It seldom happens that you long to hear choral music not in a modern auditorium but some chilly, echoing cavern of a great Victorian town hall. But that thought did arise as a full-strength London Symphony Orchestra and its hundred-strong chorus crammed uncomfortably into every inch of the Barbican hall’s stage for Vaughan Williams’s Dona Nobis Pacem. It felt like squeezing a herd of elephants into a cake tin, and the Barbican’s disobliging acoustic hardly helped enrich the mood. Yet Antonio Pappano still managed to work the uplifting magic that he reliably brings to choral blockbusters Read more ...

There are enough historical reasons for differing approaches to Handel’s Messiah to allow every conductor to produce, effectively, their own edition. American conductor Jeannette Sorrell gave the Hallé audience a streamlined, power-driven one that had them on their feet at the end as well as during the Hallelujah Chorus.The main reasons for that were undoubtedly the precision attack and dynamic strength of the Hallé Choir’s singing – most of them doing it without the book (and choral director Matthew Hamilton got one of the biggest cheers as he took his bow) – and the exciting and Read more ...

Would it be possible to get to the end of the year without hearing a single Bruckner symphony live? I’d reckoned without the presence in Dublin of fabulous conductor Anja Bihlmaier, whose 2022 concert with the National Symphony of Ireland was a fine introduction to the thriving concert scene here, and of Boris Giltburg, one of the most engaging living pianists, in Mozart (and a far from insubstantial Schumann encore). Besides, Bruckner’s Ninth gives the lie more than any of the others to any settled spirituality or faith. Here the smoke-into-fire coda of the first movement and the Read more ...

Zum Roten Igel – the “Red Hedgehog Tavern” – was a concert venue with pub attached in 19th century Vienna, frequented by the like of Schubert and Brahms. It is also the name of an ensemble committed to exploring the connections between these “classical” composers and the Volkisch music that would have been heard in the next-door room. In this case it means re-scoring Schubert’s String Quintet and garlanding it with wild interstitial dance jams, recreating an imaginary historical mash-up.It is a Marmite project, with a full Purcell Room seeing several people leave during proceedings Read more ...

 Leopold Godowsky: Java SuiteTobias Borsboom (piano) (TRPTK)  Image   There’s surely a thick book to be written about the influence of Javanese gamelan on western classical music. Debussy famously made several trips to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris specifically to visit the Dutch East Indian pavilion, where a gamelan orchestra accompanied scenes from a recreated Javanese village, the sounds he heard later recreated in his piano piece “Pagodes”. Gamelan sounds crop up in Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and the Read more ...

You have to admire Samantha Fernando’s concept of the “To Do” list. Hers has one item: “Do Less”. That’s the subtitle of one section of the new work, Wintering, for which she wrote both words and music.It was heard for the first time in the North of England last night in a concert by four voices of the Marian Consort and a Manchester Collective string quartet (the premiere was at the Wigmore Hall last week).Oddly enough, there’s nothing about winter in the evocation of a guided meditation, with a soprano voice speaking the random thoughts actually going on in the head of a participant, which Read more ...

Image  American Dream: music by Amy Beach, Dana Suesse and Victor Babin Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle (pianos), Orchestre Victor Hugo/Jean-François Verdier and Lauren Comte (Alpha Classics)Wife and husband two-piano duo Ludmilla Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle have form when it comes to exhuming rare repertoire, and this new anthology doesn’t disappoint. Amy Beach’s name was on my radar, but Dana Suesse and Victor Babin were new to me. Learning about their backstories proved to be as interesting as hearing their music. Take Read more ...

Mozart’s unfinished C Minor mass lacks a canonical completion of the sort that Süssmayr so famously – and still contentiously – imposed on the Requiem. Even without its Agnus Dei and chunks of the Credo, however, the showpiece mass planned for the Salzburg abbey in 1783 remains a mighty and stirring piece whose choral and solo peaks more than match the later work. At St Martin’s, David Bates, his group La Nuova Musica, and the Schola Cantorum of Oxford, brought to it not just passages of period-sensitive refinement but a full-bodied, big-boned weight and depth of sound. With almost 30 Read more ...

I have always been a bit ambivalent about the music of Arvo Pärt, recognising his achievement in crafting a new kind of choral music, while often finding it hard to love, especially in large doses. Which is why I welcomed the approach of the Carice Singers (with Christopher Bowers-Broadbent on the organ) and George Parris in making this concert, one of a series marking Pärt’s 90th birthday, also a celebration of a much younger Estonian composer whose music, although very different, made for an intriguing point of comparison. Evelin Seppar (b.1986) (pictured below by by Sade-triis Read more ...

Sir Mark Elder was back on the scene of past triumphs last night as he returned to the Hallé at the Bridgewater Hall – and he has not lost his taste for the slightly unexpected.This was a bill that featured both a knight (himself) and a dame – Imogen Cooper as concerto soloist (pictured below) – and its first outing pulled a gratifyingly large crowd for a programme that was in two respects somewhat off the beaten track. Sibelius’s Scènes historiques Suite no. 2 isn’t heard particularly frequently, and Dvořák’s Symphony no. 5 does not hold the place of his last two in popular esteem. Elder’s Read more ...

Am I dreaming? Did I really see a living composer of contemporary music given a prolonged standing ovation for conducting his own works in the Bridgewater Hall, twice over?We all know the difference between polite applause for new music and real enthusiasm. And John Adams seems to have a following who show the real thing – of a variety of age groups, too. The California-based creator began his own festival with the Hallé on Thursday night with two pieces which were part of the celebration of the opening of the hall 29 years ago, one of them – Slonimsky’s Earbox – then receiving its world Read more ...

The greatest procession of mass movements ever composed merits the best line-up of soloists, both vocal and instrumental, as well as the perfect ensemble – small in size, big and rich in sound where needed – and inspired direction. That it was likely to get them seemed obvious from the advertised names, but last night, as always, Peter Whelan inspired everyone to go beyond what we might have imagined.He applies pressure points imperceptibly everywhere so that Bach opens out from period-style devotion to something more operatic, above all in the first choruses of the B minor Mass and Read more ...