Classical music
Mark Valencia
The rapid rise of Dutch baritone Henk Neven is easy to explain. He is blessed with instant charm and the voice, still attractively youthful in his late 30s, emerges full-toned from his slight frame with a faint, fast vibrato that lends it a distinctive tang. The Neven sound is sturdy rather than flexible, which may help explain why the first half of his Wigmore Hall recital was more satisfying than the second.We began in Spain, or at least in some foreign notions of that country. Two groups of Cervantes-inspired songs by French composers framed an absorbing septet of Canzone Scordate (“ Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was smart programming. The final night of London's Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music presented the forces of the Göttingen Ha(e)ndel Festival. Both festivals - the London one ended last night, the Göttingen one starts next week - have taken as their theme this year the tercentenary of the Hanoverian accession, and there is no town which wears its associations with the Hanoverian/British monarchs with quite so much pride as Göttingen; it owes its main souce of an identity, the existence of its university, to Georg-August, the King we know in Britain as George II (statue of William IV Read more ...
Mark Valencia
It’s safe to assume that mischievous Monsieur Poulenc would have been delighted by the juxtaposition of his joyous slice of Surrealism with Fauré’s serene masterpiece the Requiem. What his elder compatriot might have had to say is harder to imagine. Since Les Mamelles de Tirésias was conceived for the opera house and the Requiem for a place of worship they don’t even belong in the same building – and neither of them by rights in a concert hall – so to call them an odd match would be an understatement. The only obvious link between them is thematic rather than musical: the former Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten, Weinberg: Violin Concertos Linus Roth, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Mihkel Kütson (Challenge Classics)“I am a pupil of Shostakovich. Although I have never had lessons from him, I count myself as his pupil, as his flesh and blood.” Mieczysław Weinberg's close, complex relationship with his senior mentor continues to affect how we perceive his own music. Which is maddeningly inconsistent, and the jury's still out as to whether he's one of the great Soviet composers. But, when Weinberg is on form he can be terrific, and this 1959 Violin Concerto is a magnificent beast. It Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
No quibble about the result. Pianist Martin James Bartlett deservedly became BBC Young Musician of the Year 2014 at Usher Hall in Edinburgh last night. The 17-year-old, a student at the specialist Purcell School in Hertfordshire, and at the Junior Department of the Royal College of Music took the title with a very strong performance of Rachmaninov's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He was watchful, alert to every nuance, playing idiomatically, and with a very convincing sense of the shape of the piece right through to the final pay-off. He also established a lively partnership with the Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Antonio Pappano addressed the audience before the start of the concert to explain the thinking behind this rather unusual programme, first performed in the early nineties and now a perfect fit for the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia orchestra and chorus, where he has been music director since 2005.Having spent a period of time "exploring works themed around conflict", he had wanted to take on Luigi Dallapiccola’s one-act opera Il prigioniero ("The Prisoner") but needed companion pieces to make a concert’s worth. In figuring out how to create a programme that would function Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Part of the Birtwistle at 80 series at the Barbican, this not-quite-semi-staged Gawain ended up being held back a little by its shoestring production, where a straight concert performance might have transcended its limitations.The music, however, in all its dark, unremitting intensity, was extremely well served by an extended BBCSO, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, and outstanding solists, including John Tomlinson returning magnificently to the role he first created over 20 years ago. Leigh Melrose (Gawain), Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts (King Arthur), Laura Aikin (Morgan Le Fay), and Jennifer Johnston Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tigran Mansurian: Quasi parlando Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Anja Lechner (cello), Amsterdam Sinfonietta/Candida Thompson (ECM)Wolfgang Sandner's sleeve notes rightly mention the “extreme frugality of expressive resources” in the music of the Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian. This sounds like a put down, but the clarity, the lack of superficiality only adds to the power of the works collected here. Mansurian's Concerto no 2 “Four Serious Songs” dates from 2006, and its Brahms-referencing title hints at the work's gravity. There's real beauty here. Patricia Kopatchinskaja's Read more ...
David Nice
Lovely singer, consummate pianist, shame about the programme. “Art song” is a rather prissy term, but we could have done with a few to ballast a diet of old pop – French chansons, Italian canzonettas, Spanish canciones, Victor Herbert tralala. Even a few substantial operatic arias with piano accompaniment made have made a difference. Not that Pretty Yende didn’t reveal her instinctive musicality and the lessons of her bel canto training in Milan at some point in every number, but an evening of encores is just too much for even the sweetest tooth.In fact it was one of the genuine encores which Read more ...
David Nice
Am I alone in a readiness to sacrifice all four Rachmaninov piano concertos – though maybe not the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – in favour of the second sets of Preludes and Études-Tableaux? Probably not, after last night, when Nikolay Lugansky unfurled the 13 Op. 32 Preludes as one discombobulating symphonic cosmos. This is probably as close as we can come today to being in the presence of Rachmaninov himself, the greatest recorded pianist I know.Some find Lugansky cold. Let’s just say that he favours Apollonian control and poise over Dionysian abandon, though not always. And if Apollo Read more ...
David Nice
Poised when I met him six weeks ago between 40th anniversary celebrations of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he has been a shaping chief conductor for the past five years and putting his new music directorship of Glyndebourne into action, Robin Ticciati hardly seemed like a man in positions of power, more an idealistic youth with a touch of the dreamer softening a powerful intellect.He was much the same, in short, as when I’d first encountered him sharing a 2009 Glyndebourne study day on Janáček's Jenůfa (Ticciati holding the score below) in the then-26 year old’s last Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last time I saw Apollo's Fire perform they danced. Halfway through the concert the chamber orchestra just put music stands aside, continued playing their instruments, and broke into a stately minuet on the Wigmore Hall stage. Nothing quite so unexpected happened at their second London appearance this week at St John's Smith Square, but that same maverick energy was still there, translated this time into some quirky programming and some serious energy from Cleveland's favourite early music group.It helped that they were joined by French soprano Sandrine Piau. A favourite collaborator of Read more ...