Classical music
Sebastian Scotney
Last night's perfectly-judged, superbly communicated performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony served as a reminder that the passion, experience and astonishing musicality of 86-year-old conductor Bernard Haitink are things to be cherished and never taken for granted. The symphony, first performed in 1901, was the main work in this second of Haitink's three concerts with the LSO before they leave together for Japan.The score contains a minefield of instructions to make constant subtle and sometimes radical adjustments to the tempo. Haitink's understanding of them and how to set them instantly Read more ...
David Nice
“Sounds a bit depressing,” said several friends when I urged them to attend the theatrical incarnation of The Image of Melancholy, inspirational violinist Bjarte Eike’s award-winning CD with his stunning Norwegian-based group Barokksolistene. Creative melancholy, though, is not the same as stuck depression, and the sequence on the disc was well-balanced with songs and dances as well as superbly engineered sound. The instrumental sheen created equal magic in the wood-resonant surrounds of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last night.It was admirable of Eike to vary the strain and not repeat the CD Read more ...
David Kettle
It’s hard to believe that East Lothian’s Lammermuir Festival has only been around for six years. In that short time, it’s become a cherished fixture in Scotland’s musical calendar. For regular concert-goers, it’s a calmer antidote to the August festival mayhem of Edinburgh, just half an hour away, and just a couple of weeks after the capital’s wall-to-wall chaos ends. And for East Lothian locals, it’s a well-appreciated intensive burst of classical music in the beautiful but decidedly untouristy villages and historic buildings of their neighbourhood.And it’s to the credit of co-artistic Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even if you never saw him conduct, you may well have sung one of Sir David Willcocks's carol arrangements. I remember the unnatural excitement in our church choir when the orange-jacketed Carols for Choirs 2 arrived on the scene, enhancing our repertoire with some especially juicy settings. Sir David Willcocks, who died on Thursday at the grand old age of 95, was steeped in the British choral tradition; for many, he was its heart and soul.David Valentine Willcocks joined the Westminster Abbey Choir as a treble, where he sang under Elgar's baton, and shaped The Bach Choir over 38 years, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: Symphony No. 3 'Kaddish' Baltimore Symphony Orchestra/Marin Alsop (Naxos)Technically this disc is superb. Claire Bloom's narration is beautifully assimilated into the sound picture. The orchestral playing is razor-sharp, the chorus outstanding. Naxos's recording has the requisite depth and range. The issue is the piece itself; Bernstein's Kaddish Symphony is an unwieldy mess of a work. Occasionally brilliant, but frequently baffling and downright irritating. Superb recent recordings of West Side Story and On The Town serve to confirm where Bernstein's strengths lay. Bloom does her Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s just something about an opera orchestra when it’s let out of the pit. The Royal Danish Orchestra is more than that, of course – it makes much of its six centuries of history, and since its past members included John Dowland, Heinrich Schütz and Carl Nielsen, why wouldn’t it? But the qualities that leapt out most energetically from this concert at Symphony Hall – the Orchestra’s sole UK date on a brief European tour – were those you’d expect from a band with theatre in its blood: a vivid sense of musical characterisation, and an instinct for pacing a musical argument over an evening, Read more ...
Sarah Connolly
Two hundred and 74 years ago today, on 14 September 1741, Georg Friedrich Handel completed the first edition of his legendary oratorio, Messiah. It is a work associated with children’s charity, and thanks to a royal charter granted to philanthropist Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury, Handel raised awareness and money for the orphans with performances every year for decades. William Hogarth was a governor and he persuaded leading artists Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough to donate works, effectively creating at the hospital the first public art gallery.Once there, a visitor Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a sunny afternoon at altitude – 1,082 metres, to be precise – in the precincts of France’s highest historic building, the austerely impressive early Gothic Abbey-Church of St-Robert, La Chaise-Dieu. I’m relaxed because I arrived the previous evening to hear the first of two concerts at the 49th Chaise-Dieu Music Festival, the Ensemble Correspondances‘ compact semi-reconstruction of an all-night “concert royal” entertainment at the court of the young Louis XIV – two hours as opposed to the 13 of the 1653 spectacle; and because I’ve spent the morning exploring the wonders of the Read more ...
David Nice
It was a sad coincidence that this Monday Platform “showcasing talented young artists” took place only weeks after the death in a road accident of Roderick Lakin, Director of Arts for 31 years at the Royal Over-Seas League which was last night's backer. For no concert could have been more sensitively tuned to a personal farewell. Overt melancholy only surfaced in the slow-movement theme of Brahms’s Second Piano Trio. But wouldn’t you want Dowland, Bach and Schubert at your memorial concert? I know I would, and especially from these artists, all so inclined to mature introspection that they Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Later this week David Skinner’s Alamire ensemble will collect the Early Music Gramophone Award for The Spy’s Choirbook, but last night it was the group’s follow-up album that was in the spotlight (or rather the candlelight) in a performance at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Anne Boleyn’s Songbook is the central panel of a planned trilogy of releases, with a story every bit as compelling as its predecessor.Skinner’s thesis is simple, reclaiming a songbook currently housed in London’s Royal College of Music as the possession of Anne Boleyn herself. Decades of scholarship have argued Read more ...
David Kettle
It was, admitted the Lammermuir Festival’s co-artistic director James Waters, ‘a bit of an experiment’. And trying to recreate the fertile atmosphere – intellectual, musical and culinary – of a Leipzig coffee house from the 1730s, complete with Bach, coffee and cake, could so easily have become just an excuse to expand the waistline in the name of art. Or worse, a tempting tasty marketing ploy to bring in reluctant new audience members. In the end, though, through music, discussion, informal chit-chat and, yes, very fine baking, it was a bit of a quiet revelation.This was the Sunday afternoon Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
“A rich and eclectic sequence of works” was the promise made in this evening’s concert programme. It certainly was that, with the Last Night festivities taking in new and old, well-known and obscure, plus a handful of celebrity soloists for good measure. The audience was predictably ebullient, generating the kind of atmosphere you only get at the Last Night of the Proms. Musically, though, this wasn’t the high point of the season – everything was at least serviceable, and much was very good, but only occasionally did it meet the exceptional standards set in this hall over the last few weeks Read more ...