Classical music
Robert Beale
This was at first sight a somewhat ordinary looking programme for the BBC Philharmonic: Beethoven, Brahms … even Stravinsky doesn’t frighten a Saturday night audience in Manchester these days. They come for a good night out and quite a lot of them applaud after every first movement – even more if they can (and that means they don’t consider themselves high-brow, which is always a good thing for classical concerts).But the most notable thing was that there was an outbreak of affection and bonhomie which seemed to begin from the platform and spread out to the hall. Elena Schwarz was Read more ...
Sally Beamish
I was first approached by Quaker Concern for the Abolition of Torture (Q-CAT) in 2016 with the idea of a creating a piece of music to raise awareness of torture – its use worldwide, and the terrible damage it does both to victim and to perpetrator.They had thought of asking me as I am a Quaker myself. I have written several pieces in the past which express views and concerns shared by Quakers – for instance my violin concerto, based on Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which is a passionate expression of my pacifist beliefs. Knotgrass Elegy, written for the Proms in 2001 with poet Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a Renaissance artist’s studio, a wannabe master proved his skill by drawing a perfect circle. Perhaps playing Beethoven’s A minor Bagatelle (aka “Für Elise”) as an encore should count as the pianist’s equivalent. At the Barbican last night, Alice Sara Ott did just that with the ubiquitous ring-tone earworm.It came after an assured performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. And Ott traced its shape perfectly: feathery, supple, light, but not insipid. If the LSO’s rubric for this concert invoked “wild and stormy Read more ...
Kate Whitley
We started The Multi-Story Orchestra back in 2011 with a group of friends when we’d left university. Conductor Christopher Stark and I basically wanted to find new ways to play orchestral music that would escape formal concert halls and be more exciting and more accessible.We thought car parks might be good places to try – they’re big, they’re open, and people don’t really associate them with anything in particular. We started off playing in a car park in Peckham, run by Bold Tendencies, and we now play there every summer. We’ve also played in other car parks around the country – in Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam began their two-concert visit to the Barbican with a crowd-pleasing programme: Brahms and Beethoven. We are used to hearing the pinpoint precision and transparent textures of the London Symphony Orchestra from the Barbican stage, but the Concertgebouw has a different sound.Second violins sit to the conductor’s right, with the cellos centre and the double basses lined up along the back. The result is a more singular and unified string sound. The textures are not as clean or analytical, but cohere with a warm, undefinable glow. Characterful woodwind Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Hermes Experiment are the cool kids of the contemporary music school, who have brought a "build-your-own-repertoire" approach to generating music for their unique combination of soprano, clarinet, harp and double bass. As their name would suggest, they are firmly in the experimental tradition, using improvisation, extended techniques and graphic scores.They attracted the appropriate level of beards and cardigans to their Purcell Room recital, starting at the undeniably hip time of 10pm. The concert was called "Familiar Objects" – and there were domestic items, from clothes airer, to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hélène de Montgeroult: Études Clare Hammond (piano) (BIS)“How can music of this quality and vision be forgotten so comprehensively for so long?”, asks pianist Clare Hammond. It is the right question. The piano music of Hélène de Montgeroult (née Hélène Antoinette Marie de Nervo, 1764-1836) is becoming better known, not least because of the detective work of musicologist Jérôme Dorival. Belgian-Israeli pianist Edna Stern released a selection on a period Pleyel piano in 2017. Then came the complete Piano Sonatas from Monaco's Nicolas Horvath. And now come 29 of the 114 Études of de Read more ...
David Nice
In usual circumstances, a fully staged opera and every voice-and-piano song-cycle by a single genius in one weekend would be an embarrassment of riches. The only problem about Britten hitting the heights, above all in setting toweringly great poetry by Auden, Blake, Donne and Hölderlin, at the top of a long list, meant one sitting and squirming at most of Ronald Duncan’s wretched lines for an opera which even in its very subject is problematic, The Rape of Lucretia.Oliver Mears’ production (pictured below, both production images by Camilla Greenwell), originating here at Snape Maltings with Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
We enter the Barbican Pit as if visiting an apothecary. On the walls of the passage approaching it there are scientific diagrams and documents, while the stage itself is set up with glass cases filled with different potions and experiments.A figure lies prostrate on the floor lit by diagonal slants of light; next to the figure a lutenist regards the audience with a meditative gaze. In the background recorded voices deliver snippets of observation on the state of melancholy. To be ill at ease, according to Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, was quite literally to be in a state of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I’ve not heard a didgeridoo in concert before so was grateful to the Australian Chamber Orchestra for giving me the opportunity, as part of a busy programme at Milton Court last night. Didgeridoo virtuoso William Barton was put alongside Beethoven, Janáček and others as the touring string orchestra, led by Richard Tognetti, settled into a three-day Barbican residency.The ACO has a reputation for innovative programming and last night’s was a good example. The eclectic range of music on offer had several strands – perhaps too many for complete coherence? – but the playing was excellent and the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Though billed as a “concert performance”, this was really much more than that. With the resources of their own theatre, Opera North’s team present a staging that employs a big, built-up and raked floor, with a simple platform in the centre and a starry-night black back-cloth, and their principals and chorus move and act in simple but effective style.There are costumes, there is theatre lighting, and there are sound effects – thunder and rushing wind noises tell us we’re visiting the land of the dead and abode of the Furies (as well as Gluck’s music, of course). I’ve seen poorer production Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You invariably come away from an Aurora Orchestra concert with ears refreshed and mind revived. As a storm swept across London on Sunday, the audience at Kings Place enjoyed their own cleansing wind in the form of this genre-spanning gig in the “Voices Unwrapped” season, led by tenor Nicholas Mulroy. It took us all the way from Baroque Europe to the socially-committed “new song” movements of modern Latin America. Mulroy sang – with consistently fine tone, phrasing and colour, not to mention exemplary clarity of diction – in four languages (English, Spanish, Italian, German). Ten Aurora Read more ...