Classical music
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective is a new and enterprising group of musicians determined not just to create performances of high quality but to offer a new way in which the performances themselves are done. They started from scratch at the end of 2016, and I saw one of the first of their efforts, given at Islington Mill – a laid-back space in the basement of an old industrial building in Salford – in March last year. It was a place well used to commercial music performance, but not of Janáček… coupled with a brand-new dramatic piece for voice and string quartet commissioned from composer Huw Belling.It Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
In the right hands, the music of the various Viennese Schools can still sound almost startlingly original. Imogen Cooper’s are very much the right hands, containing a rare, refined artistry that only continues to grow with the years. In her Wigmore Hall concert on Tuesday she matched Beethoven’s mighty Diabelli Variations with the same composer’s late 11 New Bagatelles Op.119, early Schoenberg and Haydn at his bounciest in a programme that left one marvelling as much at the daring of these voices as at the vivid musicianship of the pianist – which is exactly the way things should be.Cooper Read more ...
David Nice
A magnificent riven oak with gnarly branches stands in the secluded graveyard of SS Peter and Paul's Church Peasmarsh, near Rye. Transport it in your mind to Flexham Park in a very different part of Sussex, imagine it struck by lightning and it could be one of that twisted group which Elgar encountered on a short walk from his Bedham cottage in the summer of 1918, subsequently permeating his massive and masterly Piano Quintet with the ghost story surrounding them. At any rate, having such an epic work conjured by top musicians in the Peasmarsh church made it seem as if we were close to Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Shostakovich is ideal for Nicola Benedetti. His music requires effortless and understated virtuosity, as well as a confident and commanding maturity of interpretation. Benedetti has been demonstrating these qualities since her late teens, and all were evident in this reading of the First Violin Concerto, which proved an intense and compelling listening experience.In the opening Nocturne, Benedetti dug heavily into the strings, bringing an intense physicality to her tone. Sometimes she pushed too hard, leading to voicing issues and jarring breaks. But that intensity continued, even as Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Just as the Last Night of the Proms is an end-of-term party with a concert tacked on, The Grange Festival (like other similar venues) offers a massive picnic interspersed with some opera. Unlike the Proms, however, where anyone can get in wearing anything they like for just £6, the English country house opera is the preserve of the well-heeled and genteel dressed in their finery, sipping expensive drinks.But as well as being socially elite, there is also a more admirable tradition of artistic elitism at these summer festivals, where top directors and singers do often fine work for the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sei Solo: Bach's Six Sonatas and Partitas for Violin Alone Thomas Bowes (Navona)Have a look at violinist Thomas Bowes’ IMDB page. You’ve almost certainly heard him play on a giddying range of film soundtracks, and, given the frenetic pace of studio session life, you can understand him wanting a bit of peace, a few hours of "me" time. The results are collected here: Bach’s complete solo violin output in performances of heartfelt intelligence. These recordings grew from a Bach Pilgrimage which Bowes first made in 2013, travelling across the UK and playing the sonatas and partitas in Read more ...
David Nice
Have you ever wondered why the Steinway grand piano is invariably the instrument of choice in every hall you visit, great or small? Why do the halls in question not offer a choice between two or three pianos of different manufacture, as so many did before the Second World War? How is it that the hand-crafted pianos pioneered by Julius Blüthner in Leipzig from 1853 onwards, and still being made to the highest specifications on a different site just outside the city, don't usually get a look-in?Famous for their layered, mellow richness, cited by more than one great pianist as enablers for Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
From an early age, Barbara Strozzi would have entertained the guests of her father’s Venetian academy with songs, including her own works. A similarly intimate room at London’s Handel House museum provided a suitable setting for Strozzi’s work to be heard alongside the greatest of late Renaissance vocal composers, Claudio Monteverdi. Monteverdi came out ahead, but only by a nose.The life of Barbara Strozzi (pictured below in a famous portrait) is an extraordinary one: illegitimate daughter of a famous opera librettist in the earliest years of opera, mother of four illegitimate children of her Read more ...
theartsdesk
Are you a young blogger, vlogger or writer in the field of the arts, books and culture? If so, we've a competition for you to enter.The Hospital Club’s annual h Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. For the second year running they are teaming up with theartsdesk – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to launch a hunt for young talent.This year the Special Award is for theartsdesk / h Club Young Influencer Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
John Eliot Gardiner was 75 in April, and to celebrate, the Barbican Centre staged a weekend devoted to his favourite composer. Gardiner himself provided the backbone of the event, three concerts of cantatas with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, while most of the other events were chamber music recitals. That felt like a random combination, and no justification was given for the mix. Even the name was provisional: it was originally marketed as a "Bach Marathon", but became the "Bach Weekend" to prevent it sounding like an endurance test. Fortunately, the individual events Read more ...
graham.rickson
Peer at the small print and it’s clear that Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill is actually a spruced-up repackaging of a show originally devised by Gene Lerner and arranger Newton Wayland, about whom Opera North’s programme tells us nothing. The cabaret-style production’s two halves take us neatly through Weill’s career, the linking narrative divvied out among the 11-strong cast in a manner that suggests a primary school class assembly.But it works handsomely. Veteran director Giles Havergal’s hands-off approach would surely have pleased Weill’s testy collaborator Brecht. And having the songs Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Secret Mass: Choral works by Frank Martin and Bohuslav Martinů Danish National Vocal Ensemble/Marcus Creed (OUR Recordings)We're lucky to be able to hear Frank Martin’s Mass for two four-part choirs at all; this most fastidious and self-critical of composers beavered away for decades before he felt he'd found his mature compositional voice. If you're not yet familiar with Martin, rush out now and pick up a recording of his sublime Petite Symphonie Concertante. It deserves be a popular classic, but Martin is still dismissed as a dour Swiss technician by those poor souls who've never Read more ...