Classical music
Avi Avital
The mandolin is an instrument everybody has heard of without necessarily knowing much about it. Its history has been written by lovers of the instrument, often amateur players who are drawn to its approachable and appealing character, integrating it into their own lives, and in turn popularising it throughout the world.More than virtually any other instrument, the mandolin stands for different things depending on time and place. In the 18th century it was the preserve of the wealthy in salons across Europe; by the late 19th century and early 20th it had become popular among the middle classes Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After a brief interlude of concerts with a live audience, we are back to streamed events from empty halls (though many venues in London will be opening up again from next Thursday, concerts in Scotland have never opened up to the public). Some ensembles have opted to sell tickets, others – including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – to broadcast the music free but solicit donations. The economics of both models seem fraught with problems but at the same time the show must go on. But if that means in future I can sit in London and enjoy a concert from the Perth Hall that I would Read more ...
David Nice
It was Mahler as conductor who made the famous declaration that “Tradition ist Schlamperei” (sloppiness), or something along those lines. Where it becomes the opposite of sloppiness is when a national treasure in the lifeblood of Czech musicians over 140 years meets a conductor of absolute rigour, prepared to question himself and the way his (or her) orchestra plays it, but always with reference to the original score. So it was with the Czech Philharmonic and their then-new Russian-born Principal Conductor Semyon Bychkov last autumn, when they performed Smetana’s Má vlast (My Homeland) before Read more ...
graham.rickson
Osvaldo Golijov: Falling Out of Time Silkroad Ensemble (In a Circle Records)Along with many others, I was beguiled by DG’s recording of Osvaldo Golijov's Pasión Según San Marcos a decade ago, an exuberant Latin American take on Bach. After which Golijov slipped under the radar. There’s an illuminating article on The New York Times website where the composer explains the reasons for his disappearance, revealing that while he never actually stopped composing, “the ideas felt half-baked.” Falling Out of Time marks a brilliant return to form, this substantial song cycle based on David Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s hard to remember that distant time back in March before we were all digital experts, when the idea of watching a live-streamed performance was still novel and intriguing. Fast-forward eight months and serious screen-based fatigue has set in. But if you’re after something to stimulate and soothe, a concert so thoughtfully programmed and lovingly presented that it’s almost as good as being back in the hall, then the Dunedin Consort have the answer.Filmed at Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk, evocatively lit for the occasion, the concert is a musical journey through an empty city – a meditation Read more ...
peter.quinn
When Aaron Copland wrote his most beloved work, Appalachian Spring, in 1943/44, he gave it the unfussy working title of “Ballet for Martha” – Martha being the choreographer Martha Graham, for whom he’d written the score. It was only shortly before the premiere, long after the ink was dry on the score, that Graham appended the more alluring title, excerpted from Hart Crane’s poem "The Dance", by which the work is now known. At a birthday concert held in his honour at the Library of Congress in 1981, the composer noted with amusement how, due to the oft-repeated scenario of people telling him Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“This year was supposed to be so very different” said Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra when he spoke to theartsdesk earlier this year. Talk about an understatement. The CBSO has hardly been alone in having cherished plans wrecked. But in the orchestra’s centenary year, the sudden cancellation of a programme of celebrations that had taken the best part of a decade to plan felt like a particularly cruel blow. And having finally pieced together a skeletal replacement season (the CBSO’s main venue, Symphony Hall, was able to re-open its doors only Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly two weeks into the latest lockdown, and already I feel nostalgic about the last day of freedom. You should too, just watching the film released last night of the CLS’s most recent happening in Southwark Cathedral. It’s of the evening performance; I was there in the golden afternoon, sunlight flooding the nave, we spectators free to wander albeit in one direction and masked and head for one of the points of the Charles Ives-like soundscape that suffused the place to hear what a musician had to say, and play, about his or her part in Haydn’s Symphony No. 104.Haydn had more forces at his Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
We don’t often see sultry come-to-bed moves in the Wigmore Hall, that chaste Parthenon of refined musical taste. But when Jess Dandy stretched out languidly on stage while offering to show Nicky Spence “how the gypsies sleep”, the temperature shot up even in an empty auditorium. In Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, wildness and passion war with inhibition and conformity. The piece channels the mingled fascination for, and fear of, an untamed Roma culture that runs through so much Central European art, its music not least. What kind of work is this vocal narrative, premiered a Read more ...
David Nice
It must have felt very strange to Mark Wigglesworth that he returned to the London Coliseum under such unanticipated circumstances. ENO’s shortest-lived but also (many of us think) best Music Director campaigned from the start for direct communication with the audience, in that magic triangle between composer, performers and spectators, and lived it to the full in all the productions he conducted (“we underestimate the public as performers at our peril,” he told me in 2015 before taking up the post). Now, replacing a self-quarantining Martyn Brabbins, his successor, he had his back to an Read more ...
Alec Frank-Gemmill
The UK’s music industry is in dire straits and my heart goes out to friends and colleagues in financial need. For a proper discussion of the current situation, I refer you to Sophia Rahman’s excellent article for theartsdesk. What I have written here is comparatively superficial. But I hope that it might provide some light relief.During my time as a professional musician it has been a privilege being invited to various orchestras and festivals abroad. Indeed, as somebody who is half-German and half-English, and having also studied in Switzerland, lived in Austria and now in Sweden, travel has Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Chamber Music Alec Frank-Gemmill (horn), Daniel Grimwood (piano), Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin) (BIS)An hour’s worth of Brahms’s chamber music for horn? Almost; we get the familiar Opus 40 Trio here, plus arrangements of the Op 38 Cello Sonata and the Scherzo in C minor. Horn player Alec Frank-Gemmill makes the point that substituting different instruments in chamber music was common practice in the mid-19th century. Simon Smith’s transcription of the C Minor Scherzo is a giddy romp, taking its cue from the music’s 6/8 hunting rhythms, the horn part’s huge leaps made more Read more ...