Bach
graham.rickson
Bach: Harpsichord Concertos Retrospect Ensemble/Matthew Halls (harpsichord and director) (Linn)This release fizzes with energy. I’ve long preferred hearing these concertos played on a modern piano. But listening to Matthew Halls’s harpsichord performances have made me completely reassess the music. Velvety piano tone usually lends Bach’s keyboard music plenty of plush gravitas, with the D minor concerto emerging as darkly romantic, full of brooding angst. Here, the music’s character is sparkier, more pugnacious. Halls’s exuberant solo line sparks and glitters, pitched against the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Kings Place’s Bach Unwrapped season invites audiences to come at the composer from new and unexpected angles. Bach gets arranged, adapted and re-orchestrated, and his legacy is showcased in works from three centuries. Occasionally however he also gets played straight – and it doesn’t get much straighter or more authentic than the Academy of Ancient Music and the Choir of King’s College Cambridge performing the St Matthew Passion.Hall One is a lovely, intimate concert hall with a malleable acoustic and good sightlines, but what it definitely isn’t is a church. Bach’s Passions have the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Six Cello Suites Peter Wispelwey (Evil Penguin Records) Bach’ s Cello Suites remained stubbornly off-limits to me until I read Eric Siblin’s affectionate, rambling book, The Cello Suites: In Search of a Baroque Masterpiece. I’m now a convert; after overdosing on thick orchestral sludge we all need a palate cleanser, and these six solo suites do the job beautifully. Like many, I got to know these works through Pierre Fournier’s elegant 1960s cycle. You soon find yourself acquiring, imperceptibly, other sets. You won't get bored of hearing this music. Dutch cellist Peter Read more ...
David Nice
Faced with yet another world premiere from his friends in the Borodin Quartet, Shostakovich severely asked them whether they’d yet played all of Haydn’s quartets (they hadn’t). As a listener, I feel the same about Bach’s cantatas. Whether or not a lifetime will be enough to catch each of these varied and ever surprising little miracles in the flesh, Kings Place’s Bach Unwrapped series includes a chance to hear nearly 30 of the 200 from seven different ensembles in less than a year. Unfortunately it looks as if I drew the short straw at the end of the first four concerts.There was only one Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier András Schiff (ECM)András Schiff was a finalist in the 1975 Leeds International Piano Competition. He came third – presumably having confounded expectations by playing Bach’s D minor keyboard concerto instead of Rachmaninov or Tchaikovsky. Schiff has remained a connoisseur’s pianist – defiantly unshowy, softly spoken, cerebral. This is his second Well-Tempered Clavier (an earlier version was taped by Decca in the mid-1980s). The sense that Schiff is playing primarily for himself remains. We’re more than welcome to eavesdrop, but there’s no performing to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When you hear Christian Tetzlaff play you hear Brahms, or Beethoven or, in this case, Bach. What you don’t hear a lot of is Tetzlaff himself. I mean that in the best possible way – so willing is the violinist to submerge himself, to set aside ego and agenda. It’s an approach that is at its purest in Bach’s solo violin music, and as he presented the sonatas and partitas to a full Wigmore Hall last night the generosity of this extraordinary musician allowed his audience to set ourselves aside for a moment too as we listened.It has been almost 20 years since Tetzlaff first recorded Bach’s Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I'd love to see the stats on the last time a Prom was this packed for an afternoon organ recital. Were it not for the fact that organist Cameron Carpenter was sporting spandex trousers encrusted in silver glitter, a wife beater and Mohawk, you could have been mistaken for thinking we were back in the organ glory days of the early 19th century. Even the programme harked backward, offering as it did big, bloated Romantic transcriptions, arrangements and improvisations (pretty much everything in fact except the urtext).Scratch that. We did get two pieces of unadulterated Bach, the Toccata Read more ...
charlotte.gardner
What better work for Harry Bicket and The English Concert to perform at the Proms than Bach's joyous Mass in B Minor. Joyous firstly because of the music itself, with its vast stylistic and emotional range. Joyous secondly because, despite the intense scholarship to which Bach and his music have been subjected over the years, its genesis remains unusually shrouded in mystery for such a major work.While it seems likely that Bach viewed the work as a summation and climax of his life's music, that's about as much as we can guess. There's no evidence to suggest that he performed it as a whole Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach, Beethoven, Schubert Reiko Fujisawa (piano) (Quartz)Each of these three composers makes very specific, particular demands on a pianist’s technique. Playing Bach as sharply and as delicately as this doesn’t suggest that Reiko Fujisawa will be up to the mark when tackling the spongier, more amorphous world of Schubert’s Impromptus, but she’s able to inhabit both sound worlds with ease. Having a mixed programme on CD is such a rare pleasure; this is like listening to a carefully prepared live recital. The Schubert comes at the end of the disc. The major-minor shifts in the first Read more ...
theartsdesk
Peter has just come back from Lagos, so the first part of the show is a brief tour d’horizon of the dynamic Nigerian pop scene, featuring Asa, Tiwa Savage, 2Face, Flavour and D’Banj, the “Koko-Master”, who has just had his first UK Top 10 hit with “Oliver Twist”. Also discussed is the musical marriage and messy divorce between Don Jazzy and D’banj, who has signed to Kanye West's label world-wide, as well as the fact that Ye is rumoured to be an Illuminati. Is Nigerian pop about to go global? Quite possibly.Joe has been in Paris listening to the first play of the revolutionary new Mala album: Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Brandenburg Concertos, Sinfonias Orchestra of the Antipodes/Antony Walker, Anna MacDonald, Erin Helyard (ABC Classics)Exactly why this set, recorded in Sydney in 2003, has waited so long for a commercial release is a bit of a puzzle. These are fabulous performances in every sense. The playing is so vibrant, so alive that resistance is futile. Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos are as ubiquitous as Baroque music gets, but their familiarity shouldn’t hide their musical qualities. I loved Riccardo Chailly’s historically informed modern instrument versions, but these recordings Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s one thing for UK Border Control to turn Heathrow’s Arrivals into a giant theme-park queue, but it’s quite another when they start messing with our music. Paperwork issues yesterday saw one Japanese and two Korean members of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra denied entry to the UK, leaving Ton Koopman and his band too under-staffed to attempt their planned Brandenburg Concerto. Fortunately, soprano soloist Dorothee Mields stepped up with Bach’s Cantata BWV 199, giving us a rather more vocal, but no less Bach-centric evening of music to open this year’s Spitalfields Festival.One of the Read more ...