Classical music
Gabriela Montero
For as long as I can remember, there has been a continuous loop of original music playing in my mind. My father used to joke about my “tuyuyo” – a little bump I have on the back of my head – that it was my personal repository for music. My husband, less versed in Venezuelan colloquialisms, simply refers to it as “the iPod”.However mysterious its source, music is a constant soundtrack to my life. Since my mother first placed a toy piano in my crib when I was just seven months old, I have been playing original pieces of music with the same abandon and freedom I experience when talking or Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Some of the greatest pieces of the string orchestra repertoire are based on pre-existing pieces: the fantasias by Tippett and Vaughan Williams, on Corelli and Tallis respectively, treat their starting material with invention and sweep, creating something new, bigger and better than their sources. But throughout Lera Auerbach’s Dialogues on Stabat Mater (after Pergolesi) last night I felt nothing other than the desire to hear the Pergolesi original, unadorned and unmeddled-with. The shallowness of Auerbach’s work was only thrown into greater relief by the masterpiece that followed it: Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gabriela Montero: Piano Concerto No 1, ‘Latin Concerto’, Ravel: Concerto in G Gabriela Montero (piano), The Orchestra of the Americas/Carlos Miguel Prieto (Orchid Classics)Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero describes herself as “a globalised, Latin-American woman raised on a diet of European classical music with multiple side-dishes of Pan-American folklore.” Her Piano Concerto No 1 succeeds because the Latin elements are so seamlessly integrated. This is the most viscerally exciting contemporary concerto I've heard, rivalling Stewart Goodyear’s Callaloo in terms of impact. How well, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Changes from the artists originally advertised can bring some happy discoveries. Sir Mark Elder, though present in the audience to hear last night’s Hallé performance at the Bridgewater Hall, was still recovering from surgery and so did not conduct it, as he’d planned to when the season was announced. Instead, the Hallé Youth Orchestra’s music director (and noted choral director) Ellie Slorach took the baton for the first work in the programme – Weinberg’s Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes. This is Weinberg’s centenary year, so relative rareties such as this pleasant concoction of folk themes are Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
It remains some of the most terrifying music ever written. Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony - the composer’s portrayal of the fear and anxiety felt under Stalin's regime - is a horrifyingly brutal musical portrayal of life lived under a totalitarian reign. The Moscow Philharmonic under the baton of Yuri Simonov gave a phenomenally accurate and moving performance of this work at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on Tuesday night.The intense claustrophobia of the work was at once expertly captured in the orchestra’s strong yet subdued sound. Simonov slyly upped the ante with a gradual increase in both Read more ...
David Nice
There's something about the very opening of a Mahler symphony which gives you an idea of how the rest of the performance will go. In the case of the Second, the inescapable "Resurrection", it's the ferocity behind the upper string tremolo and the wildness of the uprush from cellos and basses. To kick off the first full Tsinandali Festival in the wonderful part-open auditorium recently constructed on a country estate in Georgia's wine-growing district, there was that special shock of the new you only get from young players experiencing the work for the first time.The Armenians, Azeris, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Dichterliebe is a song-cycle full of gaps, silences, absences. Where is the piano at the start of “Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet” when the voice enters first and so startlingly, ungrammatically alone? Where is the voice during the long piano postlude when the vocal line disappears but the singer continues to stand centre-stage? We even seem to join the cycle mid-conversation, unsure what has prompted the diffident, tentative harmonies with which it starts. Biggest of all however, are the gaps left by the four songs that Schumann excised between completing the manuscript version and publishing Read more ...
David Nice
Verdi, Elgar, Janáček, John Adams - just four composers who achieved musical transcendence to religious texts as what convention would label non-believers, and so have no need of the "forgiveness" the Fátima zealots pray for their kind in James MacMillan's The Sun Danced. Dodgily championed by fellow conservative Damian Thompson - ouch - as "fearless defender of the Catholic faith and Western civilization" (for which I read, no Muslims in Europe, please), MacMillan is rather nauseatingly cited as a composer with a direct line to his Catholic God (he doesn't claim that himself); but, dammit, Read more ...
David Nice
Two hours' drive from Tbilisi over a beautiful mountain pass, lushly wooded on the descent, the Tsinandali Estate has been central to Georgia's wine-growing district of Kakheti since poet-prince Prince Alexander Chavchavadze produced the first bottle in 1841. Natives and overseas tourists come to wander the English-style arboretum, described by Alexandre Dumas the Elder as the Garden of Eden, and visit the modest palace where rakish Russian writer Griboyedov putatively seduced his host’s 16 year old daughter Nino, married her and travelled with her to Iran, where he was promptly murdered in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You seldom expect to feel the breath of apocalypse and the terror of the grave amid the modestly rationalist architecture and passion-killer acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. In fact, before Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra set to work on the Verdi Requiem, I wondered whether – on a gloomy, rain-swept autumn night – any echoey, cobwebby, run-down Victorian church in south London might have suited the spirit of the piece better than this antiseptically clean, well-lighted place. By the time, though, that a lighting malfunction in the gantries above made the stage Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ed Lyon - 17th Century Playlist Ed Lyon (tenor), Theatre of the Ayre (Delphian)Lutenist Elizabeth Kenny describes this disc as a baroque mixtape, and it contains discrete songs, not operatic arias. Uniformly catchy, tenor Ed Lyon’s selection demonstrates that earworms aren't a contemporary phenomenon. Baroque composers recognised the importance of grabbing listeners’ attention within a few bars, in order that they would be “held by the ears”. Stefano Landi’s “Passacaglia della Vita” is a good example, the jaunty lute riff softening the blow of the anonymous text (message: we're all Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Handel’s Brockes-Passion is a curious piece - sacred but not liturgical, and with a strong influence from opera, though it is a concert work. Solo voices predominate, and the singers assembled at Wigmore Hall were mostly fine. Jonathan Cohen and his Baroque ensemble, Arcangelo, provided imaginative and sensitive accompaniment, the playing relaxed and accommodating. This isn’t music of the scale or emotional depth of the Bach passions, so the light touch from the performers seemed appropriate. And if Handel’s score sometimes underwhelmed, the quality of the singing usually compensated.Several Read more ...