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 ...

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 preludized by another American composer’s evocative thoughts – Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, in John Storgårds’ first Bridgewater Hall programme with the Read more ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Image 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 ...

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 ...

Conducting the staple Viennese fare of New Year's Day is no easy task. Quite apart from the basic essential panache - so drearily missing from Austrian Franz Welser-Möst's 2023 shot in Vienna itself, abundantly present this year from live wire Yannick Nézet-Séguin - there has to be the right space for the upbeat to the waltz, freedom in the melodies, energy but not mania in the fast polkas. 27-year-old Tom Fetherstonhaugh, best known as the founder of the enterprising Fantasia Orchestra, has the style in spades, and conveyed it to a clearly impressed National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, Read more ...

Concert one-offs can be experiences to last a lifetime (immediately springing to mind is Jakub Hrůša’s BBC Symphony Orchestra Shostakovich 11). But this has been a year above all for the best of festival planning, the sort where you feel enriched by connecting threads. So my starting point is the same as Graham Rickson’s top CD choice: the way Arvo Pärt’s 90th birthday was celebrated at the peerless Pärnu Music Festival in Estonia.That extended beyond the top-quality concerts of Paavo Järvi's superband, the Estonian Festival Orchestra, the performers featured on the CD: there Read more ...

  Image My album of the year came as a real surprise to me, Arvo Pärt’s output hitherto not leaving much of an impression. But Credo (Alpha Classics), from the Estonian Festival Orchestra under Pärt's long-term friend and collaborator Paavo Järvi (Alpha Classics), is a stunner. This collection of mostly orchestral pieces was recorded at last July’s Pärnu Music Festival, and the communicative power of works like Credo and Swansong knocked me for six. Birthday tributes (Pärt recently celebrated his 90th birthday) don’t come better than Read more ...