking me before the blackbird had a chance to. One of the joys of setting text as evocative as Dara McAnulty and Amanda Holden's is that it often feels as if the songs compose Read more ...
David Nice
They’re singing songs of praise in Aldeburgh today – namely Britten’s magical unaccompanied choral setting of Auden’s Hymn to St Cecilia on the composer’s birthday and the annual celebration of music’s martyred patron. And what a right to celebration Britten Pears Arts will have earned after a weekend of concerts from bold John Wilson’s latest super-orchestra, an army of technicolor generals.I heard the first, and possibly for me the best of 2021 (though it's not all over yet), on Saturday evening, after a return to the Red House where in 1983 we Hesse Students, jolly labour for the Aldeburgh Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“Take Jazz Seriously,” wrote Maurice Ravel after his American trip in 1928. This past week of the 2021 EFG London Jazz Festival has seen that advice itself being taken seriously, with a bunching of projects and premieres. Jazz musicians have been welcomed in to work with London orchestras. The fruition of months of preparatory work has been on show.Soweto Kinch’s White Juju is a 75-minute “artistic response to a year of pandemic, racial animus and culture wars”, consisting of 10 pieces. It received a loud, prolonged, vociferous and very enthusiastic reception in a nearly-full Barbican Hall. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Where do you draw – how do you draw? – a credible line between jazz and “classical” music in 20th-century America? With the reliably boundary-busting Britten Sinfonia, trumpeter Alison Balsom mixed and matched works from different formal lineages in her packed programme at Milton Court, “An American Rhapsody”. From Stravinsky and Ives to Gershwin and Miles Davis, open-minded and big-hearted dialogue blossomed, led by the sure, sweet and versatile voice of her own “genre-defying instrument” – as she called it in one of the informal chats with conductor Scott Stroman that threaded the items Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The world of the 17th-century tavern is a long way from the contemporary concert hall. A quick glance at the scene in paintings by Jan Steen or his contemporaries shows us a joyful tangle of men and women, dogs, cats and small children, all engaged in a riot of drinking, dancing, brawling, music-making and love-making (occasionally even napping) while hens stroll officiously across the floor pecking up crumbs. It looks noisy, dirty and a jolly good time.There were no dogs or hens (or napping, that I could see) at Bjarte Eike’s latest Alehouse Session at the handsome Middle Temple Hall. But, Read more ...
Conor Mitchell
A mass, in its simplest form, is the order of prayers that are said in a religious service. It is standardised and has been for centuries, in order to create a theatrical journey that takes us through a service. Composers have always been drawn to the mass as a structure because it has an inherent drama. It draws on themes of rebirth, change, redemption.As a gay man, finding myself and being "reborn" as an authentic "me" has always been held in a state of balance with faith-based backgrounds that have been embedded in society from childhood. I reacted against this. Then I embraced it. Then I Read more ...