Classical music
Peter Quantrill
There have been quite enough Beethoven tribute-acts and remixes during the 2020 anniversary year. We, and he, deserve better than composers riding pillion on that reckless, purring beast of a 700hp compositional engine. True to form, Magnus Lindberg offers something quite different with Absence, given its UK premiere last night in an Covid-conditioned Lighthouse Hall by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, belatedly welcoming back their Ukrainian maestro Kirill Karabits after a pandemic-protracted absence of his own.Sure, you can pick the Beethovenian bones out of Absence – a proto-Wagnerian Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The identity of Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved” is one of the biggest cans of worms in musical history. I hadn’t the slightest intention of writing a novel about it. At first I thought I’d create a narrated concert for the anniversary year... but that was then. Here we are and Immortal is now out.It all began when I was asked to speak about “Beethoven and Women” in a string quartet festival a number of years ago. I started reading and couldn’t stop. The love story I found hidden amid the many thousands of pages was bigger, more complex and more devastating than I’d anticipated, Read more ...
Peter Phillips
I have never been a fan of recording “Complete Works”. These projects almost inevitably include music that one would not normally spend time and money on, just to claim that one has done it all. For this reason the Gimell catalogue, from the earliest days, will be found to have marked out the Renaissance territory, one disc per composer, each disc a distillation of the best of the writer in question. By going about it this way I was able to show how broad the polyphonic achievement was, and supply us with masterpieces for concert use for the next 40 years and counting.It was through this Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven Transformed, Volumes 1 and 2 Boxwood & Brass (Resonus Classics)The Harmonie, a small instrumental group made up of pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons, hit its stride in late 18th century Vienna. Early repertoire mostly consisted of operatic arrangements, though the best ensembles were far more than cover bands. Mozart’s sublime wind serenades were composed for Harmonien, and these two discs feature period arrangements of Beethoven, the technical and expressive demands demonstrating how good the players would have needed to be. The one original piece on the first Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a bold first strike – straight to the gut, surely, for many in the audience – the Wigmore Hall’s “Proust Night” began with an old recording of the Berceuse from Fauré’s Dolly Suite. Clever. How apt that the signature tune from Listen With Mother (a beloved old BBC radio show of stories for younger children) should have been composed by a friend – and idol – of the writer whose own rapt entanglement in the mother-child bond threads through his life and work. Memory, elegy, nostalgia, lost bliss, solace beyond pain, the quest to recapture in art whatever time has snatched from Read more ...
David Nice
Beethoven anniversary year would not have been complete without witnessing a masterly live interpretation of his 33 ever more questing piano variations on a jolly waltz. This one was revelatory. Could I have afforded it, had there been more performances and not sold out, I’d have returned to be helped as never before in further understanding some of the mysteries, weirdnesses and journeys to the strangest of other worlds. I couldn’t and there weren’t. But the one evening (actually the second) just before a second lockdown, and stomach-churning anxiety about the American election left at the Read more ...
Alban Gerhardt
With horror I heard on Wednesday that the proud cultural nation of Germany, which invests probably more money per capita in its concert, opera and theatre life than any other country in the world, had decided to close down what I as a German citizen am particularly proud of - precisely this rich cultural life.For months now venues have successfully complied with the tough but necessary rules of social distancing; orchestral musicians have managed amazingly well to perform with two metres distance between them and masks on their faces, and when musical life started again in mid-June, there was Read more ...
graham.rickson
A New Century The Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst (Cleveland Orchestra)Have we reached peak box set? This debut release from the Cleveland Orchestra’s own label ups the stakes considerably, an exquisitely designed and engineered construction involving ribbons, silver card and a 150 page booklet. You approach it nervously, with gloves on. Musically, it’s astonishing, the three discs containing six works spread across three centuries, all in recent live performances under long-serving Music Director Franz Welser-Möst. His string orchestra performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No Read more ...
David Nice
Nobody would wish it this way, but orchestras playing on a stage specially built-up for distancing to a handful of invitees have never sounded better in the Royal Festival Hall. The Philharmonia’s outgoing principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is a master of exquisite textures, and Ravel, arguably the greatest orchestrator ever, has come under his sympathetic microscope on many occasions. It says much for Britten that his writing for strings and human voice stood the comparison with the French master last night in an enchanted hour of music.Britten’s haunting response to Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
To plan a programme around The Tempest, its symbolism and the idea of evanescence, the fragility of the human condition, is one thing. To pull it off convincingly is quite another. The young Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov not only did so in his Wigmore Hall recital on Monday night, but offered an evening so profoundly touching that it seemed at times to inhabit Prospero’s magic island, plus some. Music, as many have commented over the centuries, lives in the spaces between the notes; and here, however many (Liszt) or few (Schubert) were available to play, Kolesnikov carried its Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s an old rule in the theatre that you don’t have to go on if there are more people on stage than in the audience. Last night I counted less than 15 people listening in the cavernous auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall pitted against a fairly full-sized Philharmonia (with the now familiar onstage social distancing) but the show went on anyway, for the benefit of an unknown number of people watching the livestream. It made for a somewhat dispiriting experience in the hall. I enjoyed the Philharmonia’s virtual Prom last month and I’m prepared to concede that this concert may have come Read more ...
Northern Chords Festival, Church of St James and St Basil, Newcastle review - high, lucid and bright
David Nice
Whatever happens next – and even in Tier 3 the Royal Liverpool Phlharmonic goes on playing to carefully distanced audiences – this will be remembered by all participants as a day of dazzling brilliance, its bright autumn light matched by so much of the music in a morning service and four concerts ending nine hours later.In the best (and shortest) of sermons flanked by the mostly buoyant settings of Haydn’s Nicolaimesse, the vicar of the light, airy church of St James and St Basil in the leafy Newcastle suburb of Fenham, James McGowan, made everyone beam by investing Jacinda Ardern as the very Read more ...