Wigmore Hall
alexandra.coghlan
Perhaps I’m being too literal-minded, but demanding South American music from a concert programme advertised as “South American Baroque” doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable. When you add Colombian-born soprano Juanita Lascarro as soloist and Brazilian Rodolfo Richter as leader it seems actively desirable – a chance to encounter an underexposed seam of music in the hands of expert guides. Turns out that all musical roads lead back to Europe, to the ubiquitous Scarlattis, Handel and Hasse, and despite a few exotic excursions to the New World it was in the familiar Old that we spent the bulk of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In 1932 English pianist Harriet Cohen commissioned the best of Britain’s composers – Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Walton, Howells – to produce transcriptions of Bach for piano. The result, A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen, is a true document of its time, no less fascinating for its rather conservative contents. Conservative is not an adjective that could be directed at Angela Hewitt’s 20th-century reinvention of the project however. With composers including Brett Dean and Robin Holloway, and works inspired by Bach alongside straight transcriptions, it makes for a joyously diverse programme; last Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
First, an admission. I have a blindspot for the chamber work of Fauré, Saint-Saëns and Ravel. I've tried my best, acquainted myself with the most stirring recordings of the finest pieces, got friends to hold my hand. But I've never been able to shake off the feeling that these French composers are mostly a bit drippy in this genre, a bit Watercolour Challenge, a bit I-eat-yoghurt-vote-Lib-Dem-and-don't-have-much-of-a-pulse. So last night was laser-eye-treatment time. If Steven Isserlis and his clever colleagues couldn't banish my blindness at their Wigmore Hall recital, no one could. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There is an excess about the Wigmore Hall’s Arts and Crafts cupola that lends itself to extravagant musical passions. The mural’s cloudy images may profess to picture music as an abstract creature, but the golden tangle of rays and warmly naked limbs make a rather more human case for its attractions. It was a case matched for persuasive enthusiasm (and significantly bettered for taste) last night by The English Concert and Alice Coote, in a programme of charged highlights from 16th and 17th-century repertoire.To the passions of love and death – those stalwart emotional bookends of the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
As we take in news of the cuts that the arts will have to absorb, and wait for the Cassandras to start hollering, it's important to remind ourselves of one arts venue that won't be wiping one bead of sweat off its brow as a result of today's announcements: the Wigmore Hall. This season, Britain's finest chamber music venue has a line-up of unsurpassed quality and variety. Yet it does so with less subsidy than any other equivalent music organisation in the country. Cuts in state subsidy do not end quality. They improve it. Last night's innovative and exquisite recital of early Romantic German Read more ...
David Nice
Heartfelt birthday salutations to the great pianist first known as plain Stephen Bishop. For a recital in the early 1980s, when he first added the paternal Croatian "Kovacevich", introducing me to late Brahms piano music - Op 117, never more evanescent or troubling since - and the Beethoven Tempest Sonata, an incentive to tackle that work as best I could. For many unbudgeable CDs on the shelves, including the great duo partnership with one-time other half Martha Argerich and late Schubert sonatas. And for having the characteristic modesty, last night, to give a protégée the central spot in a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The first phrase of the first piece by Georges Enescu - silken, expressive, rounded, breathed to perfection - established a very good case for Håkan Hardenberger being the greatest living trumpeter. The rest of his Wigmore Hall recital established a pretty equally watertight case against.Probably the most impressive thing about the impressively impassioned account of Enescu's great single-movement tone poem Légende was Hardenberger's control of dynamic at both ends of the spectrum. The expressive feel and sweep of this late-Romantic work was perfectly communicated by both Hardenberger and Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
No, not some crazy remake of an Eighties soap featuring various members of the Bach family (though I wouldn’t put it past certain channel programmers to come up with the idea), but the Academy of Ancient Music’s (AAM) new series of concerts, which in a nutshell gives them the chance to perform lots of Johann Sebastian, with two bookend concerts covering the befores and the afters, as it were. Bound to get the crowds in and looks nice on the posters.Last night’s concert focused on Bach’s ancestors: specifically great uncle Heinrich, and his two sons Johann Michael and Johann Christoph (no Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Do paws get any mightier than Llŷr Williams's? When not crashing down onto the Wigmore Hall Steinway like a ton of singing bricks, they were digging deep, like strong, nifty moles, foraging for the contrapuntal melodies that lay beneath the topsoil. Williams was made to tackle the beefy German classics on this programme.Busoni's transcription of Bach's great Chaconne in D minor was grand and bracing, like the lusty, lyrical stirring of a mighty male Welsh choir. The fluency and conviction and sweep of the rushing scales - in octave or alone - and those enormous chromatic climbs was Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There are some recitals where you think only about the abstracted music - the harmonic arguments, the structural cleverness, the textural ingenuity - and there are others where you are forced to confront the presence of a set of living, breathing, leering musical beasts. Last night's stunning Wigmore Hall debut by Sarajevan-born pianist Ivana Gavrić - to a sellout crowd - was a very compelling example of the latter: a performance where the musical storytelling was being so well communicated that it was almost as if she was speaking to the audience or rolling a projector. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Ian Bostridge is one of those artists – Andreas Scholl is another – whose technique is so suited to the recording studio, his recordings so ubiquitously loved and lived-with, that the opportunity to see him perform live has become one of conflict. Suffering from the same malaise as successful pop artists, concert performances inevitably become processed by over-exposed ears as acts of mimicry; studied verisimilitude to a recorded original jostles for validity alongside live creative re-imagining.Last night’s performance of Schubert’s late songs – the programme released on CD by Bostridge Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Chamber music is a highly motivational experience - here is a group of instruments of quite different qualities parading, fighting, ganging up, inviting each other’s new ideas, dialoguing, and all this variety heightening the build-up to the moment when all instruments proclaim unanimity in a grand finish, or (even better) huddle up in mutual creative conspiracy and conjure a mysterious little spell that makes the outsider long to be part of it. All of which was present last night in both the performance and the music of Robert Schumann’s third Piano Trio, played by the Tetzlaff siblings, Read more ...