Classical music
Jessica Duchen
We could probably spend all day pondering what makes a great musical partnership. Is it long experience, special sensitivity, a shared sense of humour? We’d get nowhere, though because there is, genuinely, something about it that can't be explained. It’s like a good marriage: it just works, and if you could analyse precisely why, there’d likely be something wrong. Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen are that most unusual of ensembles, a piano duo; and their London Piano Festival launched its third and longest season yet – five days this time – with a concert celebrating their remarkable Read more ...
David Nice
Earth stood hard as iron in parts of this awe-inspiring recital from a true song partnership, but theirs was an autumnal odyssey, not a winter journey. For all their preoccupation with death and occasionally desolation, neither Schubert at 31, in the last utterances gathered together as Schwanengesang ("Swansong"), nor Brahms, completing the Four Serious Songs on his 63rd birthday, was ready to leave this earth. You could argue that there's smiling spring in some of Schubert's inspirations, but not the way Gerald Finley or Julius Drake saw them, tellingly placing Brahms's monumental tetralogy Read more ...
David Nice
First it was the soft acoustic guitar playing, which on three occasions to three very different audiences won a silence so intense it was almost deafening. Then the loud electric, first heard in Anstruther's Dreel Halls as part of the 2017 East Neuk Festival; the ear-plugs we were given at the door proved unnecessary – just – but the shock of Julia Wolfe's LAD, transferred from nine bagpipes to Sean Shibe live alongside eight recorded selves, was massive.There's more than a touch of creative genius in all this, and as Graham Rickson confirmed in this week’s Classical CDs Roundup on Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Not all composers require the finger of mortality pointing at them to develop what becomes a late style. Charges of detachment and even indifference have been levelled at the B flat major Piano Concerto K595 which Mozart completed early in the year of his death, but Mitsuko Uchida’s playing of it on Saturday night was as refined, as weightless and translucent as her trademark silk tops.Recent analysis of the manuscript source has suggested that in fact Mozart completed most of the concerto three years earlier, around the time of the last three symphonies. Without introducing a note of false Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Stoller Hall, the modest-size auditorium inside Chetham’s School of Music, is really proving itself to be the venue Manchester has long needed this season. Two concerts on successive days, each the first of a series and both making something of a statement, proved that.On Thursday Psappha opened its Manchester season there (the remaining performances are at St Michael’s Ancoats) with three guest singers and a second half that was as much music theatre as concert. "Four iconic works from the 20th century" was the subtitle, but the initial focus was on two pianos and two pianists, as Paul Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jãnis Ivanovs: Symphony No. 5; Juris Karlsons: Music for Symphony Orchestra 1945 Latvian National Symphony Orchestra/Andris Poga (Skani)Jãnis Ivanovs’ promising conducting career was kyboshed by the outbreak of war and the Soviet invasion of Latvia. After Riga’s liberation in October 1944, it's believed that Ivanovs was responsible for broadcasting one of the five surviving records belonging to the reactivated state radio station, and his Symphony No. 5 was completed during the following spring. Asked about the symphony's meaning, Ivanovs replied that the music “contained everything Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s always been something of a buzz in the air at East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival. It’s the feeling that it’s somehow a special privilege to discover its performances – whether they’re from international names or emerging artists, challenging, provocative and illuminating by turns – across the region’s exquisite and little-known churchs, halls, theatres and other venues. Plus, of course, its timing: there’s no avoiding the fact that the Lammermuir Festival feels like a comforting come-down after the unbridled frenzy of its elder, far more gargantuan Edinburgh neighbour that takes over Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: Wonderful Town Danielle de Niese, Alysha Umphress, Nathan Gunn, London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (LSO Live)Wonderful Town’s one problem is that it isn't On the Town or West Side Story. If you didn’t already know those scores, you'd consider it a belter, a brilliant sequence of very witty, tuneful songs. That the words are great isn't a surprise, Bernstein teaming up again with Betty Comden and Adolf Green, the trio holed up in a cramped New York apartment in 1953 and finishing the piece in around five weeks. Based on a popular 1940 play, Wonderful Town follows two Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The LSO and Sir Simon Rattle have been launching their new season with a mini-festival, if not so-called, mixing and matching some delectable repertoire. This was their third concert in four days – and its programme was wonderfully shaped, bringing together three works written within 11 years of each other, each from a composer with a unique voice that spoke for his whole nation in one way or another.Janáček’s Sinfonietta, which the same team also featured recently at the Edinburgh Festival, makes a near-perfect concert opener, with its grand fanfares and tough-hewn, close-harmony blocks of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Winterreise brings out the best from Ian Bostridge, and the worst. His dedication to understanding and communicating its complex and harrowing text is everywhere apparent, and this was an emotionally draining evening. But his style of delivery has always been controversial – some say distinctive, others eccentric – and all of those characteristics were heightened here, inspired (or provoked) by Schubert’s psychological drama. Much of this performance was enjoyable, but it was punctuated by moments so exaggerated and ghoulish as to overwhelm the many moments of elegance and beauty.Bostridge Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A tradition seems to have been invented. First nights of the LSO’s seasons with Sir Simon Rattle as its Music Director start with a concert of music by British composers. The first one last year had Helen Grime, Thomas Adès, Birtwistle, Knussen and Elgar. This year’s selection was Birtwistle (again), Holst, Turnage and Britten. Rattle described the formula as a mixture of the brand new, the undiscovered and an "established masterpiece". As with most things going on in this fissile country at the moment, there were some very fine moments, but it left mixed feelings.The inclusion of Birtwistle Read more ...
Ismene Brown
“What is it about Mozart?” wondered the legendary pianist Sviatoslav Richter, pointing out the composer's frightening demands of accuracy and lucidity. Even though many pianists today command technique to spare, a Mozart fear factor tends to keep his sonatas off recital programmes. Richter’s longtime protegée Elisabeth Leonskaja once made a disc with him of arrangements of late piano sonatas but she is now more associated with the epic romantic repertoire that she is playing around the world for most of this year, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and the great Schubert sonatas.So an evening of Read more ...