Bach
Paul Gent
Dresden is slowly opening up to the world. All but destroyed by British bombing in the Second World War, locked away inside Communist East Germany for 40 years, it is now becoming a tourist honeypot. On a warm day in May, you can see the snap-happy groups of Japanese and Germans trailing behind their guides, marvelling at the imposing Baroque buildings in the Old Town. You see them queuing patiently for the extraordinary museums and poring over the the restaurant menus in the city’s huge squares. One of the local specialities is potato soup, but then nothing’s perfect.There are buskers on Read more ...
David Nice
Sing, dance, breathe: those are the three imperatives for successful Bach performance, and three superlative interpretations at the Thuringia Bach Festival glorified them in excelsis. Frankly, I would have thrilled even to a merely good performance of the B minor Mass given its location in Eisenach’s Georgenkirche, which is to Bach lovers what Bethlehem is to Christians (not that many folk can't be both; and besides, can there really be blasphemy when it comes to the ultimate genius among composers, human as he undeniably was?).There, among the instrumentalists of Prague’s Collegium 1704, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
After a Messiah last Christmas by one of London’s finest professional chamber choirs that was straight off the factory production line – mindlessly and maddeningly correct, just, I suspect, as it had been the five other times they performed it that week – I vowed to do things a little differently this Easter. Bach’s Passions certainly need skill and musicianship, but what they need above all is sincerity and heart. With that theory in mind, I went looking for a performance by a good amateur ensemble; when I found one by the Anton Bruckner Choir that also numbered Jacques Imbrailo and Ed Lyon Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The Australian musician and musicologist Martin Jarvis, connected with Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, has been obsessed for the past 25 years with proving that Anna Magdalena Wilcke, Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife, was not only muse, inspiration, and copyist but a composer of pieces that now bear her husband’s name. He claimed that she created the cello suites which are among the masterpieces of 18th-century music, among other contributions, including, perhaps, the tune that is the basis for Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Jarvis enlisted the professional help Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Six Cello Suites Viola de Hoog (Vivat)Two hours of solo instrumental music may sound daunting. Bach's six cello suites are anything but. They were composed when the cello was beginning to supersede the fretted viola de gamba, an instrument well-suited to polyphony, whereas the cello's design and tuning pattern means that the harmonies usually have to be implied, the chords broken and arpeggiated. This gives the Bach suites a very distinctive feel, and newcomers could do worse than dipping into Canadian journalist Eric Siblin's engaging, accessible exploration. Bach's music is Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A memorial concert to a busy man. Alexander Ivashkin, who died last January, was a cellist, a scholar, a teacher, an authority on Russian music, and much else besides. This evening’s concert faced up to the daunting challenge of commemorating the many diverse aspects of Ivashkin’s career. The results were predictably wide-ranging, yet always coherent, and an impressive focus was brought to this mixed but never eclectic programme.Credit, then, to Danny Driver. The concert was organised by the University of Goldsmiths, where Ivashkin was Professor of Music, and where Driver has succeeded him as Read more ...
David Nice
While the embers of the concert year are dying out around the country, you can be sure of a great blaze-up at St John’s Smith Square. The annual Christmas Festival of quality early-music groups and top choirs – this is the 29th – now traditionally culminates in two great works for chorus and orchestra. Over the past three years I’ve reeled at the best of Messiahs, four cantatas out of the six making up Bach’s Christmas Oratorio – and now that God of music’s ultimate demonstration of his omnipotent range.The B minor Mass may seem even less seasonal than two-thirds of Messiah, but it has its Read more ...
David Nice
In one way, it makes sense to give your London comeback concert in the venue where you made your European debut 44 years ago. Yet the Royal Festival Hall is a mighty big place for a violin-and-piano recital. Kyung Wha Chung had no problem nearly filling it last night with an audience including whole Korean families, but might have wished she hadn’t in the ailment-ridden dead of winter; her look could have killed a coughing child ("go and get a glass of water" is what I think I heard her say, from my very distant seat). There were swathes of panache in an emotionally demanding programme, but Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
There is ice at the heart of German director’s Dietrich Brueggemann’s Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg). Winner of this year’s Berlinale Silver Bear for best script – the director wrote the film in collaboration with his sister Anna – it’s a chilling look into the psychology of extreme religion, in this case very traditional Catholicism, set in small town Germany. Formally impressive, it’s unsparing in its point of view in telling a tragic tale.We encounter 14-year-old heroine Maria (Lea van Acken, an extremely poised screen debut) in the first scene at her final confirmation class. It’s led Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
How long should a dance programme be? Opera and theatre habitués can be surprised by outings to contemporary dance, where the pieces might be shorter than the intervals, and a 7:30 start could see you comfortably on the 9:15 train home. But the early train is in no danger from Rambert’s new programme, their annual showcase of contemporary creations at Sadler’s Wells, which features one world première, one London première, and one revival from this time last year, and last night came in at a handsome two and a half hours.Ashley Page, former Director of Scottish Ballet, is a good choreographer Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
This concert was part of a tour of Canada’s National Arts Centre orchestra to five cities in the UK themed around the anniversary of the start of World War One. The Ottawa-based orchestra joined forces with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Choir for this London centrepiece to the tour, under the baton of violinist-turned-conductor Pinchas Zukerman. Splicing two orchestras together with necessarily minimal rehearsal time may not make perfect musical sense but, as artistic director of the NCA orchestra and principal guest conductor of the RPO, Zukerman is uniquely Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Partitas 1-6 Igor Levit (piano) (Sony)Martin Geck's sleeve essay accompanying this pair of discs is a good read, hinting at the subtleties and complexities lying just below the surface of what may, superficially, look like six simple suites of dance movements. Bach's title page for the first Partita describes it as music "for keyboard practice... composed for music lovers, to refresh their spirits". Geck quotes from a letter about Bach written by Schumann in 1840: “I confess my sins to this lofty figure every day, while seeking to purify and strengthen myself through him... I'm Read more ...