Classical music
David Kettle
Edinburgh audiences can, it has to be said, be frustratingly unadventurous. Which no doubt accounts for the relatively light turnout for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s quietly fizzing Queen’s Hall concert under conductor Oliver Knussen, three quarters of whose music was written after 1945. What any absentees missed, however, was a gloriously passionate evening of crisp, energetic music making. And also one that showcased the versatility of the SCO as far more than a band that just plays Mozart and Haydn, but a very persuasive contemporary music outfit too. Even if it all ended a bit Read more ...
David Nice
Every year is Shakespeare year in theatre, opera house and concert hall. An anniversary's best, though, for those select few galas where the mind's made flexible by constant comparison between different Shakespearean worlds. I don't know how it was at Stratford last night – BBC Two will provide opportunity enough to catch up – but things could hardly have been more impressive on the Southbank, where Vladimir Jurowski and his London Philharmonic Orchestra reminded us what a gamut they've run both at Glyndebourne and at the Royal Festival Hall. They had a starry line-up of singers and actors to Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
It’s always fun to watch the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. As members of a self-governing orchestra, and often soloists in their own right, the players like to do things their way. Come the ripe second theme of the Bruckner Adagio and the cellos were giving it lashings of vibrato; muesli-wearing adherents to pure tone be damned. So were six of the eight basses ranged across the back of the Royal Festival Hall stage. That just left two basses, left-hand fingers resolutely unmoved. They weren’t going to vibrate for Bruckner, for Sir Simon Rattle or for anybody.There are many positive Read more ...
graham.rickson
Krenek: Piano Concertos 1-3 Mikhail Korzhev (piano), English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Toccata Classics)Ernst Krenek? If he's remembered at all, it's for his jazzy Weimar Republic opera Johnny spielt auf. This was an international hit after its 1927 premiere, though swiftly banned when the Nazis came to power. Krenek rubbed shoulders with many 20th century greats, before fleeing to the US in 1938; he remained there, teaching and composing until his death in 1991. He's an important figure, so this disc deserves a warm welcome. Krenek wrote four piano concertos and here are Nos. 1-3, Read more ...
David Nice
A young nation with a small population and the most untarnished democratic credentials in Europe today can do certain things with festivals not so easy to imagine here. When Estonian Music Days, focused on native and contemporary music, took nature as its theme for 2016 – in this case posing a question in the title, "Green Sound?" – it could expect many of its 60 featured composers to respond to commissioning by making a direct link to the native ecology. And, lacking our centuries of patriarchal baggage, it could furnish a high quotient of women in music – composers, players, conductors – Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s not the first time that young French conductor Alexandre Bloch has been in front of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – he took them on a well-received short Scottish tour last summer. But it was his first main-season gig with the band, and he certainly had something to say. "A bit of French and Russian atmosphere," was how he modestly described his concert in the concert progamme’s intro: it was certainly that, but plenty more besides.As shown in his opener, Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, one of the pieces he’d toured with the SCO last summer, and which the players clearly knew inside out. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There aren’t many opera choruses I’d want to hear singing Brahms’ Requiem, and still fewer I’d rush to hear. But the Olivier Award-winning ENO chorus is a different beast altogether – as responsive and flexible of tone as it is skilled with an all-out musical punch – and more than capable of finding the interiority as well as the intensity in this choral classic.Singing the English translation in the composer’s own arrangement for chorus, soloists and piano-duet, the ENO choristers showed their full dramatic range in a performance that all but blew the doors off St George’s Hanover Square, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bartók & Folk:Complete works for male choir, interspersed with folk music Saint Ephraim Male Choir/Tamás Bubnó, Balázs Szokolay Dongó (flute, bagpipe, tárogató), Márk Bubnó (gardon) (BMC)These pieces were included on an irresistible collection of Bartók’s complete choral music released last year on the same label. Buy that, then get this disc too; the performances are equally idiomatic and the numbers are interspersed here with glorious renditions of the folk tunes which the composer may have heard on his musicological field trips. Bartók’s wax cylinder recordings can be sampled on Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Last and most imposing of Bruckner’s completed symphonies, the Eighth invites and frequently receives architectural comparisons. Such talk of pillars and cathedrals could only be wide of the mark in the wake of this unconventional, beautifully prepared and deeply humane performance by the London Symphony Orchestra and their principal conductor designate, Sir Simon Rattle.Over a span of 80-plus minutes, Bruckner transforms a double-dotted, death-watch tattoo in C minor into unanswerably emphatic C major. As ever, the destination is less important than the journey. The tempi were flexible, so Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“The rests, the silences in Bach are never for nothing,” I once heard the Dutch cellist and baroque specialist Anner Bylsma telling a student in a masterclass. “You jump up from them, you reach higher.” Hearing the Bach Collegium Japan on Sunday night kept bringing those phrases to mind, because the listener in the acoustic of Saffron Hall really does get to hear this music, so delicately played, emerging again and again from silence. The performers stand in readiness. Then, propelled by Masaaki Suziki’s benign, ultra-clear beat, the music springs into action. The unflamboyant, serving- Read more ...
David Nice
This second concert in the Barbican residency of Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan transported us across the water from the concert hall to St Giles Cripplegate, and from the greatest of masses to organ masterpieces and, among motets, a work of which Mozart allegedly said, "at last, something to learn from". All that cascading counterpoint in Singet dem Herrn in a bright church acoustic ideally suited to this music told us why.The programming and the choral singing were perfection, Suzuki's handling of the St Giles organ more ambiguous: it's always hard to tell on that instrument Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
“Bon soir, good evening! Nice to see you! To see you...” Four years after bidding an emotional farewell to the Usher Hall, the Gallic charmer is back, maybe slightly stouter, with a tinge of grey in a new beard, the great mop of curly red hair as unruly as ever. And that accent! As the anecdotes flow, stout middle-aged Edinburgers swoon as they imagine themselves drinking pastis on the Boulevard St Germain in the spring sunshine.Stéphane Denève was music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for seven years, during which time he fell in love with Scotland and Scotland fell in love Read more ...