Classical music
graham.rickson
Brian Elias: Electra Mourns Psappha/Nicholas Kok, Britten Sinfonia/Clark Rundell (NMC)Bombay-born British composer Brian Elias has been active since the 1960s. A slow and fastidious worker, his 1992 score for the Royal Ballet’s The Judas Tree is probably the closest thing he's had to a hit. Frustratingly, it's not been recorded, but NMC have released several discs of his music. Electra Mourns is the latest. The title work was written in 2011; Elias sets an untranslated chunk of Sophocles’s play sung by mezzo Susan Bickley, duetting with Nicholas Daniel’s obbligato cor anglais and accompanied Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The CBSO is justifiably proud of its association with Benjamin Britten. There’s rather less proof that he reciprocated, dismissing the orchestra as "second-rate" after it premiered his War Requiem in 1962. Throughout the 1950s, he’d repeatedly promised to write an orchestral work for Birmingham, only to renege on the deal after the orchestra’s then chief conductor Rudolf Schwarz moved on to the BBC in 1957. What the CBSO did get from Britten, in September 1954, was the world premiere of an unwieldy Symphonic Suite from what's generally agreed to be one of his patchier operas, the 1953 Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
How to change the way we hear Chopin and Beethoven: play Bach first. Richard Goode opened his Royal Festival Hall recital with the Partita No.6 in E minor, perhaps the most enigmatic and challenging of its siblings. Its intricate contrapuntal lines and harsh, crunching harmonies cast a long shaft of light over the rest of the programme. Without Bach, it seemed to suggest, neither of the other two composers would have written as they did.With Goode, a recital is all about the music (that might sound like stating the obvious, but one can’t guarantee it with every pianist these days). The Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Koen Kessels is on a mission to change the culture around music in ballet. Anyone who has heard the Belgian conduct will know that he is the right person for the job: Kessels makes the classic scores come alive in the pit like nobody else I’ve heard. I will never forget a performance of Swan Lake with Birmingham Royal Ballet in which he had us all pinned to our seats with excitement, shaping every phrase of the familiar music as if it had never been heard before. This gift has brought him the top music job at two of Britain’s major ballet companies, the Royal Ballet in London and Birmingham Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia are embarking on a three-year project, coupling the symphonies of Beethoven with works by contemporary Irish composer Gerald Barry. Adès is keen to highlight the radical vision of the two composers, so expect stark juxtapositions and uncompromising readings. The project began on a more modest scale, however, with this recital of chamber works, given excellent performances and full of intriguing surprises.Opening the cycle with Beethoven’s Septet, Op. 20, suggests a path from the conventional to the revolutionary. But this early, elegant and classically Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Bernard Haitink is one of the great Bruckner conductors of our time. His interpretations are expansive yet vivid and always go straight to the heart of the music. But he is also an old man, and physical frailty is increasingly inhibiting his work, reducing the spontaneity of his communication with the orchestra. The results are both frustrating and inspiring, with details lost and clarity of texture often compromised. But he still has a firm grasp of the bigger picture, making this performance of the Te Deum and the Ninth Symphony continually compelling, for all its flaws.The Te Deum is often Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ståle Kleiberg: Mass for Modern Man Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and Choir/Eivind Gulberg Jensen (2L)There's a reference in the sleeve notes to Norwegian composer Ståle Kleiberg’s use of “a highly distinctive form of extended tonality.” Exactly what this entails is not spelt out. His music, at least on the basis of this release, is tonal and approachable without sounding glib or facile. This Mass for Modern Man follows a now familiar template of mixing chunks of the Latin mass with contemporary texts. A restrained, austere Kyrie eleison precedes the first of poet Jessica Gordon’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was a very fine concert indeed, plus a lot more. The first half was a very carefully planned series of unveilings around the theme of Béla Bartók and Hungarian folk music, the second an overwhelming performance of his Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.The evening started with conductor Iván Fischer evoking the crucial incident in Béla Bartók’s life when, newly graduated as pianist and composer, he was mesmerised by the folk singing of Lidi Dósa, a peasant girl from Gerlice. It was that experience which led him to head off to the villages of Hungary and Transylvania with Zoltán Kodály to Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Joubert: Jane Eyre April Frederick, David Stout, English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Somm)This is the second Brontë opera to have come my way in the past year; Carlisle Floyd’s Wuthering Heights is now joined by this involving adaptation of Jane Eyre, composed between 1987 and 1997 by John Joubert, born in South Africa but a British resident since 1946. He's still musically active, and this live recording was made at a performance given in Birmingham last October, now released to celebrate Joubert’s 90th birthday. An extended interview included as a bonus on the second disc is Read more ...
David Nice
It could have been your standard Russian touring programme: Tchaikovsky ballet music as hors d'oeuvre, Rachmaninov piano concerto, Shostakovich symphony. But the symphony was hardly the usual (Sixth rather than Fifth or Tenth). And any chance should be taken to hear London-born Freddy Kempf, a phenomenal artist incapable of playing a routine phrase, on his relatively rare visits to his native city.Kempf is a pianist in a million. At first you may wonder if the bucking and circling around the keyboard is absolutely necessary. But it produces the sound: the deep staccatos which highlight only Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
On paper this was a knockout concert: Gramophone Award-winning Belgian ensemble Vox Luminis teaming up with the wonderfully gutsy Freiburg Baroque Consort to perform Monteverdi’s Vespers in the composer’s 450th anniversary year – one of the highlights of this year’s London Festival of Baroque Music. It may even be a wonderful concert when it is broadcast tonight on Radio 3, thanks to some skilful miking and the alchemy of the recording process. But in St John’s Smith Square last night it just wasn’t.It’s hard to know quite where the problem lay. Vocal forces of just 13 and an orchestra of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eisler: Hangmen Also Die and other film scores Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin/Johannes Kalitzke (Capriccio)Holed up in Los Angeles, Schoenberg never wrote a Hollywood film score. Unlike his pupil and fellow exile Hanns Eisler, whose music for Fritz Lang’s 1944 film Hangmen Also Die (with a screenplay by Brecht) was nominated for an Oscar. What was used in the film totals barely 15 minutes, but it’s vintage Eisler, a pragmatic, practical blend of late-romanticism and strict dodecaphony. The Main Title and a brief Love Scene are ripely enjoyable cheese; far more striking are a very Bergian Read more ...