Classical music
Miranda Heggie
After meeting on the Genesis Sixteen Young Artist Scheme, this vibrant vocal ensemble has been rapidly gaining momentum since their debut at St John’s Smith Square in 2017. Under the direction of conductor Sarah Latto, the final concert in their UK tour was polished, poised and subtly powerful. The concert had been planned to take place in the Midland Arts Centre's Hexagon Theatre, but a last minute change put it in a gallery space, surrounded by paintings that form visual artist Caroline Walker’s Women’s Work exhibition (which, if you’re in the area, is well worth a visit on its own). It’s a Read more ...
David Nice
Nominally, this was a programme of three symphonies. The first, though, sounded like music re-cut and pasted from a very British film and the second was a suite, albeit impressively reworked, from an opera. The real deal, Brahms’s Third, is a very personal masterpiece, more inward than outward looking, and that, too, may have been why Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s latest Prom with her City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was less electrifying than its predecessors.Would “the Gipps Second Symphony” have made a reappearance had its composer been called Ralph and not Ruth? She is remarkable for her Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Two nights after the Scottish Chamber Orchestra had brought the first great E flat major symphony to the Proms – Mozart’s 39th – a serendipitous change of programme on Tuesday gave us the second: Haydn’s “Drumroll”. An equally serendipitous change of conductor saw Ben Gernon get the evening off to a deceptively simple start: no fancy-dan cadenza from the BBC Philharmonic’s timpanist, just enough of a flourish to get everyone’s attention as Haydn probably had in mind. Then the happy-face Dies Irae of the introduction’s theme, bassoon and basses nicely to the fore, and it was soon clear that Read more ...
Brooke Simpson and Erin Black
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain’s Hope Exchange is an explosive return to the concert platform for hundreds of teenagers like us, playing a variety of new pieces, with the preparation beginning in hundreds of primary schools across the country. What Brené Brown writes in The Gifts of Imperfection perfectly summarises how we both feel about the project: “The belief in music’s incomparable ability to touch and resonate with the human spirit traces back to ancient civilisation through storytelling and philosophical musings”.This is our opportunity to build on a previous Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The Proms are back, even if they don’t yet feel remotely normal. With audiences timid about mass events, and about a third of the arena roped off to protect a TV camera mounted on something vaguely resembling a diplodocus, yesterday’s seemed less of a Prom than – well, a decent concert on a wet Monday night.This fifth Prom of the season had lost both its original star attractions, cellist Sol Gabetta and conductor Elim Chan, who had each withdrawn for logistical travel reasons. Enter Guy Johnston and Ryan Bancroft to save the day, though, and the programme remained as planned, fresh, varied Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In its 40th anniversary year, the Ryedale Festival once again brought live music of the highest quality to the beautiful villages and venues of the Yorkshire Moors. Reinvented for the current climate, the festival featured 40 events to mark its 40 years, with shorter concerts, and multiple performances to enable as many people to attend events with smaller audiences.The stunning Ampleforth Abbey – home to a community of Benedictine monks – was the perfect location for Tenebrae’s “Spanish Glories'' concert – a performance of Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Requiem Mass, preceded by two shorter Read more ...
David Nice
Did absence from Albert’s colosseum from early September 2019 until now and a roof-raising finale hoodwink many of us into thinking Dalia Stasevska’s interpretation of Sibelius’s Second Symphony among the greats? Having listened to it again on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer this morning, I'm convinced not; this was the real deal. Without that guarantee, a BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form would not have entrusted its second Finn – Stasevska is its Principal Guest Conductor – with the music of a composer (their composer) its Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo has already presented with unsurpassable Read more ...
graham.rickson
Riccardo Muti – The Complete Warner Symphonic Recordings (Warner Classics)As with Warner Classics’s recent André Previn box set, begin at the end. Jon Tolansky’s audio documentary is on the last disc in this 91-CD box, chronicling Riccardo Muti’s galvanising effect on a moribund New Philharmonia Orchestra in the early 1970s. Muti, aged 31, made his UK debut in December 1972 in Croydon’s Fairfield Hall; Tolansky recalls the rehearsals, and the fact that “within minutes it was vividly evident what he wanted and what he very quickly obtained: colour, nuance, contrast, character – and knife Read more ...
stephen.walsh
King Arthur, as every schoolgirl knows, never actually existed, so it made perfect sense that the Gabrieli Consort’s Worcester Cathedral performance of Purcell’s semi-opera about the mythical British king and his battles with the Saxon incomers made not the slightest mention of Arthur.Nor was much made of his bitter enemy, the Saxon Oswald, nor the fair, blind Emmeline, nor even the great magician, Merlin, who, in Dryden’s original waves his wand in the final scene and summons up "A Vision of Britain, the Queen of Islands."All these personages figure in the play, but none of them ever sing. Read more ...
David Nice
Now that the summer opera-house companies have pulled off staged triumphs under the most difficult of circumstances, it’s time to celebrate semi-al-fresco concerts. Not so many have cropped up as I’d hoped after the success of the Battersea Park Bandstand Chamber Music series last year. The Wigmore Hall made a start in nearby Portman Square and we have a host of impressive August events planned by Bold Tendencies in Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, building on the successes of 2020. Opera Holland Park's dazzling mini-festival of song, dreamed up by enterprising baritone Julien Van Mellaerts Read more ...
graham.rickson
Martha Argerich Edition (EuroArts)Almost eight hours of Martha Argerich on film. What a glorious prospect! This six-DVD set mostly consists of recordings of live concerts. The set was released to celebrate the great Argentinian’s 80th birthday last month. Again and again in performance, she finds depths, colours and transcendence that simply stop you in your tracks. There is a Prokofiev 3rd Concerto with the LSO and Previn recorded in Croydon in 1977, where she switches from the most delicate of dream sequences to playing which is forceful, propulsive, totally commanding. And there are Read more ...
David Nice
The heading may be a bit misleading. There were no vocalists at this year’s ingeniously adapted East Neuk Festival – live events held exclusively in the big space of the Bowhouse, St Monans, to a compulsorily limited audience – and the only rain was that which pelted down on the roof of the venue during the most intimate moments of Beethoven’s D major Quartet, Op.18 No.3, with the Castalian Quartet valiantly persisting. But all the players in the six concerts I heard sang from the heart, as any good instrumentalist should, and the weather was wildly varied, with four seasons in rapid Read more ...