Classical music
graham.rickson
Schubert: Symphony No 9 Scottish Chamber Orchestra/Maxim Emelyanychev (Linn)There’s a telling photo of Maxim Emelyanychev on page 11 of Linn's booklet, the conductor beaming at the camera, the body language suggesting he's having a hard time actually sitting still. This performance of Schubert 9 is impulsive and upbeat, an irrepressibly positive statement. Yes, this is a Ninth Symphony (or eighth, depending on your point of view), but it's still very much a young composer's work. It's possible to make this music sound like Bruckner, but Emelyanychev’s light touch feels entirely right, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Classical CDs are still with us, even if the shops that sell them are rarer than hens’ teeth. Maybe this article should be renamed Downloads of the Year, or Cream of the Streams? That people are still listening to good music at all is a cause for celebration, and there’s still an abundance of interesting material being pumped out by labels great and small. Much of what really tickled my ears this year was off the beaten track. Here, in roughly chronological order, are twelve releases which got my pulse racing:The first volume of Santtu-Matias Rouvali’s projected Sibelius cycle coupled Read more ...
David Nice
It says so much for the cornucopia of London's classical music scene alone that all five of the most recent concerts I've attended have made the long list for best of 2019. I'll settle for two. The anger and violence of Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony is still resonating after the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano tore into it with focused fire on election night. Shortly before that, beauty rather than ferocity was the keynote of Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion as played in an intense Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert by Pavel Kolesniknov (don't miss his Wigmore solo Read more ...
David Nice
Arriving in Tallinn hotfoot from Paavo Järvi's inaugural concert as chief conductor of Zurich's Tonhalle Orchestra, and expecting the limelight to belong to composer Erkki-Sven Tüür on his 60th birthday, I found another Estonian bonus in store. Not only did 48-year-old Olari Elts, whose work I was witnessing live for the first time, conduct what turned out to be a Tüür symphonic triptych masterfully; he had just been unofficially appointed Neeme Järvi's successor as Music Director of the superb Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, to take effect in the 2020-21 season.News couldn't be Read more ...
graham.rickson
Schütz: The Christmas Story Yale Schola Cantorum/David Hill (Hyperion)Heinrich Schutz’s parents did their best to dissuade him from becoming a professional musician in 17th century Dresden, arguing that a legal career was a better option. Luckily, a wealthy patron sent him to Venice to study with Gabrieli, Schütz later recognising no conflict between his love for the music of Catholic Italy and his Protestant faith. His Historia der Gerburt Christi is a lovely work, concise and elaborately scored. A pair of chirping recorders accompany the shepherds, and Herod gets some suitably Read more ...
David Nice
Culturally, "the little country that could" - as Estonia's ex-Prime Minister and historian Mart Laar dubbed it - punches well above its weight. While it educates the young with a musical instrument made available to every child, Estonia continues to shine through its musical leaders. Grand old man Arvo Pärt continues with his jewel-like craftsmanship, shining in a blissful reworking of an early piece in Zurich; and while fellow octogenarian Neeme Järvi may just have handed over his post as music director of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (henceforth here ERSO, Eesti Riiklik Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
As they celebrate their 50th year, Ex Cathedra have brought their much loved Christmas music by candlelight concerts to churches all across England, before giving five concerts in the run up to Christmas at St Paul’s in the Jewellery Quarter, in their home town of Birmingham. Singing to a packed-out Coventry cathedral on Monday night - Ex Cathedra’s first time there - was a group of ten from their consort of professional choral singers, who performed a mix of new carols and festive favourites.Opening with founding director and conductor Jeffrey Skidmore’s arrangement of Hildegard von Bingen’s Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Why does music suddenly disappear? It is all the more heartening when a work as excellent and enjoyable as Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No 3 takes wing once more, but you do have to wonder how in the world such a terrific orchestral piece was permitted to sink and vanish in its day under a morass of dubious opera. The symphony formed the second half of the Aurora Orchestra’s latest concert in its Pioneers series, for Kings Place's "Venus Unwrapped" focus on music by female composers, and very welcome it was. Farrenc (1804-1875) was a highly successful and well-regarded musician in her Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Christmas Oratorio Thomanerchor Leipzig, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig/Gotthold Schwarz (Accentus)Another year, another new Bach Christmas Oratorio. This one is happily among the best, its plus points including a slimmed down Leipzig Gewandhausorchester as backing band, and the city's Thomanerchor, a group tracing its history as far back as 1212. The choir's bright, clear timbre sits very nicely against modern orchestral instruments, and Gotthold Schwarz’s flowing speeds invariably hit the mark. Patrick Grahl gives us a very human Evangelist, and there's sterling work from soprano Read more ...
David Nice
What a jolting coincidence that one of the 20th century's angriest symphonic beasts should have a rare unleashing on a night of high national anxiety. Whether Vaughan Williams spewed forth his Fourth Symphony in response to darkening European clouds in 1934 or as a sublimation of sexual frustration, given his unhappy domestic life at the time, it hit us all hard last night. There was even some release of tension in the sheer energy of embattled themes and grinding dissonances, thanks to Antonio Pappano's stupendous control of a London Symphony Orchestra on fire.Most surprising, perhaps, was Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s programmes in Birmingham are so personal – so utterly bespoke – that in the event of her being indisposed, they present something of a problem. That’s what happened this week. The programme was vintage Gražinytė-Tyla – opening with Elgar’s two partsongs Op.26 (a reflection of her blossoming relationship with the CBSO Youth Chorus), and ending with that ravishing Cinderella of the Brahms symphonies, the Third: a nice nod, in the CBSO’s centenary season, to Elgar’s particular love of this work. In between came the UK premiere of the new orchestral version – co- Read more ...
Robert Beale
Omer Meir Wellber may be the first chief conductor of a major orchestra to have begun his tenure with a children's concert. But the young new music director of the BBC Philharmonic was proud that this was how his first public appearance since officially taking the reins in Salford worked out. It was the launch of the BBC’s "Bring the Noise" school music streams and podcasts (followed by a studio concert live-streamed on iPlayer and the Philharmonic website). The Bridgewater Hall audience in Manchester can finally savour a big concert tomorrow. .On one level it's because he had existing Read more ...