choral music
igor.toronyilalic
It's one of the great perversities of modern cultural life that orchestras from America and Venezuela visit London more often than those from Birmingham or Manchester. A perversity and a shame, as last night's exceptional performance of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and CBSO Chorus on a rare visit to the Barbican showed.Not even the cancellation of their chief conductor Andris Nelsons (owing to a family illness) or Toby Spence was able to derail things. The essentials were simply too good. There's nothing quite like a first-class English orchestra Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Like a streamlined sandstone-coloured satellite berthed unexpectedly in Manchester’s medieval quarter, the new addition to the country’s largest specialist music school, Chetham’s (pronounced Cheetham’s), makes a confident statement for the future. It looms seven storeys high amidst atmospheric buildings dating back as far as 600 years. At yesterday’s opening ceremony, heralded by a newly-composed fanfare, Head of School Claire Moreland said: “This new building will take Chets into a whole new era, providing the world-class facilities for music making that our students deserve and Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Fancy buying a new recording of Bach’s Cantatas? It’ll cost only slightly more than a regular CD. The only snag is it hasn’t been recorded yet, which is where you come in.Over the last few years Sir John Eliot Gardiner has been steadily releasing a complete set of Bach’s church cantatas recorded in 2000 with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in the conditions in which they would have been originally performed. The 27 double-disc release has been described by David Attenborough, who is known for listening to calming music in the jungle, as “the most extraordinary, ambitious and Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's the effortlessness that does it. So many singer-songwriters strain like billy-oh to make obvious their artistry, their auteurship, their emotional authenticity, when behind it all they're doing something really quite ordinary. This album, on the other hand, veritably glides out of the speakers, full of light, air, easy wit and endless hooks so perfectly and simply realised you'd swear you'd been whistling them to yourself half your life – yet the emotional weight and musical depths hidden behind its inviting surfaces are devastating. After all, the opening lines of the album are "I used Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Coram Boy is a thrilling story of dead babies, teenage love, material greed and the redeeming power of music. This is Christmas entertainment that packs a powerful punch, borne aloft by the inspiring sound of Handel’s Messiah, with horrific events presented on stage, an emotional rollercoaster ride that is definitely not for the very young or the faint of heart.The production comes from the same team that launched the show, based on Jamila Gavin’s now classic young persons’ novel, at the National Theatre in 2005. Adapted by Helen Edmundson and directed by Melly Still, it has been re-imagined Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s typical: you wait ages for a Belshazzar’s Feast and then two come along at once. And judging by the performance delivered by Ed Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night, Andrew Nethsingha and his massed Cambridge choirs will have their work cut out to follow it next week at the Royal Festival Hall. Throbbing with dance, gaudy as an Eastern bazaar painted by a second-rate Victorian artist, Gardner’s Belshazzar was a wash of Technicolor extravagance among the twee reds and greens of Christmas classical programming.And speaking of gaudy – it was quite the curiosity that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Honegger: Une cantate de Noël, Pastorale d’été, Symphony No 4 London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, New London Childrens’ Choir/Jurowski (LPO)Arthur Honegger’s best-known work is his short, mechanistic portrayal of a steam engine, Pacific 231. It’s a brash, brilliant study of rhythm and tempo; the speed of the musical pulse actually slowing as the train gets faster. Alas, it’s not included on this LPO disc, but we do get the unexpectedly delightful Pastorale d’été, a seven-minute bluesy haze of a piece which suggests an unlikely meeting between Gershwin and Vaughan Williams. Honegger Read more ...
graham.rickson
Fauré: Requiem Chœur de l’Orchestre de Paris, Orchestre de Paris, Paavo Järvi, with Philippe Jaroussky (counter tenor), Matthias Goerne (baritone) (Virgin Classics)Fauré’s understated Requiem is another iconic work which has suffered by dint of its popularity; too many dodgy amateur performances convinced me that I never wanted to hear it again. And then a fresh-sounding recording turns up, and makes you realise that there is something special going on here. It’s Fauré’s restraint which surprises: there’s little shock and bombast in this Requiem but a great deal of warm, fuzzy consolation. Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Some countries have a particular talent for choral music. Georgia, for example, has wonderful choirs, as does South Africa and, it seems, Bulgaria. Unfortunately, due to the expense of touring, we hardly get to see them. So when Le Mystère de Voix Bulgares, the female choir who embody the strange and powerful music of their homeland, came to town last night, lovers of global choral music were out in force.How they came to be here is a curious tale. The music, while based on folk singing, was actually a Soviet-era idea of creating a national musical language. In 1952 Philip Koutev created the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
While revered and respected, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis has never inspired audiences with the same affection as Bach’s B minor Mass, Haydn’s Nelson Mass, or even Mozart’s Coronation or C minor settings. Perhaps it’s the austerity, the monumentality of the work Beethoven knew to be his greatest that rejects the easy assimilation into secular concert life, perhaps it’s more simply the lack of big tunes to wash down all that liturgy. Furtwängler famously drew back from the work’s sacred challenges as he grew older, but Sir Colin Davis is evidently determined to keep tackling a work whose Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Mendelssohn loved looking back. And nowhere more so than in his blockbuster oratorio, Elijah. But what was most striking about last night's monumental performance at the Proms was how much he was also clearly looking forward and outward, and how feeble an appellation oratorio seemed to be for what we were witnessing. We were being bombarded with pre-echoes of the adventure-laden Hollywood epics of the 1950s. We were being hit by a microclimate of such unstable energy that it could easily have registered on the Beaufort Scale. Prototype movie. Tropical hurricane. Last night's Elijah was Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“The text of Britain’s teaching, the message of the free…”. No, not the Last Night of the Proms or the Olympic Games ahead of time. This is the final chorus of Elgar’s concert-length cantata Caractacus, which was given a vigorous work-out in this star concert of the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester Cathedral under Sir Andrew Davis. And before you start jeering and bringing up the problems on Britain’s streets, let me tell you that the choruses in this work are as brilliant as any in the language, and quite thrilling enough to persuade you that the message, however facile and inopportune, Read more ...