Bach
Bernard Hughes
There’s a game called Whamageddon, where people see how deep into December they can go without hearing “Last Christmas”. I’m like that, but with the Bach Christmas Oratorio, and this year I made it four days. And who would want to wait any longer? Last night I was at the Voces8 Centre in London as part of a live audience for a concert also streamed in the ongoing Live from London series, started during the Covid summer of 2020 and continuing to flourish.The programme was titled “Christmas with JS Bach” but could equally have been called “Blackadder Goes Forth” for the determination to get Read more ...
Robert Beale
The showman was back – and, bless him, he can still sell every seat in a big hall even if the programme offers close on an hour and a half of unalloyed Bach.Lang Lang’s gifts are phenomenal: he doesn’t just play music brilliantly, every now and then he plays with it, putting his own twist of fun or pathos or bravura where few would venture to try. It can be utterly mesmerising; it can be quirky, if not exasperating. And so he did with the aria and 30 variations for keyboard known to us as the Goldbergs.He preceded it with Schumann’s Arabeske, Op. 18, as if needing to warm the atmosphere a Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
As any good choral singer knows, you can’t deliver too emphatic a “k” for the opening Kyrie Eleison of any one of thousands of Mass settings. Well, almost. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus produced such a distinct, detached, and powerful opening consonant for this performance of Bach’s B minor Mass that it seemed to bounce several times round the auditorium before being enveloped by the great tide of chromaticism that characterises this magisterial movement.As the Kyrie developed, the consonants retreated somewhat to a more conventional audibility, but the opening served to remind us Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Goldberg Variations Víkingur Ólafsson (piano) (DG)Bach Goldberg Variations Reimagined Rachel Podger/Brecon Baroque (Channel Classics)It feels like ages since I’ve listened to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I’m more team piano than team harpsichord, so my current favourites include recordings by Glenn Gould (both of them), Murray Perahia and Igor Levit. Víkingur Ólafsson’s lucid sleeve note is entertaining, particularly when he follows his florid comparison of the work to “…a grand oak tree… living and vibrant, its forms both responsive and regenerative…” with Bach’s punchier Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh International Festival’s focus on Korea moves to the Queen’s Hall in the festival’s middle week, with performances from two Korean soloists playing alone.Yeol Eum Son has already made waves in Scotland, and she chose some meaty repertoire for her EIF debut, culminating in Beethoven’s mighty Hammerklavier Sonata (★★★★). For the first half of her Tuesday morning programme, however, she played Liszt’s Ninth Transcendental Étude alongside three set of variations by Bizet, Czerny and Alkan. Variations are a neat choice for an artist because the variety intrinsic to the form gives Read more ...
Simon Thompson
There’s a Korean strain to the Edinburgh International Festival’s programme this year, more in the drama programme than in the music one, but it came to the Usher Hall in Friday night’s concert from the KBS Symphony Orchestra (★★★★). They play a similar role in Korea to what the BBC Orchestras do in the UK (KBS stands for Korean Broadcasting System) and if this concert is anything to go by then they’re a jolly impressive bunch of musicians.Their overall sound was full of confidence, with a golden glow to the brass and a bright sheen to the strings. That came in very useful in illuminating the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Otto Klemperer: The Warner Classics Remastered Edition (Warner Classics)The young Otto Klemperer’s conducting career was encouraged by no less than Gustav Mahler, Klemperer’s meteoric rise leading him to become director of Berlin’s Kroll Opera from 1927 to 1931. The first two CDs in this set comprise recordings made during his tenure there; dim mono sound aside, these fiery readings of Wagner, Brahms and Strauss defy their age. The following decades saw the conductor faced with exile in Los Angeles and range of physical and personal catastrophes, including brief imprisonment. Do listen Read more ...
David Nice
Founded two decades ago by Franco Buitoni and his wife Ilaria in league with their good friend Mitsuko Uchida, the Borletti-Buitoni Trust never seems to put a foot wrong in its choices: the present and future are as dazzling as the last 20 years. As well as giving generous long-term support to over 200 artists and groups, BBT commissions new works – more than 50 to date – and has set up a Communities wing "to encourage social cohesion".Which is how this weekend started off in Peckham’s Multi-Storey Car Park with a gobsmackingly brilliant event. Composer Kate Whitley has written eloquently on Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: The Four Symphonies, Piano Quartet No. 1 (orch. Schoenberg) Luzerner Sinfonieorchester/Michael Sanderling (Warner Classics)Some like their Brahms thick and dark. Others, well, will like what we get here, a more transparent, less granitic take on four of the most-recorded works in the orchestral repertoire. Michael Sanderling’s conductor father Kurt had a reputation for dourness and intensity, but these performances tend towards the light and lyrical. You’ll find more doom-laden accounts of Symphony No. 1’s slow intro, but the fast main section is as exciting as any on disc, and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The turbulence and agitation of betrayal could be felt from the word go in this galvanising performance of the St John Passion, which administered a jolting urgency to Bach’s radical portrayal of the Easter story. The work will be 300 years old next year, yet this Polyphony Good Friday performance – a fixture at St John’s Smith Square for slightly fewer years – delivered a version as fresh and discomfiting as if the crucifixion had taken place yesterday.That was in no small part due to Nick Pritchard (pictured below), who as the Evangelist narrated the story with a vibrancy that suggested he Read more ...
David Nice
Tenebrae in tenebris: put more plainly, a top choir that’s anything but shadowy, except when it needs to be, doing its bit for the darkness of Maundy Thursday. The thoughtful plaiting of Bach motets with three Tenebrae Responsories and other works by our top choral composer, James MacMillan, worked well until the last work on the programme. Then they had to go and spoil it all by premature ejaculation.Personal context: as an agnostic, I value this stage in Easter week as a time for meditation on suffering, compassion and death, never more needed than now. Two year ago, when concert halls were Read more ...
graham.rickson
In Márta’s Garden Katharina Weber (piano) (Intakt)The Márta of the title of this solo piano album by many-faceted Swiss pianist, composer and teacher Katharina Weber (b. 1958) is Márta Kurtág (1927 -2019). Weber first got to know the Kurtágs in 1989, and stayed in dialogue with them for three decades. She has performed and taught their music extensively (two of her previous albums on Intakt include it), she visited them often in Hungary, and her own compositional practice has been influenced and mentored by them. This solo piano album both starts and finishes with a piece by Read more ...