Classical music
stephen.walsh
There’s a lot to be said for the planning that clearly went into this concert by the Cardiff-based new music ensemble, Uproar. Starting with Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, it added three new commissions for (more or less) the same band and a fourth, existing piece previously composed to go with the Ligeti.The risk, I suppose, is that plenty of the model work, as well as its actual scoring, will rub off on the new pieces. All but one of the four did indeed give the slight impression of having filtered through Ligeti’s originally startling combination of ambient cosmic noise and passing musical Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Memorably described by Gramophone magazine as the “new kids on the classical block…with lavish pocket money”, Apple’s London-based label Platoon is busy cementing its street cred with an ongoing concert series at Kings Place.If BIS (bought by Apple in 2024) remain the old-school, traditionalist offering, then Platoon are the edgy, digital younger sibling. So far the roster includes violinist Daniel Pioro, rising violin star Stella Chen, conductor Dalia Stasevska and now the Grammy-winning American Attacca String Quartet, whose new recording of the Ravel String Quartet put them in the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective, now very much a part of the establishment world of new music, are still enlarging their territory. For this set, performed in Leeds and Manchester and repeated in Liverpool, Nottingham and the Southbank Centre, they are revisiting some ground but have a world premiere, commissioned by themselves, to offer too.On one level, with co-artistic director Rakhi Singh as lead violin, it’s a programme exploring the range of the classical string quartet (with or without percussion and/or electronics, and in one item down to a trio), but on another it’s a journey into almost Read more ...
David Nice
Not to be overshadowed by the adrenalin charges of the Budapest Festival Orchestra the previous evening, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska gave a supercharged triple whammy of masterpieces. They even had a pianist to match the Budapesters’ Igor Levit, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. He seemed as delighted with Stasevska and the players as they were with him; the post-performance embraces spoke volumes about communicative kindred spirits.Was it worth assembling a full BBC Symphony Chorus and two soloists as well as large orchestra for the first 18 minutes? Read more ...
David Nice
A showstopper for starters followed by dark depths, a quirky compilation after the interval: it’s what you might expect from Iván Fischer and his 42-year-old Budapest Festival Orchestra. All Prokofiev, too: the sort of thing we used to get from Valery Gergiev and visiting Petersburgers. Yet while Gergiev’s alliance with Putin means he’ll not be here again, Fischer has balanced criticising Orbán and keeping his Hungarian orchestra on the road.The nominal star soloist was Igor Levit, one of the few pianists in the world up to the colossal demands of Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto, but as Read more ...
David Nice
You could plan an entire concert season around the theme of “late style”, its paradoxes and variations. For this one-off, many of us expected a concentrated mesh of Edward Said’s only-connect observations with a well-balanced musical programme, something along the lines of the recent 90-minute cloud tapestry the City of London Sinfonia wove with atmospheric scientist Simon Clark (Rachel Halliburton, whom I accompanied, loved it, as did I).That was to underestimate the latest collaboration with the London Review of Books, involving four very fine actors voicing not just Said’s chosen literary Read more ...
Robert Beale
Anja Bihlmaier returned to the BBC Philharmonic – for the first time in the Bridgewater Hall as principal guest conductor – with a programme to mark International Women’s Day, and consisting entirely of music by women composers, past and present.Surviving symphonies written by 19th century women are not exactly thick on the ground, but Emilie Mayer’s No. 5 (one of eight) is evidence of what determination and originality could achieve even in a social context where expectations were of conformity and subservience. More of it below. The whole programme was of unfamiliar music: not a single Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Exactly half a century ago, Semyon Bychkov fled the USSR for the United States as he sought to swap tyranny for liberty. Last night, in a world that feels utterly different yet even more terrifying, the great conductor turned the stellar talents of his Czech Philharmonic Orchestra to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich: both a victim, and a troubled celebrant, of the searing Soviet history he endured. At the Barbican (a date on the Czechs’ current European tour), we inevitably felt the weight of the past that conductor and orchestra carry, in a programme that paired Shostakovich’s First Read more ...
graham.rickson
Quartets Through a Time of Change: music by Ravel, Durey, Tailleferre and Milhaud Brother Tree Sound (First Hand Records)There are plenty – and I mean plenty – of recordings of the Ravel String Quartet, the majority, I would guess, paired with the Debussy Quartet, in what has become something of a programming cliché. The Brother Tree Sound quartet take the rather more enterprising approach of putting it alongside three other French quartets written between 1917 and 1919, none of which are very well-known if they are known at all. It works really well, both as exposure for the lesser Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Mahan Esfahani play the harpsichord is to watch a philosopher at work. While there’s often playfulness and shimmering levity you can feel the thought behind each note. The Iranian-American’s passion for the harpsichord began when he was nine – the moment he heard it on a cassette his uncle gave to him when he was visiting Iran, he knew he wanted to spend his life devoted to the instrument. In a Guardian interview he once described it as the “posh, pretty boy in prison. He’s gonna get beaten on” – a witty yet defensive quote that accounts for an approach that’s as radical as it’s Read more ...
Robert Beale
A cello concerto received its UK premiere in Manchester last night – almost 100 years after it was written. It’s by Maria Herz, a German-Jewish composer who had to leave her native land in the 1930s and whose work has remained almost unknown until quite recently.Raphaela Gromes has championed this concerto, giving its German premiere last year, and she brought it to Britain with the Hallé and Alpesh Chauhan (main picture).It’s a one-movement work in three sections, with modest orchestral forces required, and harmonic analysts might say it’s of its time – displaying a mastery of chromatic Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston just gets better and better, both as singer and as actor. Last night’s recital at Temple Church had an unusual and wide-ranging programme – consisting of a first half hopping through the centuries, followed by a complete performance of Schumann’s “Kerner-Lieder” cycle.Charlston and Sholto Kynoch had originally devised this programme for last autumn’s Oxford International Song Festival. It certainly looked very appealing on paper, with all kinds of music to discover. And so it proved.The first half worked brilliantly as a sequence, with all kinds of Read more ...