Classical Reviews
Classical CDs Weekly: Per Nørgård, Stephen Hough, The Society of Strange and Ancient InstrumentsFriday, 11 July 2014
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Daneman, Bostridge, Drake, Middle Temple HallThursday, 10 July 2014
Temple Music's enterprising song series, directed by pianist Julius Drake, brought a welcome rarity to Middle Temple Hall last night. Schumann's Myrthen, the garland of twenty-six songs dedicated to his intended bride Clara Wieck, are seldom heard in a complete performance. Even with an interval in the middle, they serve as a reminder of the power and sheer emotional range of Schumann's music. Read more... |
Pinnock's Passions, Handel's Garden, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseTuesday, 08 July 2014
The latest in a series of "Pinnock’s Passions" concerts at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse saw the doyen of period instrument performance lead a delightful exploration of Handel the musical borrower, entitled "Handel’s Garden". As Trevor Pinnock writes in the programme notes, "throughout his life as a composer he had the habit of taking cuttings, transplanting and grafting from works old and new". Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Turina, Rorem, Rhos Male Voice ChoirFriday, 04 July 2014
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Jordi Savall, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseTuesday, 24 June 2014
Jordi Savall has spent half a century combining instrumental performance on the viola da gamba with being the leader of ensembles of pioneering scholarship. Now in his early 70s, he has certainly had the recognition he deserves: a Grammy (he has made over a hundred albums), an honorary professorship (he has taught since 1974), and the Légion d'Honneur. These days he is also a prominent public figure supporting the “Catalunya should have the right to vote” campaign. Read more... |
Crowd Out/Death Actually, Spitalfields Music Summer FestivalSunday, 22 June 2014
“I feel so alone I could cry”. As the keynote of Adam Smallbone’s Passion in the breathtaking third series of Rev, that unspoken sentiment provided a passacaglia bass line to the failure of St Saviour’s. Read more... |
De la Salle, LSO, Luisi, BarbicanFriday, 20 June 2014
It is not often we hear Bruckner’s colossal Eighth Symphony in its longer and far quirkier original version (1887 ed. Nowak) and when we do hear it in either of its two incarnations it invariably stands alone. Read more... |
Owen Wingrave/ Pavel Haas Quartet, Aldeburgh FestivalMonday, 16 June 2014
What a red letter day it is when a work you’ve always thought of as problematic seems at last, if only temporarily, to have no kind of fault or flaw. That was the case for me on Sunday afternoon with Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, launching this year’s Aldeburgh Festival with an ideal cast fused as one with the young Britten-Pears Orchestra thanks to the self-evidently intensive collaboration of director Neil Bartlett and conductor Mark Wigglesworth. Read more... |
Anna Prohaska, Eric Schneider, Wigmore HallSunday, 15 June 2014
Judging from the photos used to publicise Anna Prohaska’s new album – one of them is dancing merrily above this review – this gorgeously gifted soprano should have been singing this spin-off recital wearing an army great coat. She compromised with a severe black tunic and trousers with military references and a slight science-fiction cut: she could almost have been a futuristic soldier from the old Korda film Things to Come. Read more... |
Gilchrist, Bevan, OAE, Devine, QEHFriday, 13 June 2014
Of all the epithets you could pin on that roast beef of Old England, William Boyce, “gamechanger” is one of the more unlikely. Like any good 18th-century Englishman, this composer followed the widespread Italianate model of the late Baroque, infused it with Handel, and a swig or two of Purcell, and just got to work. Latterly he spent far too much time setting toadying odes for Britain’s Hanoverian kings; no chance for revolution there. Read more... |
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