Bach
Jessica Duchen
It’s always heartening to see a full house for a debut recital, though when expectations run so high, the stakes for the pianist can be dangerously raised. No worries at St John’s Smith Square, though, for Seong-Jin Cho. The diminutive, young South Korean musician who took the platform in front of a capacity crowd last night made waves last autumn upon winning the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and his first recording (on DG) likewise whetted appetites for his first visit to the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, which is currently being held at St John’s while the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The French Suites Peter Hill (piano) (Delphian)Start trying to explain exactly why this latest instalment in Peter Hill’s Bach series is so good and it might seem as if you’re dismissing the very things which make it great. This is pianism completely devoid of ego and flash; Hill is a superb technician but never draws undue attention to himself. You forget he’s even there: what we’re hearing is Bach. In all his guises – the earlier, minor key French Suites typically open with introspective Allemandes before the mood lifts. Hill’s way with the opening of Suite No. 1 is typical: Bach’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One down, 26 to go. “Mozart's Piano” is a series of concerts by the Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place, based around a complete cycle of Mozart's piano concertos. It started last night, and will reach its conclusion in 2020.It was Peter Millican of the Kings Place Music Foundation who first presented the idea of a Mozart piano concerto cycle to the orchestra. And – as is Aurora's highly successful and original way – they were determined not to place the concertos in standard concert programmes, but to create a series which would develop themes, and contain bold juxtapositions. For example Read more ...
David Nice
Prokofiev milestones stood proudly at the ends of the New Year’s first three major UK concert programmes. The Second Piano Sonata raged as the zenith of the composer’s generous enfant terrible period in Christian Ihle Hadland’s journey through two centuries of piano masterpieces; the Fifth Symphony rocketed skywards in the hands of enthusiastic but also technically brilliant teenagers in Leeds, according to theartsdesk's Graham Rickson, and presumably in London too; and the late Cello Sonata celebrated outward simplicity alongside inner ambivalence in the electrifying duo performance of Read more ...
David Nice
Relatively recent tweaks to the abundant London concert scene have resulted in top-end events right up to Christmas. We have in part to thank the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square, postponing the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s holidays, putting them together with superb soloists and choirs, and serving up major Handel and Bach. One snag: their Christmas Oratorio when I last went to hear it turned out to be only four cantatas out of the sequence of six.You’d have to pay two period-instrument horn players if you included Part Four – the OAE didn’t – and yet as Richard Read more ...
David Nice
In 1981 a 20-year-old Swedish trumpeter on national service turned up in the town – city, by Swedish reckoning – of Örebro as soloist in Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. The ensemble, then a mix of amateurs and professionals, some of them from the local military academy, is now the much-recorded and award-winning Swedish Chamber Orchestra; the trumpeter, Håkan Hardenberger, is probably the most famous in the world, and certainly the most adventurous – he still fights for contemporary composers to take first place in musical creation. Earlier this month the SCO and Hardenberger Read more ...
Thomas Rees
Contemporary jazz is a world full of magpies – artists who flit between genres and build glittering nests of disparate musical influences. Rock up to a so-called jazz night today and the repertoire can come from anywhere, you’re as likely to hear Jimi Hendrix or J. Dilla as Jerome Kern, and pianist Brad Mehldau has played a role in making that happen.Over the course of the past twenty years, Mehldau has established himself as one of the most distinctive and influential pianists of his generation, a musician with a healthy lack of respect for musical boundaries. Cast an eye over the tracklist Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Magnificat Dunedin Consort/John Butt (Linn)This disc's academic credentials are impeccable, but my reasons for loving it are purely musical; John Butt's Bach programme allows us to party as if it was, er, 1723. This is a reconstruction of Bach's first Leipzig Christmas – a cantata and a magnificat, interspersed with organ music and chorales. Butt begins proceedings with a Gabrieli motet and a sonorous organ prelude, before Bach's cantata Christen, ätzet diesen Tag erupts into life. Opening with a swinging chorus, the grandeur is bolstered by four trumpets. The choral forces are Read more ...
graham.rickson
Janáček: Sinfonietta, Dvořak: Symphony No.9 Anima Eterna Brugge/Jos van Immerseel (Alpha Classics)Jos van Immerseel's last period-instrument excursion took in Orff's Carmina Burana, so this latest release is a chronological back step. Though Janáček's insane Sinfonietta, written in 1926, still sounds uncannily modern, a work full of abrupt jumps, unpredictable harmonies and loopy rhythms. The best performances make no attempt to smooth over the rough joins, and Anima Eterna Brugge's playing is suitably ripe. The fanfares which open the work are bright and pungent, the period brass Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
It was rather like a trip home to see long-lost relatives. Ton Koopman took to the stage at the Liverpool Philharmonic with a broad smile. That smile both greeted the audience and, from what the audience could see, told the orchestra that they were on form. Or, on the other hand, it might have been encouraging them to try harder.The latter was hardly necessary. There have been times when the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra reduced its ranks to become a Baroque ensemble and, in so doing, failed to realise that it needed to leave behind the 19th century bluster and become that bit more Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The city of Brecon (county town of former Brecknockshire, now lost in the spurious and far-flung county of Powys) is a long way from Leipzig and on the face of it has little in common with the home of Bach and the native city of Wagner. But once a year for the past decade this rainy, hill-girt metropolis on the upper reaches of the River Usk has played host to a festival of Baroque music, and particularly Bach, that would match pretty well anything likely to be offered in the Thomaskirche.Its chief organiser, the violinist Rachel Podger, is both a local figure and a national treasure. Her Read more ...
David Nice
One of the summer’s greatest pleasures has been to confirm an often untested truism: that you may hear some of the finest and rarest music-making in out-of-the-way places. Just take a local who’s made the grade – in this instance, violinist and conductor Thomas Kemp – and who can gather friends and colleagues of equal calibre around him, harness the most atmospheric and/or unusual local venues, here spread around beautiful Kent country in the vicinity of heavily wooded North Downs and the Pilgrims’ Way, and you have a top-notch festival. Whether its reputation and its financing can make a Read more ...