Classical music
Robert Beale
Rachel Helleur-Simcock’s first appearance with the Hallé after appointment as leader of its cello section was auspicious – she became the soloist in their performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in the season’s opening concert at the Bridgewater Hall (Truls Mørk having had to withdraw).After 16 years with the Berlin Philharmonic, she’s come to the Manchester orchestra. No stranger to the concerto’s solo role, she brought a highly lyrical, sweetly sorrowful voice to it that made this performance, conducted by the Hallé’s gifted young maestro, Kahchun Wong, one of the most affecting I’ve heard. Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Royal Northern College of Music was in celebratory mood last night for the opening of its new season, in a joint promotion with Manchester Camerata that marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the RNCM’s Junior Fellowship programme.For Benjamin Huth, it was his final performance as the 2024/25 Mills Williams Junior Fellow in Conducting, and with him were three soloists moving on from their time on the RNCM International Artists Diploma, the highest performance accolade the college offers. What better way for a violinist, cellist and pianist to celebrate together than in Beethoven’s Read more ...
David Nice
Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra last seared us in Britten’s amazing Violin Concerto, with Vilde Frang as soloist, on the very eve of lockdown in 2020. The work’s dying fall then was echoed by the spectral drift ending Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony. This time Frang’s equal as the greatest of violinists, Janine Jansen, faced the daunting solo role fearlessly, and the riproaring end of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony proved that this team is here to stay. There were telling links with Thursday’s concert, too. Britten’s emotional demands are as challenging as Read more ...
David Nice
Between bouts of that far from shabby, still shocking masterpiece Tosca, Royal Opera music director Jakub Hrůša went for fleshcreep: too little of Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin – given a chorus, he could have done the half-hour ballet, not just the suite – and too much of a spooky thing in a big Dvořák cantata.The Spectre's Bride was last heard in London at the Proms conducted by Hrůša’s late master Jiří Bělohlávek. I’d only previously heard Rozhdestvensky feature it in a 1991 Prom, and was racking my brains to remember why it didn’t stick. Here’s the reason. Imagine, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Concerts need to have themes, it seems, today, and the BBC Philharmonic’s publicity suggested two contrasting ideas for the opening of its 2025-26 season at the Bridgewater Hall. One was “Fountain of Youth” (the programme title and also that of Julia Wolfe’s nine-minute work that began its orchestral content) and the other “Grasping pain, embracing fate” (used as a kind of strapline).Given that the latter phrase must have been meant to reflect something in the music, I was wondering – and still am – where pain came into it. Perhaps it was actually a reference to the pre-concert show: Read more ...
David Nice
35 years ago, persona-now-non-grata John Eliot Gardiner revealed how performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo and La Clemenza di Tito allying period instruments with great voices could electrify in a new way. And here we were last night with Pablo Heras-Casado, a conductor as at home in Wagner at Bayreuth as he clearly is with the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, stunning us with a consistently vigilant and alive Mozart Requiem.The programme was typically inventive. It started with the ultimate joyburst, Bach’s Singet dem Herrn – “singet" as in zing it – with Heras- Read more ...
David Nice
It was a hefty evening, as it needn't necessarily have been throughout, since Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony can conceal more darkness between the lines in a lighter take. In his second full concert of his second season as the wildly successful and popular Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, Antonio Pappano spared us none of the hard-hitting.Nor did the phenomenal pianist Seong-Jin Cho in Prokofiev’s colossal Second Piano Concerto, drawing as usual crowds of his fellow South Koreans. It was neither Pappano's nor Cho's fault if I’d recently heard interpretations of that and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Kabalevsky: Cello Concerto No. 2, Schumann: Cello Concerto Theodor Lyngstad (cello), Copenhagen Phil/Eva Ollikainen (OUR Recordings)This disc’s sleeve note suggests that Kabalevsky’s Cello Concerto No. 2 “owes an obvious debt to the composer’s colleague and one-time neighbour Dmitri Shostakovich”. It does indeed, several passages sounding like direct pastiche. That doesn’t make the work any less enjoyable and entertaining, the first movement’s “Allegro molto e energico” section very similar in tone to the opening movement of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Though Kabalevsky begins Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Concerts at the Wigmore Hall offer many types of pleasure, but not often an evening so straightforwardly fun as Monday night’s recital by baritone Benjamin Appl and Lithuanian accordion virtuoso Martynas Levickis. Appl is primarily a Lieder singer – but here dived into a stylistically diverse world of music ranging from Mahler to Copland, via Ravel and Kurt Weill.There were passages of seriousness: Gustav Mahler’s dolorous opener, leavened by the sunny and saucy Alma Mahler that followed, and Reynaldo Hahn’s touchingly ingenuous take on Bach, “À Chloris”. Bernstein’s “Simple Song”, from his Read more ...
Simon Thompson
My colleague Boyd Tonkin visited the Lammermuir Festival for the first time this year. His eyes and ears have been opened to its treasures, but some of us have been in on the secret for years. Importantly, that includes the East Lothian audiences, who have been attending the festival in bigger numbers than ever, ensuring that the festival has sold out almost every concert in its biggest venue, St Mary’s Church, Haddington, and packed out many other smaller ones, too. The festival’s major modus operandi is to build partnerships with artists over considerable chunks of time, so as to Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Critics (including this one) casually refer to John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London as an all-star outfit, an army made up of generals. This week I was able to see, and hear, exactly what that means. A few days ago, in Scotland, I marvelled at flautist Adam Walker’s agility and versatility in his outstanding performances with the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective at the Lammermuir Festival. Yesterday, on the penultimate night of the Proms, there he was again with the Sinfonia, a stand-out soloist in key passages from Strauss’s tone-poem Don Juan and, above all, in the complete version, Read more ...
Clare Stevens
If you were a devotee of Dmitri Shostakovich whose only opportunity to attend some live performances marking this year’s 50th anniversary of his death was spending the weekend of 21 - 25 August at the Presteigne Festival, you probably wouldn’t have felt short-changed.As the festival’s Composer in Focus, Shostakovich was represented by a deeply-felt performance of his 1934 Cello Sonata, given by Gemma Rosefield and Timothy Horton, cellist and pianist respectively of the Leonore Trio; by his six Spanish Songs (in Russian translations), performed by mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons and Read more ...