Classical Reviews
Morison, Big Noise Wester Hailes, RSNO, Søndergård, Usher Hall, Edinburgh - shimmering delicacy and surging swellSaturday, 09 March 2024
While it is an incontrovertibly good thing that the classical music world has set about rediscovering the work of neglected female composers, not all rediscoveries are equally worthy of being found. Particularly on a day like International Women’s Day (IWD), concert programmers run the risk of unearthing work that tends towards the mediocre, and which can end up being tokenistic. Read more... |
Murray, Vlaams Radiokor, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - visual ‘interpretation’ blunts sonic brilliance in Szymanowski rarityThursday, 07 March 2024
Chances are few enough to catch Polish composer Szymanowski’s densely brilliant 1920s score for a ballet about love in the Tatra mountains. Harnasie (Robbers) is so little known that we need a clear line through action and sung text. That all went out of the window in the projections of renowned choreographer Wayne McGregor and visual artist Ben Cullen Williams. Read more... |
The Art of Fugue, Schiff, Nosrati, Wigmore Hall review - rarity and quality in music and performanceWednesday, 06 March 2024
At the start of his 75-minute pre-concert lecture on Sunday, the incomparable András Schiff staked quite a claim for the piece he was about to perform: Bach’s The Art of Fugue was, he said: “the greatest work by the greatest composer who ever lived”. Read more... |
Gerstein, LSO, Rattle, Barbican review - American glitter and sinewMonday, 04 March 2024
How lucky those of us were who grew up musically with the young Simon Rattle’s highly original programming in the 1980s. He’s still doing it at a time when diminishing resources can dictate more careful repertoire, and last night’s Americana proved spectacularly original. Four of the five works gave a different perspective on the decade and a half in which Shostakovich’s very different Fourth Symphony, LSO triumph of the earlier part of the week, failed to reach public performance. Read more... |
The Creation, Alder, Clayton, Mofidian, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - dancing gay in green meadowsSunday, 03 March 2024
Light and grace must flood the concert hall in Haydn’s The Creation, after a striking-for-its time evocation of Chaos, and periwigged creatures skip around the Genesis picture. With Edward Gardner keeping the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus on their dancing toes, as ever, and three fine soloists carrying the creatures’ share of the beauties, it was a good time for happy creativity. Read more... |
Faust, LSO, Rattle, Barbican review - violence and wit in Shostakovich, luminosity in BrahmsSunday, 03 March 2024
The LSO’s apéritif hour “Half-Six Fixes” have an informality that usually works and sometimes doesn’t. But the first of this two-night run of Dmitri Shostakovich’s monstrous and terrifying Fourth Symphony was unforgettable. Panels on the auditorium walls greeted the audience with a portrait of the composer and his famous note: “The authorities tried everything they knew to get me to repent… But I refused. Instead of repenting, I wrote my Fourth Symphony”. Read more... |
St Matthew Passion, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Whelan, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin review - fluency, fire and some jaw-dropping solosSaturday, 02 March 2024
After last year’s small-scale, big-impact Messiah in the Wigmore Hall, superlatives are again in order for the IBO’s performance of the greatest musical offering known to humankind. With the fluency established by that most supple of directors Peter Whelan at the start of Bach's opening chorus leading to the astonishing heft of nine singers and gleaming instrumentalists at its culmination, we knew we were in for something approaching perfection. Read more... |
Hallé, Elder, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - Bruckner is backFriday, 01 March 2024
Sir Mark Elder conducted Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 for his first time in last night’s Hallé series concert, a reflection of his untiring exploration of new territory even as he nears the end of his time as the orchestra’s music director. So this was quite a ground-breaking event. And for the audience it was like seeing an old master in vivid colours after restoration. Read more... |
Colin Currie Quartet, Wigmore Hall review - toccatas for triangles and teacupsWednesday, 28 February 2024
I have never seen the Wigmore Hall stage more crammed with instruments than for this Colin Currie Quartet concert. Sadly the auditorium was not similarly packed, the hall’s admirable initiative of broadening its repertoire away from mainly dead Germans being disappointingly shunned by the regular patrons. Read more... |
'Migrations' String Quartet Weekend, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - memorials and masterpiecesTuesday, 27 February 2024
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 had processed beneath our windows on Merrion Square with the usual array of flags and heartfelt banners; at 2.30pm we were listening to a Syrian poet’s words about devastation and displacement as set to music by Jonathan Dove. Read more... |
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