Classical music
Bernard Hughes
I’ve always loved the sound of two-piano music: the amazing range of available textures, the interplay of parts and the sense of collaboration between soloists. All were on display in Saturday’s Two-Piano Gala, part of the London Piano Festival at Kings Place, which boasted a wealth of top-notch pianists in a superabundance of piano duos (and one duet) but was something of an overstuffed sofa: inviting but bursting at the seams. As Basil Fawlty once said: “Too much of a good thing always leaves one wanting less.” Admittedly he was talking about a veal cutlet, but the principle applies to Read more ...
Gabriela Montero, Kings Place review - improvising to a Chaplin classic is the icing on a zesty cake
David Nice
As the Statue of Liberty appears in Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, our improvising pianist proclaims “The Star-Spangled Banner”, only for it to slide dangerously. The passengers on the ship taking them to a new life are brutally cordoned by the crew; enter the same fierce bass-register tritones which made us jump out of our seats as Gabriela Montero began her recital with Prokofiev’s Sarcasms, then a whiff of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata, and later, as our hero finds himself dollarless in a New York restaurant, echoes of the other Second Sonata in the programme. Prokofiev and Read more ...
Robert Beale
The joint enterprise of soloist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, with Manchester Camerata, in recording publicly all Mozart’s piano concertos alongside his opera overtures – with the project theme “Mozart, made in Manchester” – was rudely interrupted after 2019 by you-know-what. Last night they were all back together at Chetham’s School of Music, and it was just like they’d never been gone. The concertos on the order paper were Nos. 22 and 23: the latter in A major a great favourite for its sunny, optimistic beginning and end, the former, in C minor, possibly a Read more ...
David Nice
First came the difficult decision: whether to experience performances by great musicians whose work I already knew in the second, Exmoor-based weekend of the Two Moors Festival, or to go for enticing programmes by others whom I’d never experienced live around Dartmoor. What was for me the more adventurous choice paid off: I heard six unforgettable concerts in four memorable Devon churches, as well as two inspiring talks on the wildlife of this tor-capped upland, and fell in love with a territory only fitfully encountered in childhood.Three cheers for the festival’s artistic director, top Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This concert almost had me in tears before a single note was played because it marked (joy!) the first classical concert to take place in the Usher Hall since it was shut in March 2020. She has been closed for eighteen long months, but she hasn’t aged a day.The final piece of music I heard in the Usher Hall before lockdown was Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, so there’s a pleasing symmetry to the fact that it’s also the first I heard when it reopened. And it’s played here by a crack musical team, one that is still glowing from its magnificent Mozart at this summer’s Proms. That concert, Read more ...
David Nice
Two suns, two moons, two Philharmonia leaders sharing a front desk, two aspirational giants among Richard Strauss's symphonic poems bringing the number of players, in the second half, to 134. Who’d have thought we’d be witnessing such phenomena when, contrary to what the orchestra’s CEO claimed at the start and the unmasked half of a packed audience seemed to think, we haven’t even reached the “post-Covid era”.Never mind the long-term implications; by the time we reached the huge arc of Strauss’s one-movement Alpine Symphony, everyone in the audience must surely have been feeling the physical Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Whatever the upsets and uncertainties of this musical season, the return of choral works at full scale and full power has been an unalloyed joy. And sheer, exhilarated, heaven-storming joy branded the Academy of Ancient Music’s reading of Haydn’s The Creation in the Barbican Hall on Tuesday night. The AAM’s incoming music director Laurence Cummings commanded his substantial orchestra, a 26-strong chorus, five soloists and even Alastair Ross’s striking, historically-informed continuo – an 1801 Broadwood fortepiano. They endowed Haydn’s Enlightenment-era vision of a sin-free universe with Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Christian Gerhaher and a string ensemble led by Isabelle Faust presented here a programme of works with a nocturnal theme. Gerhaher’s voice is an instrument of husky shadings and dark hues, so the night theme seemed wholly appropriate. The impetus for the programme, which the group is touring to several countries, was a new arrangement by David Matthews of the Berlioz Les nuits d’éte, with string sextet accompaniment, but the most interesting work was the first, Othmar Schoeck’s Notturno, op. 47.Schoeck composed the cycle, for baritone and string quartet, in 1931-3. The composer himself was Read more ...
David Nice
Is there any composer alive who writes more luminously bittersweet elegies than Mark-Anthony Turnage? Taking key lines from memorialising poets through the ages as inspiration, he knows that instrumental phrases must sing, sometimes to invisible words, as well as dance if they’re to pierce the heart.What more inspired choices could there be, then, to frame thornier works than This Silence of 1992/3 for mixed octet and a new Concertino for phenomenal, more-than-just-mellifluous clarinettist Jon Carnac, a musician Turnage loves and admires (he can’t compose unless such affinities pertain). It Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Music in London has faced down plagues, puritans, philistines and planners over the four centuries spanned by the Aurora Orchestra’s season-opener at Kings Place on Saturday. This concert in the venue’s “London Unwrapped” strand filled its main hall without distancing for the first time since the capital’s (and the world’s) latest pandemic struck. Accompanied for several works by the counter-tenor Iestyn Davies, on their own in others, a score of the Aurora’s players were led by their founder-conductor Nicholas Collon on a journey from the first Elizabeth’s city to our own, by way of the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Anthony Collins: Complete Decca Recordings (Decca Eloquence)Born in 1893, Anthony Collins began his musical career as a 17-year-old violist in the Hastings Municipal Orchestra. Active service in World War 1 was followed by a spell at the Royal College of Music, after which Collins established himself as a resourceful and versatile London-based musician. Peter Quantrill’s entertaining booklet essay for this 11 disc Decca Eloquence set has one wondering how such a prominent figure, renowned as a conductor, arranger, composer and performer, managed to slip into obscurity. These mono "FFR" Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If a standard-sized recital hall can be a lonely place for a solo violinist, playing an auditorium of Barbican dimensions must feel like crossing a desert under pitiless spotlight sun. Happily, Nicola Benedetti’s prowess as a communicator means that she made those trackless wastes shrink into a shared garden where she, and we, explored her instrument’s many kinds of bloom. Defiantly, a solitary figure in red on the enormous stage, she began her recital with Bach’s D minor partita – and the mighty, earth-moving Chaconne which completes it. Post-interval, she moved onwards through the history Read more ...