mon 23/12/2024

Classical Reviews

Vaughan Williams Anniversary Concert, Wigmore Hall review - choices, choices

David Nice

A 150th birthday cornucopia was anticipated: vintage chamber and vocal Vaughan Williams in a big Wigmore Hall three-parter alongside music by other great Brits. It turned out, instead, to be a handsome if overlarge horn sounding several cracked notes.

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Orpheus, Opera North review - cross-cultural opera in action

Robert Beale

Within its own aspirations, Orpheus is a complete triumph. “Monteverdi reimagined”, as Opera North subtitled it from the start, is an attempt to unite (and contrast, and compare, and cross-fertilise) early baroque opera with South Asian classical music.

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Esfahani, RSNO, Søndergård, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - music meets machine

Christopher Lambton

This was one of those rare occasions when a somewhat diverse collection of pieces knits together into a rather satisfying programme. To start at the end, the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony is a rumbustious crowd pleaser not least because of its theatrical appeal: the lone organist sitting way above the orchestra unleashing the final peroration in a great surge of full-fat romantic harmony.

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Total Immersion: Sibelius the Storyteller, Barbican review - a feast of sagas and psychic masterpieces

David Nice

If there’s a dud or a dullard among Sibelius’s 116 official opus numbers, I haven’t heard it. Yet catching even many of the outright masterpieces live in concert isn’t easy; the brevity that can show us a world in under 10 minutes makes some difficult to programme.

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Noisenight10, Roberts Balanas, Omeara Club review - virtuosic brilliance with a wave to the wild side

Rachel Halliburton

When Roberts Balanas was at the Royal Academy of Music he was asked to perform something “different” for an open day. The Latvian violinist already had a reputation for being as experimental as he was virtuosic.

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Boris Giltburg, Wigmore Hall review - power and grace in elegies and monuments

David Nice

A double-sided A4 sheet is better than a programme online only – the default for several London venues now – but the Wigmore Hall missed a vital trick in failing to tell us what Boris Giltburg intended in a transcendental sequence which should have been headed “death and remembrance”, He’s an eloquent writer, too; his own note would have been much better than the disconnected observations we got about Bach/Busoni, Ravel, Chopin and Medtner.

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Kolesnikov, Hallé, Elder, Manchester review - commanding Smetana, Rachmaninov and Strauss

Robert Beale

As Sir Mark Elder begins his penultimate season as music director of the Hallé, it’s clear that his command of, and communication with, the orchestra are as complete and purpose-driven as ever. It’s the first Thursday series concert of the new season, and at last a full set of concerts is in the offing, after three years of interruption and adaptation, but change is in the air.

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Purcell's Playhouse, Bevan, Barokksolistene, Eike, Purcell Room review - kaleidoscopic delights

David Nice

“What about the communication with the audience?” asked violinist and impresario Bjarte Eike in his First Person piece for theartsdesk. “How can a 'normal' concert be turned into a special event?” Explaining how is one thing – but doing it to dazzle our senses is what counts. Though the Alehouse Session which followed out in the foyer was brilliant business more or less as usual, “Purcell’s Playhouse” took us further on the road of making the old absolutely new.

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Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall review - titanic talent shows his lighter side

Rachel Halliburton

It probably tells you all you need to know about Igor Levit that when a mobile phone pinged just before his encore, he neither ignored it, nor seemed annoyed, but turned it into a seamless musical gag. After sending a ripple of laughter through the audience as his eyes widened in comedic shock, he played a responding ping on the piano at exactly the same pitch.

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Gurrelieder, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - everything in place, but still something’s missing

David Nice

Schoenberg’s “Song of the Wood Dove” takes up a mere 11 of the 100 minutes of his epic Gurrelieder, though it’s a crucial narrative of how King Waldemar of Gurre’s beloved Tove was murdered by his jealous queen. Last night, as in Simon Rattle’s 2017 Proms performance, stunning mezzo Karen Cargill came on stage, immediately in character, and with no reference to the score on the stand in front of her, showed everyone else how to do it.

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