Classical Reviews
Hagen Quartet, Wigmore HallMonday, 01 May 2017
The Hagen Quartet has been playing together for decades, and it shows. The group, which includes three siblings, performs with a deep and intuitive sense of unity: of timbre, technique, articulation and intent. Where most quartets are clearly led by the first violin, the Hagens move as one, the motivation coming simultaneously from each player. They put this finely honed ensemble to the service of emotive performances, but also retain a sense of intimacy and proportion. Read more... |
in vain, London Sinfonietta, Lubman, Royal Festival HallFriday, 28 April 2017
If Georg Friedrich Haas’s in vain was a work of political protest when it premiered in 2000, in 2017 it’s a piece that reads more like a commentary – a disturbing musical documentary that captures nearly 20 years of escalating European tensions, suspicions and right-wing extremism. As harmonic consensus gave way last night to chattering confusion, musical certainty to a distorted multiplicity of possibilities, abstraction has rarely felt more pointed, more horribly specific. Read more... |
Janina Fialkowska, Wigmore HallThursday, 27 April 2017
You wouldn’t guess it from her name, but Janina Fialkowska isn’t actually Polish. You wouldn’t guess from her Chopin either, which is sensitive and supple, always emotive and deeply idiomatic. Read more... |
Stoller Hall Opening, Chetham's School of Music, ManchesterMonday, 24 April 2017
The opening of a new concert hall offers two options for opinionizing: the venue itself – or the performances in it? Review the acoustics – or the music? It has to be a mixture of the two, in the end. Read more... |
Tamestit, LSO, Roth, BarbicanMonday, 24 April 2017
François-Xavier Roth is a distinctive presence at the podium. He is short and immaculately attired, and first appearances could lead you to expect a civilised and uneventful evening. But the facade soon drops. His movements are brisk and erratic, as he conducts without a baton and instead shakes his outstretched hands at the players. He often leaps into the air, landing in a fierce pose directed at one of the players, before returning to his repertoire of small, indistinct gestures. Read more... |
Kim, Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, ManchesterFriday, 21 April 2017
The world premiere of a symphony by a British composer – Huw Watkins – was the chief attraction in the latest Hallé programme with Sir Mark Elder at the Bridgewater Hall. The other music on the programme, however, held interest and indeed created a foil to Watkins’ work. Read more... |
Dvořák Requiem, BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Bělohlávek, BarbicanFriday, 14 April 2017
Not your usual blockbuster for Holy Week, this. In other words, neither of the Bach Passions but a Requiem, and not – these days, at any rate – one of the more often-performed ones (it's not among the 79 works listed in The BBC Proms Guide to Great Choral Works). Read more... |
Mahler 8, LPO, Jurowski, RFHMonday, 10 April 2017
For the first performances of his Eighth Symphony in Munich, Mahler conducted 11 rehearsals. He arranged for the bells of the city’s trams to be silenced during the concerts. He left nothing to chance. On Saturday night, for once, one felt that all concerned had done likewise. Read more... |
Debussy Préludes, Alexander Melnikov, Wigmore HallThursday, 06 April 2017
Who needs hallucinogenic drugs when we have Debussy's two books of Préludes? In the hands, that is, of a pianist magician who holds the key to this wild parade, demi-real wonderland, call it what you will. I've only heard two wizards equal to the whole sequence: on disc, Krystian Zimerman, graced by a wide recorded range the old masters could never command, and now, in the concert hall, Alexander Melnikov... Read more... |
Ma, New York Philharmonic, Gilbert, BarbicanMonday, 03 April 2017
John Adams, greatest communicator among living front-rank composers, zoomed into the follow-spot for the second and third concerts of the New York Philharmonic's Barbican mini-residency. Read more... |
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