Classical music
graham.rickson
Elgar: Sea Pictures, Polonia, Pomp and Circumstance Marches 1-5 Alice Coote, Hallé/Sir Mark Elder (Hallé)“Foam-flakes cloud the hurrying blast.” Ouch. The texts chosen by Elgar for his Sea Pictures haven't all worn well, though Alice Elgar's words do sound perfectly fine when accompanied by her husband's music. I didn't notice any longueurs at all in this delicious performance from mezzo Alice Coote, her voice appealing enough to make a tax bill seem seductive. Sir Mark Elder's responsive Hallé play with real delicacy, Elgar's scoring unusually transparent. “Sabbath Morning at Sea” is Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
David Nice writes: it hardly seemed possible, but a pivotal figure in the 20th century music scene has died, two months short of his 91st birthday. As composer, Boulez now seems not so much a game-changer as a constant innovator in one of many strands among the possibilities of contemporary music. He even admitted in an Edinburgh Festival interview that he and his colleagues may have underestimated the role played by the audience in absorbing his avant-gardism. But on one thing everyone agreed: his fabulous ear for sonorities informed both everything he wrote and an ever-expanding repertoire Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
So the feasibility study for the new concert hall – The Centre for Music – has finally surfaced, a little later than planned. It’s being greeted, generally speaking, as if it’s to be the next London Olympics. “A global beacon,” declares the Evening Standard... Nicholas Hytner (he who said that building the Southbank Centre extension would spoil the view from his National Theatre) compares it to Tate Modern, which he says enlarged audiences for other visual arts rather than taking them away. This should, he says, be “a Tate Modern for music”.Having written more times than I can count that it’s Read more ...
David Nice
Prokofiev milestones stood proudly at the ends of the New Year’s first three major UK concert programmes. The Second Piano Sonata raged as the zenith of the composer’s generous enfant terrible period in Christian Ihle Hadland’s journey through two centuries of piano masterpieces; the Fifth Symphony rocketed skywards in the hands of enthusiastic but also technically brilliant teenagers in Leeds, according to theartsdesk's Graham Rickson, and presumably in London too; and the late Cello Sonata celebrated outward simplicity alongside inner ambivalence in the electrifying duo performance of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.” So promise Dryden and Purcell in their hypnotic song, a high-stakes closer for Andreas Scholl and Tamar Halperin’s "Exquisite Love" recital. But beguiling away cares on the eve of a national return to work is a big ask, even in the other-worldly surroundings of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and something that, on this occasion, the countertenor himself couldn’t quite deliver.Scholl’s has never been the biggest of voices – it simply hasn’t needed to be. Where others use vibrato and volume to project, Scholl has always relied on the bladed Read more ...
graham.rickson
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain’s standard of playing is consistently impressive, so much so that it’s easy to forget that the ensemble is effectively reconstituted from scratch each autumn. Last night’s fresh incarnation, deftly conducted by Nicholas Collon, sounded as if they’d been playing together for decades, though without any sense of complacency which that might bring. When you’ve 163 teenagers squeezed onto a stage, the worry is that the details will get lost in a blurry soup of sound. But no; this account of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony was immaculate.Collon’s flowing Read more ...
graham.rickson
Roger Doyle: Time Machine (Heresy Records)Roger Doyle’s Time Machine is a suite of 11 linked pieces, its starting point being the composer’s archiving of telephone messages recorded while living in late 1980s Dublin. Younger readers won’t know what an answering machine is, let alone understand the joys of living in a world without smartphones. One where calls could only be made or received if you were actually at home, and people turned up punctually to meetings. Happy days indeed. Doyle half-thought that his cassettes might eventually come in useful, and began to assemble the work from 2010 Read more ...
David Nice
The musical future looks bright indeed, at least from my perspective. There are more classical concerts than ever going on across the UK on most days of the year, so who can know with any authority what might have been missed? Yet each of theartsdesk’s classical music writers has a special take on the events of 2015, and part of mine has been the special privilege of following a trail of younger players in out-of-the-way places.Serendipity began in Fife’s East Neuk Festival, where travelling up a day earlier than originally planned meant I caught the second concert given by the young Read more ...
graham.rickson
Does classical music still matter? Of course it does – sample any one of these ten discs and discover why. All of them are available as CDs as well as downloads – the classical CD shop may be almost extinct, but the physical product refuses to die.CPE Bach: Symphonies Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Rebecca Miller (Signum)You wonder what facial expressions JS Bach might have pulled when listening to these five symphonies composed by his second son Carl Philipp Emmanuel, whose career blossomed during a 28-year spell under the employ of Frederick the Great in Berlin. These short Read more ...
David Nice
Relatively recent tweaks to the abundant London concert scene have resulted in top-end events right up to Christmas. We have in part to thank the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square, postponing the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s holidays, putting them together with superb soloists and choirs, and serving up major Handel and Bach. One snag: their Christmas Oratorio when I last went to hear it turned out to be only four cantatas out of the sequence of six.You’d have to pay two period-instrument horn players if you included Part Four – the OAE didn’t – and yet as Richard Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
L'Arpeggiata seem to revel in being L'Anachronista. The baroque-jazz group led by the Graz-born theorbo player Christina Pluhar has been proudly and brazenly flouting the dictates of those who set the rules of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) for all 15 years of their existence.The printed programme, for example, mentioned “Francesco Turrisi – harpsichord”, and described in detail the delicious and lengthy agonies of tuning which his 1624 Ruckers copy harpsichord would have gone through prior to the concert; but what it didn't mention was that Turrisi would be spending roughly Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Is it possible for a carol concert to have a cult following? Ex Cathedra's annual Christmas Music by Candlelight performances in St Paul’s Church have quietly grown into a Birmingham institution. The audience has evolved its own rituals: camping out through the long interval in the box pews, and sharing improvised picnics of mulled wine and mince pies.The formula, devised by Ex Cathedra’s director Jeffrey Skidmore back when Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter was still lit by gaslight, is simple enough to allow creative elaboration: a candlelit sequence of mostly a capella, mostly modern choral Read more ...