18th century
Rachel Halliburton
Raw, muscular, visceral, haunting – this was Handel as you’ve never experienced him before. In this striking entry for the London Handel Festival, an uncompromising production by Adele Thomas with conductor Laurence Cummings took four of the composer’s early cantatas about thwarted love and mined them for all their incandescent rage and poisoned wistfulness.The staging took place in the acoustically and architecturally exquisite Stone Nest on Shaftesbury Avenue – a nineteenth century chapel with an umbrella dome that closed in the early Eighties to become a nightclub. That decadent past Read more ...
Harry Bicket
Of the many questions we asked ourselves during lockdown, I suspect that many of us looked at our lives and professions and asked, “Why?”.Perhaps a period of forced introspection is a positive thing if it helps clarify what is truly important and what isn’t. For musicians, whose work is by definition a communal event, it was a strange period; endless time to practise and study, but with apparently nothing to practise and study for. Many groups understandably decided to hunker down and reduce their activities and ambitions. The English Concert had a different concept: if our world was about to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet mischievously described interpreting Haydn’s piano sonatas as “putting clothes on a rather naked skeleton… You have this joy of bringing it to life with all the tools you can imagine.”Certainly the French pianist is well positioned to talk about exhuming not just Haydn’s music but key aspects of his reputation following his release last year of an acclaimed recording of all 62 of his too often neglected piano sonatas.For his lunchtime recital at the Wigmore, Bavouzet opened with a version of Haydn’s 1773 Sonata No. 24 in D Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two intriguing themes and two great guest artists were offered by the BBC Philharmonic to their Saturday night audience in the Bridgewater Hall: the themes were what “classicism” really is, and the variety of music inspired by (or written for) dance.The artists were Angela Hewitt, soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, and Sir Andrew Davis, making another welcome visit to Manchester. You might say that a third theme of the evening was the chance to see the two of them deliver a masterclass in piano playing and orchestral conducting.Classicism, then: what is it? Whole books have been Read more ...
David Nice
Ian Page’s “journey of a lifetime” with his Mozartists, taking the greatest genius year by year, lands us in 1773 with the adolescent Mozart's first durable crowdpleaser, the pretty-brilliant motet for soprano and orchestra Exsultate, jubilate (last night was its 250th anniversary). The boy wonder still needs annual support from his elders, though, and as usual we got more than just a sampler of what else was going on musically in that year.Page’s scholarly but performance-vivid planning gave us a first half which was a kind of Sturm und Drang sandwich – vivid, angular products of that style Read more ...
David Nice
Across three and a half decades, John Eliot Gardiner’s 1987 recording of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists spoiled one for live performances. Not that many of those weren’t equally fine and alive in different ways, but none I experienced gave us all six, equally glorious cantatas.It could all be done in a single sitting – the whole is still shorter than Handel's Messiah – but on the London leg of their latest European tour, Gardiner and Co kept us waiting in rapt anticipation for Parts Four to Six between Tuesday and Thursday evenings. The Read more ...
Robert Beale
If there was a certain doom-laden dimension to Clemens Schuldt’s Bridgewater Hall programme with the Hallé ( … Requiem … Mozart in D minor … Strauss describing Death and …), it was easily lightened by the conductor’s own approach and personality.Schuldt has a very clear beat and makes his gestures economically, but every one of them works, and he gets precise and telling results. He’s appeared in this hall before, with the BBC Philharmonic in 2018, and with the same Strauss work, Tod und Verklärung, and we realised then that his command of an orchestra in a complicated score and the richness Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In some ways the concerto da camera was the 18th-century music equivalent of the hatchback – only slightly larger in scale than a basic chamber work but with an ambition that allowed it to carry ideas associated with more substantial structures.At St John’s Smith Square, the dynamic ensemble El Gran Teatro del Mundo gave a diverting tour of this distinctive form, titled "The Art of Conversation", taking us from Germany down to the Mediterranean through Italy and Spain before circling back to Germany again.Telemann was the underlying link, and the concert began with a Sonata in B flat 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 ...
Simon Thompson
The Dunedin Consort are most readily associated with the music of the Baroque, but this concert showed that they’re every bit as good at playing the music of the next generation. At times, in fact, I was taken aback by the magisterial scale of the orchestral sound as they played Mozart’s great C Minor Mass.There was wiry intensity to the period-instrument strings of the opening of the Kyrie, but this was always a sound of commanding strength, one where hair shirts were left in the cupboard and a sense of scale was allowed to have its impact. Director John Butt used the new edition (Breitkopf Read more ...
David Nice
Jean-Guihen Queyras and five dancers of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company in the Bach Cello Suites was a thing of constantly evolving wonder. So too is Pavel Kolesnikov’s ongoing dialogue with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, different every time he plays them. Would De Keersmaeker alone be able to hold her own dancing to this inventory of technical rigour and human emotions?For the first, muted-silver hour, it was hard to say, given the difficulty of interpreting much in the dancer’s vocabulary and tallying it with what we were hearing in Kolesnikov’s myriad worlds. The sensation was Read more ...
Robert Beale
Buxton International Festival’s opera scene is clearly back on track for 2022, and its most substantial production a taut and tension-filled presentation of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago.Jacopo Spirei’s production, with design by Madeleine Boyd, has just one basic set: it changes from Act One to Act Two by removing two evocative visual elements (a hearth and a panel of generally rustic appearance) and replacing them with geometrical and electrically dazzling shapes, and it has a binary contrast of costumes – ragged rebel Highlanders and sophisticated, techno-style royal loyalists.So, from the Read more ...