fri 29/03/2024

chamber music

Theresienstadt-Terezin 1941-1945, Nash Ensemble, Wigmore Hall review - memorial music of stunning impact

Towards the end of his book Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann deploys a cogent expression: “chasing history, before it disappears”.Last time the Nash Ensemble devoted a weekend here to music from the Terezín concentration camp, in 2010, there...

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Scottish Ensemble, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall New Auditorium review - making a move

Continuing the relationship with choreographer Örjan Andersson – who choreographed their landmark project Goldberg Variations – Scottish Ensemble gave the first of their latest movement-inspired performance, Impulse: Music in Motion in Glasgow on...

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'Migrations' String Quartet Weekend, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - memorials and masterpieces

It was chance that the National Concert Hall’s weekend of quartet events featuring responses to war and refugees should coincide with the second anniversary of Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine. By late Saturday morning thousands of Ukrainians and friends...

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Grosvenor, Park, Ridout, Soltani, Wigmore Hall review - chamber music supergroup in perfect accord

Frank Bridge’s Phantasie Piano Quartet was astutely described by his student Benjamin Britten as “Brahms tempered with Fauré”, so it made a lot of sense to programme it alongside the first piano quartets of those other composers. A “supergroup” of...

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Louise Alder & Friends, Wigmore Hall review - magic carpet rides with soprano, strings and woodwind

Sometimes all the stars align in musical performance. There’s no soprano more alive to the expression of musical joy and rapture than Louise Alder, no composer more levitational in his strange later adventures than Fauré, no instrumentalists strings...

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Les Égarés, London Jazz Festival, Cadogan Hall review - a wondrous musical conversation

Combine four super-talents, masters of their instrument, and you might well expect a battle of egos or a clash of modi operandi.  Not least, as in the case of Les Égarés, a quartet made up from two seasoned duos – the virtuoso jazzers Vincent...

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West-Eastern Divan Ensemble, Michael Barenboim, QEH review - enchantment and conviviality

What a month, and what a day, for Michael Barenboim to bring the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble to London. Created in 1999 by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, the original West-Eastern Divan Orchestra has always impressed because it gathers Israeli,...

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Degun, Scottish Ensemble, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh review - fusion of east and west, ancient and modern

In a fusion of musical traditions both eastern and western, old and new, Scottish Ensemble were joined by virtuoso sitarist and composer Jasdeep Singh Degun for an evocative performance of Degun’s own work plus reimagined music by Terry Riley and...

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The Ossianic Ballads, Edinburgh Quartet, Màiri MacMillan, National Library of Scotland review - good ingredients get lost in the mix

To coincide with the National Library of Scotland’s first bi-lingual exhibition Sguel/Story, an exhibition in English and Scottish Gaelic which celebrates stories and storytelling, the library presented a performance of newly reinterpreted Gaelic...

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Denk, Danish String Quartet, Wigmore Hall review - metaphysical strings, the piano as chameleon

Few pianists manage stylistic perfection in both Mozart and Ligeti, but to Jeremy Denk it seems to come naturally. We should have heard the riveting contrasts in quick first-half succession, but European air traffic control had wasted much of the...

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Concert Theatre DSCH, Norwegian CO, Oslo Opera House Scene 2 review - Shostakovich choreographed for strings and accordion

Do we really need instrumental Shostakovich with lighting, movement, costumes and video projection? I might have said no before having seen what the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra could do with former leader Terje Tønnesen, performing the Chamber...

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Jerusalem Quartet, Wigmore Hall review - singing to make the heart leap

Conversation just before this concert started concerned Verdi’s Il trovatore and the truism that it needs “the four greatest voices in the world”. Whether or not the quartets we heard by Mozart, Prokofiev and Brahms demand the same in string terms,...

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