Classical music
David Nice
A muse of fire descended on the top floor of a former warehouse in the East End, unextinguished by the rain which fell almost continuously outside during the four stupendous concerts – three advertised, one a generous bonus – of the Ragged Music Festival. Once turned into an educational refuge for the East End poor by the heroic Dr Barnardo, surviving the Blitz unlike just about every other building in the vicinity, this unlikely and allegedly haunted venue – the Paranormal Society is due to have a sleepover here soon – the Ragged School Museum has been commandeered by pianists and partners, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This concert by Sir Bryn Terfel and the Britten Sinfonia, the very first concert given at the Barbican in front of an audience since 15 March, was surely in need of some stronger explanation than that offered by the blurb for the evening, namely “comfort and familiarity” and a “remedial tonic of an evening.”There was, and more than one. First there was a biographical story: as the Welsh singer explained, the first and second elements of the three-part programme had both a personal and a local significance for him. The second work, Gerald Finzi’s cycle of Shakespeare songs Let us Garlands Read more ...
Gregory Batsleer
Choral music is one of the UK’s oldest and most-loved art forms. It has been at the centre of my life ever since I started singing in primary school and has grown to become a crucial part of my identity as both a musician and artist. I am a signed-up evangelist of choral music; I do not need convincing of its power. I strongly believe, however, that we have reached an important moment in our history in which we need to look seriously at who we are, what our future looks like and crucially dare to be bold about what we can become.Having had the privilege of leading choirs at the highest level Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Salzburg, Verbier and other high-end festivals have scraped together reduced, still impressive programmes over the summer for consumption online. Not so starrily cast but hardly less engaging in situ is the adapted offering from Istanbul, mixing local and international artists, chamber and orchestral concerts with a flair that belies its reputation on the fringe of the major music festivals. In a series of pre-recorded concerts, streamed daily and mostly made available for a month thereafter (until mid-October), the organisers have taken the opportunity to range even further than their usual Read more ...
graham.rickson
Kemal Belevi: Guitar Duos Duo Tandem (Naxos)I might have responded to Kemal Belevi’s music differently had I not encountered him straight after a few hours spent with Schoenberg (see below). These pieces for two guitars don’t do anything earth-shattering, but they’re irresistible, the composer’s Cypriot heritage roots permeating every bar. Belevi’s themes sound like folk melodies and what he does with them is invariably delightful. Dive in and explore his three-movement Suite Chypre if you’re curious. Originally written for cello and guitar, it finishes with a little 2/4 Turkish dance, Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Like many musicians, Danny Driver had not given a recital since the pandemic took hold in March. His return to the platform took place in the intense spotlight of the Wigmore Hall, broadcast live in BBC Radio 3’s Lunchtime Concert and webcast to the world - for which he chose a programme that was demanding, exposed and imaginative and rose to its ferocious challenges as if butter wouldn’t melt. Driver’s selection focused on the idea of études, which the best composers can make into far more than technical exercises. First, an unusual choice: a sonata by C P E Bach, the ground-breaking Read more ...
David Nice
There should eventually be a plaque on the outside of the Fidelio Orchestra Café in Farringdon, to the effect that London’s musical life after lockdown re-ignited here. And how, in early July, with Steven Isserlis exuberantly stepping up to play Bach before a rapt small audience. Even now that so many venues have started cautiously opening up, it was still a physical and emotional jolt of the best kind to hear another of the greatest string sounds in the world, that of violinist Viktoria Mullova, and the double-bass thrumming in the resonant woody space of her son Misha Mullov-Abbado at the Read more ...
David Nice
How do they do it? Bach and Angela Hewitt, I mean, transfixing and focusing the audience in the Wigmore Hall – at home, too, hopefully, thanks to the livestreaming– through 13 and three-quarter fugues and four canons, all starting in the same key and (until the last) on the same theme, plus a benediction, the glorious whole amounting to an hour and a half without a break. No-one knows quite how the master intended his final studies in counterpoint to be performed, or even on what instrument(s), but in this superlative pianist’s hands the sequence makes total sense – centred, radical-sounding Read more ...
David Nice
Clearly it takes peculiar circumstances for some of us to hear the Academy of St Martin in the Fields within its eponymous church – that’s a first for me. The lure was considerable. Quite apart from the relative dearth of live events in London, the programme was of the imaginative kind more ensembles should be thinking about: three solos by a German, a Frenchman and a Scot resonating between each other, followed by the addition of increasingly larger groups of players, a kind of paradigm for lockdown and thereafter.Three Orpheuses (Orphei?) led the way in to meditative depths while straggling Read more ...
Danny Driver
There’s an old saying that goes: if life deals you lemons, make lemonade. To say that the COVID-19 pandemic is a lemon would be a huge and trivial understatement – it has had a massive effect on people’s way of life across the globe, it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and permanently scarred many more physically, psychologically and emotionally. In terms of livelihood, performing artists whose work involves close proximity and live audiences in theatres, concert halls and studios have been particularly badly affected, and it is clear that establishing a new modus operandi for the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No. 7 Orchestre National de Lille/Alexandre Bloch (Alpha Classics)Mahler 5’s five movements trace a lucid journey from darkness to light, and No. 6’s tautly-structured outer movements don’t contain a wasted note. Whereas cynics suggest that No. 7 is an unsuccessful rehash of elements drawn from its two predecessors. They’re wrong. This is the Mahler symphony I got to know first, if only because it was the only one available at my local record library (remember those?). I’ve loved it ever since. That the work is now almost standard repertoire is remarkable, given the Read more ...
David Nice
Songs of the beyond versus the profundity of the here and now struck very different depths in the Castalians’ evening concert at the Wigmore Hall and Elizabeth Llewellyn’s recital with equal partner Simon Lepper the following lunchtime. It was good to have the very human anchoring of Haydn’s “Emperor” Quartet, Op. 76 No. 3, before the awfully big adventure of Beethoven’s Op. 132: none of us who’d adapted to the al fresco mix of sophistication and take-it-as-it-comes in the four quartet recitals in Battersea Park Bandstand would willingly swap it for a more lugubrious Temple of Art, but the Read more ...