Classical music
Natalie Clein
The cello is so deeply engrained in my fingers, my imagination, it’s part of my being – my life would feel amputated without it. You fall in love with the instrument, the music, and then you embark on the life-long task of trying to get closer to that beguiling musical ideal. That’s the drug, the contract you sign with the devil. Every day I think how lucky I am that I can dive into a score and work at it physically.In Cello Unwrapped, a year-long festival of the instrument at Kings Place which opens on Saturday 7 January with two performances by Alban Gerhardt, I’m performing in three Read more ...
graham.rickson
Glazunov: Violin Concerto, with music by Tchaikovsky, Chausson, Sarasate and Saint-Säens Hideko Udagawa (violin), London Philharmonic Orchestra/Kenneth Klein (Nimbus)Here’s another outing for Glazunov’s charmer of a violin concerto, which should be played in public far more – presumably its 20-minute time-scale counts against it. It’s full of tunes and there isn’t a wasted bar – what’s not to like? Hideko Udagawa’s big-hearted performance is up there with the best, without quite supplanting Nicola Benedetti’s recent Decca version as my first choice. There’s lots to admire in a rapt slow Read more ...
David Nice
Revelations in the classical year never stop coming. Even the week before Christmas yielded two performances as good as you're going to get: the sheer effervescence and light-flourishing of Lucy Crowe in ecstatic Bach and Mozart with La Nuova Musica, and Sheku Kanneh-Mason in Haydn's C major Cello Concerto. So any sifting of 2016's musical riches needs to put the truly one-off packages at the top of the list.In terms of unrepeatable magic and logistics that actually worked, watch the birdie for Pierre-Laurent Aimard's four Aldeburgh Festival concerts of Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux from 4. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Adrian Corker: The Have-Nots OST (SN Variations)German director Florian Hoffmeister’s debut film The Have-Nots is a European exploration of the emotional after-effects of 9/11. The score comes from the British musician Adrian Corker. He’s worked with the likes of Antonia Bird and mentions Giacinto Scelsi on his website, so he must be worth investigating. Corker’s palette is dominated by a string quartet, though one including viola da gamba and bass. Luminous string textures are often undercut by ominous crackles, spits and hisses, the effect achieved by recording their parts straight to Read more ...
David Nice
Sheku Kanneh-Mason isn't just BBC Young Musician 2016 - he's the year's top player in my books, a master at any level. Despite a contract with Decca, starting with the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto he played in the competition finale, he looks likely to remain loyal to family and friends, including the Fantasia Orchestra, founded this year, in which he's already played as part of the cello section.You have to pinch yourself to realise the ages delivering this quality. Kanneh-Mason is 17, as was Mendelssohn when he composed the work of total genius which launched last night's concert; Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Time was when the principal conductor of a top orchestra could afford to refine mastery of a small and familiar repertoire, covering a century and a half of music at most. The rest he (always he) would leave to loyal or youthful lieutenants. The days of such podium dinosaurs are numbered. The likes of Valery Gergiev, Mariss Jansons and Riccardo Muti are outflanked by colleagues, mostly a generation or two younger, who have been trained to view the entire history of Western ensemble music – at least three centuries’ worth – as the right and duty of an orchestra to promote.Daniele Gatti has Read more ...
David Nice
Five seconds of cadenza in Mozart's Exsultate Jubilate would be enough to tell you that there's no more magical stylist among sopranos than Lucy Crowe. In an evening of Allelujas, Glorias and heartfelt Amens beautifully modulated by director of sprightly La Nuova Musica David Bates - henceforth David Peter Bates - hers was the central spot, and you wanted it to go on for ever.Even as much as she gave - five consecutive movements in Bach's Cantata Jauchzet Gott for soloist, trumpet (the brilliant David Blackadder) and string/continuo ensemble before the interval, four in the Mozart after it - Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Certain places and times are a vortex of creativity for music, collective fever points of innovation. Paris in the 1920s was one, New York in the 1970s another. Within a few years within a mile or two in Manhattan several music forms were essentially invented that went global – including disco, hip hop, punk and New York’s variant of salsa. It was also when the Minimalism of the likes of Philip Glass and Steve Reich began to find a large audience. As in Paris in the 1920s, uptown mixed it with downtown, the Talking Heads played art galleries and classicists hung out at CBGBs. In the middle of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Christmas Oratorio Dunedin Consort/John Butt (Linn)This set makes a brilliant counterpoint to last week’s modern instrument Sony recording, an earthier, differently flavoured set from one of the UK’s best period ensembles. John Butt uses just two singers for each vocal part, each pair swapping solo duties for the different cantatas which make up the oratorio. The Dunedin Consort’s playing is full of character: horns and trumpets are stretched to the limit but acquit themselves handsomely, and there’s some nifty bassoon work from the superb Peter Whelan. And who needs modern oboes when Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams, let's face it, was the reason many of us came to hear the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Their performances and recordings as dedicatees of his labyrinthine First String Quartet and Absolute Jest, in which the four players function as soloist with orchestra, led to high hopes for the UK premiere of a second quartet. As it turned out, the yield was smaller beer than expected. What really hit home, for those of us who don't spend as much time as we should with the first and most varied quartet canon in the literature, was an early Haydn masterpiece.Not the curtainraiser, Op. 20 No. 1 Read more ...
David Nice
Add three natural trumpets, flawlessly wielded, to chorus and standard period-instrument orchestra, and the seasonal spirit will flow no matter the context. It's true that Bach's Magnificat is not that common a visitor at this time of year - according to the Lutheran church calendar, July is the time to celebrate the pregnant Mary's paean to the Lord, though this spectacular also featured at Christmas in Leipzig with four interpolations - but then its rarity may also be because it challenges all but the best. Which John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists still Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Advent is as profitable for choirs as it is tricky to programme. How to delight the palates of carol-hungry audiences while offering them new treats? How to reconcile the fairy-lights of ubiquitous consumption and satiation with the Biblical call of the season as a time to wait, take stock and look forward?Without a "Ding-Dong" in earshot, Siglo de Oro appeared at the Spitalfields Music Winter Festival and brightened up a wet and windy evening in east London with unfailingly polished accounts of Advent antiphons at either end of a half-millennium. Pearls of 16th-century polyphony gleamed in Read more ...