Elgar
stephen.walsh
The Three Choirs is (are?) off again, for the 295th time, but with a very different look, even from the festivals of my youth, never mind 1715, or whenever the first one was held (there seems to be some doubt about it). The big oratorio concerts in the cathedral are still there, but these days with a pulsating retinue of smaller concerts and recitals in a variety of other venues, not all of them in Gloucester, this year’s host city. Even oratorio life has a somewhat skewed appearance. Vaughan Williams’s Sancta Civitas is labelled “oratorio” but lasts a mere half-hour or so, while his Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You don’t expect to visit the Britten-Pears shrine in Suffolk and come back raving about Edward Elgar. Yes, Elgar. On Sunday evening, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London brought the composer’s Second Symphony to Snape Maltings: that marshland temple to every anti-Elgarian current in post-war British music.With transformative daring and dash, they made it sound like a work that even the Aldeburgh Festival's founder-saint himself might have appreciated. (Benjamin Britten once confessed himself “absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar for more than two minutes”.) Indeed, the middle weekend of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis, Elgar: Introduction and Allegro etc Sinfonia of London/John Wilson (Chandos)John Wilson has done it again! He is, at breakneck speed, building an extraordinary catalogue of recordings with his supergroup, the Sinfonia of London, which is – particularly in the realm of British string orchestra music – setting the pace both in terms of revelatory performances of canonic works and disinterred forgotten gems. Into that latter category must go last year’s wonderful John Ireland survey, and likewise the Berkeley and Bliss from 2021’ Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert was advertised as the completion of an Elgar symphony cycle, though in the absence of the reconstructed Third, that meant the second of two. Both were planned with interesting concerto couplings. The First Symphony was presented with the Tippett Piano Concerto earlier in the week, and early publicity for this concert promised a new piano concerto from Mark Simpson, with Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson.For reasons unspecified, that concerto failed to appear, so instead Ólafsson performed the more familiar Schumann. The result was an audience-pleasing combination, though the Read more ...
David Nice
Asked which work suits capricious Albert Hall acoustics best, I’d say Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, partly due to the choral billows – this year there’s been an extra thrill about massed choirs – but also because the Kensington colosseum haloes this spiritual journey of a soul. Best singer in the space? Based on years of Proms experience, surely the palm should go to tenor Allan Clayton, ringing of tone and so clear in diction that you can hear every word.So the work and the protagonist were assured before a note had been played. What really allowed everything to take flight, though, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jacqueline du Pré: The Complete Warner Recordings (Warner Classics)There’s something both humbling and miraculous that a great musician’s recorded output can be squeezed into a neat box. Most of the material in Warner Classics’ latest Jacqueline du Pré collection has been reissued before, but one suspects that this will be its final appearance in CD format. Multiple sclerosis ended du Pré's playing career in 1973; 50 years on, one wonders whether her stellar reputation was justified, and whether these recordings stand up. Asking a couple of string playing contacts and trawling Read more ...
David Nice
Two quirky concertos – one for orchestra, though it might also be called a sinfonietta – and a big symphony: best of British but, more important, international and world class. Sakari Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra sounded glorious throughout from my seat – at 7 of the Albert Hall clock if the conductor is at 12 – but the eccentric charms of Mark-Anthony Turnage and Vaughan Williams fared better than the elusive soul of Elgar.There’s no doubt about it, Turnage’s Time Flies is a brilliant opener for any concert (and accomplished youth orchestras ought to give it a go). Co-commissioned by Read more ...
Robert Beale
It’s an ill heatwave that brings nobody any good, and Buxton International Festival’s decision to move its highlight concert, by Manchester Camerata with Jess Gillam and the Brodsky Quartet as their guests, from the Buxton Octagon to St John’s Church meant not only that it was heard in probably the only coolish venue in town yesterday afternoon, but also that it benefitted from an acoustic that’s excellent for instrumental music.The Camerata is celebrating its 50th anniversary in different places this year, and while the personnel seen yesterday may not overlap entirely with the band we are Read more ...
David Nice
Had Claudio Abbado conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a major Elgar orchestral work – and to my knowledge he never saw the light about the composer’s due place among the European greats – it might have sounded something like last night’s “Enigma” Variations. Yes, John Wilson and his superband Sinfonia of London really are in that league. Elgar’s cavalcade of character-studies, both inward and extrovert, is the ultimate test, the most varied of masterpieces in a various programme.Perhaps it was a slightly over-long one. I’d have jettisoned Bax’s Tintagel in favour of a pleasing symmetry in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Karel Ančerl: Live Recordings (Supraphon)Karel Ančerl’s nascent conducting career was interrupted by World War II, Ančerl and his family being sent to the Theresienstadt camp in 1942. Two years later, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz. Ančerl’s wife and son were murdered; he survived, returning home and gaining a conducting post with Radio Prague. There’s an inspiring quote in this set’s booklet, Ančerl recalling that, “despite having witnessed the abysmal depths of that which a human is capable of doing to a fellow human, I did not lose faith in people – I returned with full Read more ...
Robert Beale
Saturday’s concert by the BBC Philharmonic was in large measure about the Mahlers – Gustav and Alma. The former’s First Symphony formed the substantial second part of the programme: Frau Mahler was the inspiration of the piece that opened the evening. New Zealand-born Gemma New returned to Manchester to conduct: we saw her last October on the Hallé rostrum, and the energy and fierce attention she brought then were even more evident this time.That first piece was Die Windsbraut, by Alissa Firsova (daughter of Elena and of Dmitri Smirnov), a short essay in putting pictorial ideas into music, Read more ...
Simon Thompson
“You’ll have to forgive me”, said Sir Andrew Davis at the start of this concert’s second half, “but I’m going to sit down.” As he lowered himself onto his podium stool, he let it slip that this was the first concert he had conducted in more than two years.All the more excellent to have him back, then. Davis has had some first-class concerts with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra over the last decade or so, but none more memorable than their Walküre and Götterdämmerung as part of the Edinburgh International Festival’s 2016-2019 Ring cycle. He strikes sparks off the orchestra and they play Read more ...