Classical music
David Nice
Every visit by Vladimir Jurowski, the London Philharmonic Orchestra's former Principal Conductor and now Conductor Emeritus, is unmissable, and this fascinating programme outdid expectations. If there was any link with the LPO's "Harmony with Nature" season theme, it was ironic – discord being the keynote – but the concert was perfectly wrought.Jurowski balanced Mosolov's 1920s mini-thrash depicting an iron foundry with contemporary Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun's soundcape initially tied to an image of mining waste mountains in the Donbass (the composer pictured below by Konrad Read more ...
Robert Beale
It was a pleasure to see conductor Duncan Ward back in Manchester. His Hallé debut was by no means his first time in the city – he trained at the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music and has conducted the BBC Philharmonic and Manchester Camerata in the past, and some may even remember him as a student with an orchestra he took to the Arndale shopping centre, making music in the malls, back in 2011.He was something of a Wunderkind then – pianist, organist and composer as well as budding conductor, a product of Mark Heron’s joint course at the two Manchester Read more ...
David Nice
After the myriad intricacies and moodswings of Janáček's The Makropulos Case on Tuesday and Thursday - I was lucky to catch both performances, the second even more electrifying than the first - the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle seemed to be enjoying a relative holiday last night. They could leave the most fiendish element in Bartók's Second Violin Concerto to the astonishing Patricia Kopatchinskaja, delivering every aspect of a work that might have been written for her, and other poetic extremes to mezzo Rinat Shaham, before letting their hair down in Falla's complete ballet Read more ...
Robert Beale
Marketed as “City Noir” to begin with, this programme title was switched to “Beethoven Piano Concerto no. 4” closer to the off, perhaps because the more familiar of the two main items in it would ring more bells with potential attenders. Unsurprisingly, it proved a thing of two halves, with Beethoven in the first, and John Adams’ self-described symphony inspired by Los Angeles, from 2009, in the second.The concerto was imaginatively preludised by another American composer’s evocative thoughts – Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, in John Storgårds’ first Bridgewater Hall programme with Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Director Bill Barclay’s new collaboration with the Gesualdo Six – commissioned by St Martin-In-The Fields for its 300th anniversary – brings an opulent intensity to its depiction of a man whose troubled existence was reflected in darkly ravishing music. Gesualdo’s life was in many ways the counterpoint to Christ’s – born into privilege, he allowed himself to be defined by lust and a murderous thirst for revenge. So it’s one of his many disturbing paradoxes that he identified so strongly with Jesus’s suffering. Part of the power of this production comes from the heretical frisson that in this Read more ...
David Nice
Our most adventurous guitarist never does anything twice, at least not in quite the same form. Days after a recital in Dublin's Royal Irish Academy of Music, he included several items from that programme in a unique three-parter.It started with a selection of international lute dances from the Scottish Rowallen Manuscript – talking about them in between, as he apparently didn't in presumably a different Dublin selection – in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, before leading us in to the Purcell Room for Bach and Adès on guitar, and then out for Part Three in a differently organised foyer, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Anna Lapwood may not be the only virtuoso organist to celebrate the centenary of Joseph Jongen’s Symphonie concertante this year, but with her performance with the Hallé under Katharina Wincor she was almost certainly the first. It’s one of the most taxing – if only for the sheer stamina required of its soloist – and multi-faceted works for organ and orchestra ever written. Its four movements come in at around 35 minutes, concluding with a moto perpetuo romp of a toccata in classic French celebratory style, and the organist is required to handle fistfuls (and feetfuls) of notes from the start Read more ...
David Nice
To the great Weill interpreters she summoned at the start of her First person for theartsdesk, from Cathy Berberian to Tom Waits, can now be added mezzo-soprano Katie Bray's contribution. The hour's worth of songs from the German, French and American eras she presented in the perfect Fidelio Cafe setting, the wintry night outside and cosiness within evoking Berlin or Vienna haunts, didn't include everything that's on her new CD, but it all made perfect sense, and saved the most emotional until last.Bray is a superb communicator, and a generous sharer with her co-artists. The programme fulfils Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Composer Zoë Martlew’s album (Album Z) launch in the surround-sound environment of Hall 2 at Kings Place thrived on a theatricality rare outside the world of rock music and clubs. A wondrously energetic person, overflowing with a generosity and capacity for heartfelt relationship, Martlew thrives on high drama, as a performer as well as a person, with an almost child-like joy in making music that’s irresistibly contagious.There was dramatic lighting, dry ice and earth-shaking electronics. In a deftly-constructed programme of new and older works, she created an enjoyable – at times hilarious Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Never mind the singing, Roderick Williams could have been a great TV presenter or even stand-up, on the evidence of his spoken introduction at the Wigmore Hall last night. It was the best pre-concert speech I’ve heard for a long time – relaxed, witty, authoritative and engaging – and this is not damning with faint praise, as the recital that followed was completely delightful. The fact it also featured Williams as composer was further evidence that nature does not hand out talent equitably. The programme, of Williams’s devising, saw him revisit and update an idea from about 10 years ago Read more ...
graham.rickson
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M'a dit Amour: Songs by Debussy, Louis Beydts, Enescu and Isabelle Aboulker Julie Roset (soprano), Susan Manoff (piano) (Alpha Classics)Avignon-born soprano Julie Roset’s debut recital album is a delight. To hear a dazzlingly bold voice of such character and flexibility, and such intelligent singing is a constant pleasure. Roset was already snapped up by a big agent before she had completed her artist diploma at Juilliard. Having shone since with baroque specialists such as William Christie and Raphaël Pichon, and elsewhere, she now Read more ...
Katie Bray
Lotte Lenya, Ute Lemper, Marianne Faithful, Teresa Stratas, Cathy Berberian, Dawn Upshaw, Brigitte Fassbaender, Louis Armstrong, Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Sting, Frank Sinatra, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald. It would be difficult to imagine a more varied list of interpreters of just one composer’s work, but this is only a small selection of the artists who have performed and recorded Weill’s music. But what is it about Weill’s work that is so universally appealing, and so adaptable, making as much sense sung by Tom Waits as it does by Ella Fitzgerald or Anne Sofie von Otter?I’ve been drawn to Read more ...