Elgar
David Nice
A year ago, the City of London Sinfonia’s quietly different concerts in Southwark Cathedral were a lifeline in the twilight of semi-lockdown; I’ll never forget how we treasured the last, on 17 November, knowing that everything would be closed again the following day for at least a month (there was a brief intermission, then darkness again until this May).Now that the London concert scene is back at full strength, CLS has once again proved, this time in its 50th anniversary season, that it’s still doing something unique at the very highest level, here presenting a fabulously varied programme Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Some lockdown-era recital programmes have doled out miserly short measures, as performers gallop through a brief, rushed hour (or less) of music as if afraid to tax the online patience of their disembodied audience. If this final concert in Leeds Lieder’s spring weekend of song had a fault, it lay on the opposite side: an abundant generosity that saw Dame Sarah Connolly and pianist, and festival director, Joseph Middleton pack a full-length bill (introduced by presenter Tom McKinney) with intensely flavoured major works almost to the limits of digestion – and then add some extras to the menu Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“This year was supposed to be so very different” said Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra when he spoke to theartsdesk earlier this year. Talk about an understatement. The CBSO has hardly been alone in having cherished plans wrecked. But in the orchestra’s centenary year, the sudden cancellation of a programme of celebrations that had taken the best part of a decade to plan felt like a particularly cruel blow. And having finally pieced together a skeletal replacement season (the CBSO’s main venue, Symphony Hall, was able to re-open its doors only Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 Australian World Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (ABC Classics)I love Bruckner’s mature symphonies, but they still baffle me. Mostly in terms of how certain performances work, or don’t work, and the near-impossibility of understanding and explaining exactly why. Then there’s the question of tempo, and how incredibly expansive performances can feel shorter than quick ones. A BBC Music Magazine poll in 2016 asked conductors to nominate their favourite symphonies, and Sir Simon Rattle included Bruckner 8 in his top three. He’s recorded two impressive accounts of the " Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sheku Kanneh-Mason: Elgar London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle (Decca)Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s debut album included a brilliantly punchy account of Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No 1 alongside various odds and sods. This second CD repeats the formula, the Elgar concerto coupled with shorter numbers by Bridge, Bloch and Fauré. I wish he'd opted instead for Walton's underrated Cello Concerto – to my mind as good a work as Elgar's, and inexplicably neglected. Still, this account of the Elgar is impressive. Kanneh-Mason’s technique is staggering – his lightness of touch in the Scherzo is Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s programmes in Birmingham are so personal – so utterly bespoke – that in the event of her being indisposed, they present something of a problem. That’s what happened this week. The programme was vintage Gražinytė-Tyla – opening with Elgar’s two partsongs Op.26 (a reflection of her blossoming relationship with the CBSO Youth Chorus), and ending with that ravishing Cinderella of the Brahms symphonies, the Third: a nice nod, in the CBSO’s centenary season, to Elgar’s particular love of this work. In between came the UK premiere of the new orchestral version – co- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eric Coates: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1 BBC Philharmonic/John Wilson (Chandos)One reason to love Eric Coates and his music is discovering that his compositional routine involved waiting “until he was properly dressed in the morning, complete with tie and Harris Tweed coat, and, perhaps, a Turkish cigarette.” Coates came from a Nottingham mining village, taking violin lessons from a pupil of Joachim and studying musical theory with a Nottingham academic. He played in Henry Wood’s Queen’s Hall Orchestra, concentrating on composition after being fired for missing too many rehearsals. Wood’s Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The London Philharmonic’s Isle of Noises, a year-long festival dedicated to music of the British Isles, drew towards its close with this programme of Butterworth, Elgar and Walton. Marin Alsop was a good choice to lead, especially for Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. Although well-known for her performances of British music, she’s not one to wallow in pastoral whimsy. Instead, she brings drive a focus, clearly defining all the rhythms and orchestral lines. And although that rarely makes for comfortable or cozy English Romanticism, it allows the LPO to demonstrate the impressive orchestral skills Read more ...
David Nice
The Apostles is a depressing work, mostly in a good way. Elgar's one good aspirational theme of mystic chordal progressions is easily outnumbered by a phantasmal parade of dying falls, hauntingly shaped and orchestrated. After The Dream of Gerontius, this ostensibly more clear-cut oratorio has less sense of form; it's fragmentary or modern, according to taste. I doubt, even so, if a better argument could be made for it than that from last night's team and its keen guide, Martyn Brabbins – a more flexible shaper, let's be honest, than the admirable champion of the work he was replacing, Mark Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The BBC put social and ethnic diversity at the heart of this Last Night programme. The concert opened with a new work, by Daniel Kidane, called Woke, and the first half was dominated by the music of black and female composers. In the second half, mezzo Jamie Barton waved a rainbow flag during her "Rule, Britannia!" The Proms is clearly in the vanguard for inclusivity among classical music organisations, although the fact that Kidane stood out as one of the only non-white members of the huge audience suggests there is still a long way to go.Woke is a dynamic concert opener, energised by Read more ...
David Nice
Let's be clear: this was a Prom of world-class works by English composers, not a conservative concert of English music. Politically speaking, Elgar was one of the few on the right, but how different inwardly, speaking through the poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy and singing with his own reminiscences in The Music Makers of timeless art that outlives the fall of empires and individual fates. How moving it was, then, to welcome back Dame Sarah Connolly after her very public statement about her recent operation for breast cancer. The most passionate of Remainers, she might have worn a more pronounced Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Cellist Raphael Wallfisch thinks outside of the box. His concert repertoire spans the popular concerto choices – the Elgar, the Dvořák – but he doesn’t stop there, and makes a point of seeking out the lesser-known and the little-heard. He has a particular taste for English cello concertos of the 20th century, and his advocacy has revived the fortunes of cello works by Bliss, Bax, Moeran, and particularly Gerald Finzi, his performance of the Finzi Cello Concerto a surprise hit of the 2001 Proms.His recording projects are equally adventurous. By the end of this year, Wallfisch will have Read more ...