Classical music
David Nice
"Get those creatures off the stage, or I won't answer for what I'll do". The exclamation of the Prima Donna in the backstage prologue of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, about to share her grand opera with lower forms of theatrical life, seems to have been shared by a head teacher at the first Setúbal Music Festival in Portugal eight years ago, faced with the arrival of special-needs children to join his pupils. It was a sink-or-swim moment, but artistic director Ian Ritchie stood firm, and the festival has gone swimmingly ever since. All levels now work together without anything other Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If you ever find yourself in Leipzig at a weekend during school term, the Bach motet (and occasionally cantata) performances in the great cantor’s old church, the Thomaskirche, are an absolute must. But if you happened to be in that city this weekend just past, you will have been able to immerse yourself in practically a whole year’s worth of cantatas in the space of a little more than forty-eight hours. The Leipzig Bach Festival is an annual event. But it has surely never been quite like this before. The festival’s artistic director, Michael Maul, and the president and director, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Juanjo Mena, chief conductor of Manchester's BBC Philharmonic for the past seven years, took his official leave of them with a programme reflecting his great love, the music of his Spanish homeland. Albéniz and Falla, to be precise, and the greater part was a complete concert performance of the latter’s opera La Vida Breve. A quality list of Spanish singers had been engaged – notable among them Nancy Fabiola Herrera, as Salud – along with the Spanish Radio and TV Chorus, Coro RTVE.So there was a festive feeling in the air from the outset: the concert was to be a celebration of a warm Read more ...
graham.rickson
Haydn: Piano Sonatas 32, 40, 49, 50 Paul Lewis (Harmonia Mundi)One of the many good things about Haydn's piano sonatas is their brevity. You can easily squeeze four or five on to a single disc, though the ones chosen by Paul Lewis for his debut Haydn disc all feel like deceptively big pieces. Lewis takes a commendably non-interventionist approach: rhythms are nicely sprung and his clear, crisp articulation is a joy. He doesn't over-accentuate the quirkiness: Haydn doesn't need any extra help. Take the opening to the Sonata in C, its fragmentary, staccato major triad quickly blossoming Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Marking his departure as the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Music Director after six years, Peter Oundjian definitely left on a high, conducting a gripping, visceral performance of Mahler’s last completed symphony. Its beginnings were glassy and clear, matched with a lyrical softness, before the orchestra erupted into powerful, passionate swells. Woodwind were crisp and piercing, cutting through the strings’ density, and con sordino horns were solemn and ominous.As the first movement progressed, through more pastoral passages with tender horn and clarinet playing, to the more dark and Read more ...
Franco Fagioli
I started singing when I was nine years old in my primary school choir. I sang plenty of solos there before moving on to another children’s choir; that was a formative experience for me. At this point, I was singing the soprano part and from here I was invited to sing in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. This was my first experience of opera, and one that gave me great joy and satisfaction.My first major performance was as Hansel in Humperdinck's fairy-tale opera at the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires. This was a special experience, on the one hand because it was one of my first leading roles and on the Read more ...
David Nice
Serendipity as well as luxury saw to it that the night after Simon Rattle gave his farewell Festival Hall performance as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, his imminent successor appeared over at the Barbican with another excellent German orchestra. We've only rarely encountered Kirill (not to be confused with honorary Liverpudlian Vasily) Petrenko in the UK up to now, so the contrast was instructive. While one shouldn't compare incomparables, it's tempting on this evidence to suggest that Rattle is more earth, Petrenko airier, with a shared fire when the Englishman's at his best. But Read more ...
graham.rickson
Messiaen: Catalogue d’Oiseaux Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Pentatone)The title Catalogue d’Oiseaux suggests a dusty ornithological textbook. And Messiaen implied that all he’d done to compose this ear-tickling sequence of piano pieces was to sit down somewhere quiet and scribble down the birdsong within earshot. But, as Nigel Simeone’s excellent booklet essay points out, “birds don't sing to a conventional twelve-note chromatic scale, nor do they sing within the range of a piano.” Messiaen's birdsong transcriptions are best heard as brilliant reimaginings. Though the 13 movements are Read more ...
Richard Bratby
How to judge a genius who died at 25? Gerald Larner, in his programme note for this concert by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, suggests that Lili Boulanger’s tragically early death was actually central to her achievement. She knew she probably wouldn’t see 30, and directed her energies accordingly. The result is unlike anything else that was being written during the First World War: music with all the invention, fire and vaulting ambition of youth, underpinned by an awareness of mortality that’s less like a creeping terror than some mighty, towering presence on the horizon – Read more ...
David Nice
Questions of interpretation apart, Simon Rattle has yet again proved the great connecter, this time in concerts separated by just over a month. Having set his seal on his new, galvanizing partnership with the London Symphony Orchestra by asserting, as he has since the late 1970s, that Mahler's Tenth Symphony in Deryck Cooke's performing version is the true end of that composer's quest, he returned to London on his farewell tour with the Berlin Philharmonic to test the waters of a completion from fragments, the finale of Bruckner's Ninth.Unless you buy into Robert Simpson's assertion that Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven Revisited: Symphonies 1-9 Taschenphilharmonie/Peter Stangel (Sony)The most enjoyable recent Beethoven symphony cycle I've heard is Yury Martynov’s set of the Liszt piano arrangements. Closely followed by this one. It’s also a left-fielder, arranged and conducted by Peter Stangel and performed by his versatile chamber-sized "pocket philharmonic orchestra". In his words, “all instruments play one-on-a-part, winds are reduced and some instruments are omitted completely, as if Beethoven had written for a large chamber ensemble.” As with this team's bewilderingly brilliant take on Read more ...