Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
Whips, scourges, sinews, blood and pus: where Bach’s two Passions lament from a contemplative distance, Handel’s plunges right to the bone, to the cruel, tortured death that is the heart of the Easter story.Perhaps that explains the work’s recent neglect. While Easter Week in London annually offers more Bach Passions than you can count on both hands, Handel’s – a model and influence for Bach’s later works – has been all but silent. But with this performance from the Academy of Ancient Music maybe the tide is turning – troubled times finally bringing the beautiful horror of Handel’s Passion Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For the final instalment of their three Matthew Passions this Holy Week, Ex Cathedra gave a large scale performance of Bach’s oratorio in their home town on Birmingham, after dates with lesser forces in London and Bristol. With an augmented orchestra and their regular chamber choir and orchestra joined onstage by Ex Cathedra’s Academy of Vocal Music - Ex Cathedra’s strand for young singers - and members of various community choirs in and around BIrmingham, the collective masses on stage made a full, fabulous sound, which filled Symphony Hall. That’s not to say that the increased number of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gabriel Jackson: The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ Emma Tring (soprano), Guy Cutting (tenor), Choir of Merton College Oxford, Oxford Contemporary Sinfonia/Benjamin Nicholas (Delphian)This Passion sets a libretto compiled by the Chaplain of Merton College, Simon Jones. He draws on each of the four Gospel accounts and adds to them poetry ancient and modern, each poet having a connection with the college. Bach’s surviving Passion settings are epic schleps, whereas Gabriel Jackson’s vibrant new one is in just seven sections and lasts 70 minutes. This is an unabashedly diatonic, very Read more ...
David Nice
Expect no cliches about toreador pianism. Red-earth flamboyance is not Javier Perianes' style, and the seven dances he offered in his programme - eight including an encore - by fellow Spaniard Manuel de Falla were not the most consistently engaging part of the recital. The lucidity he brought to Chopin and Debussy proved of the essence, though, and something absolutely fresh and new.Perianes is serious but modest and likeable in demeanour, coming straight on to the stage to probe the interior worlds of Chopin's C minor and F sharp minor Nocturnes, Op. 48. Composed in what one can only Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Great conductors, like efficient auto engines, apply a lot of torque – they can use a little energy to achieve great surges of movement. Now aged 91, the American-born Swedish maestro Herbert Blomstedt sometimes hardly seems to raise his baton-free hands. His feet, meanwhile, remain more or less immobile. Yet, like some highly-geared sports car, last night the Philharmonia zoomed, boomed or swerved at the merest distant kiss of his fingertips.Quietly but completely in command for the second of his Royal Festival Hall Concerts with the orchestra, Blomstedt shares with his fellow- Read more ...
Robert Beale
John Wilson conducted Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony with the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester just over a year ago with great success, in a programme of music from the 1940s. This time it was the very different, troubled Fourth, and the context was British composition.Two contrasting masterpieces from the 1930s made up the bulk of it: Walton’s Violin Concerto (premiered in 1939) and the symphony (first heard in 1935). They make a remarkable contrast. Wilson began with Arnold Bax’s November Woods – suitable enough, as VW dedicated his symphony to Bax – but it’s the product of another world, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mozart: The String Quintets Klenke Quartet (with Harald Schoneweg, viola) (Accentus Music)The viola was Mozart's instrument of choice when playing chamber music, his fondness for the instrument's warm timbre prompting him to add a second viola to the quartet line-up when composing his six string quintets. Listen to this set through good headphones and it's as if you’ve turned up the bass a notch or two. The augmented Klenke Quartet make a superbly sonorous, rich sound, one so fulsome that you could mistake their sound in the denser passages for that of a small chamber orchestra. They Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
At Wigmore Hall the JACK Quartet presented the complete Elliott Carter string quartets in a single day – an astonishing feat given the scale and complexity of the music. One of Carter’s many achievements here is the self-sufficiency of each of his five quartets, the subtle issues of concept and form that each poses always comprehensively addressed. But the five quartets also work as a cycle, for the similar approaches the composer takes. The JACK Quartet crafted two satisfying programmes from the five works, presenting the Fifth and First in a lunchtime recital, and then in the evening Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: The Cello Sonatas The Fischer Duo: Norman Fischer (cello), Jeanne Kierman (piano), with Abigail Fischer (mezzo-soprano) (Centaur Records)Comparing Brahms’s pair of cello sonatas is like looking at the two piano concertos. There’s the youthful, three-movement grumpy one. Then a long gap before a major key work in four parts, with a last movement frothy and exuberant. Veteran cellist Norman Fischer describes listening to both works as giving “a full Brahmsian yin-yang experience”. As with the piano concertos, I’m more yin than yang, and the earlier work’s craggy magnificence is Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The vocal octet Voces8, approaching its 15th anniversary, is a purring musical machine: vocally top-notch, precisely and exhaustively rehearsed, imaginative in repertoire and equally at home in Monteverdi and Duke Ellington. And if the classical items grabbed me more than the kitsch swing numbers they ended with, there is no denying the whole concert was put together with panache and musical excellence.Voces8 perform more than 100 shows a year together and their sheer familiarity with each other shines through. They are very tight – even their bowing is perfectly synchronised. The spoken Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If Gilbert and Sullivan did the Bible it would sound a lot like Hubert Parry’s Judith. Premiered in 1888 and last heard in London a year later, the oratorio – whose principal claim to fame is as the original home of tearjerker hymn tune Repton, better known as “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind – has been lovingly restored to life by conductor William Vann and the English Song Festival, who will record it with Chandos later this year.Fire and lashings of Old Testament brimstone all come tied up in a hearty musical bow. The setting may be Judah but the bucolic clarinets and horns are pure Albion Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
We live in a secular age, or so we’re told. Yet we seem to need rituals, the age-old practice and province of religion, as much as ever. It is the achievement of Peter Sellars and Sir Simon Rattle to present one without the other in their concert stagings – "ritualisations" – of the Bach Passions they have taken around Europe and to the US since the St Matthew was first shown this way in Berlin in 2011. Last night saw the premiere of the St John in London, much awaited, long-rehearsed and at times striking home with irresistible force."It’s not theatre. It’s a prayer," says Sellars. In truth Read more ...