Classical music
graham.rickson
Michael Tilson Thomas: The Complete Columbia, Sony and RCA Recordings (Sony)Big box sets continue to arrive. This one’s a whopper: 80 discs celebrating Michael Tilson Thomas’s 80th birthday. Artistic qualities aside, the production values here are superb, Sony’s 200-page hardback book accompanying individual discs replete with original sleeve art and spines that display each CD’s contents. This is a minor detail but a significant one, making it easy to find the performance you’re looking for. As with the recent Paavo Järvi set, it’s nice to see a celebration of a conductor who’s very Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps all great music counterpoints and comments on the times, but Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra have been searingly congruent. Before he took up his post as Chief Conductor, there were the extinction whispers of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony the night before lockdown and the fury of VW’s Fourth on the eve of Boris Johnson’s election. Now the aggressive dynamism of Walton’s First raised us out of that sinking feeling as the USA worsens by the day.George Walker’s Sinfonia No. 5. “Visions” (the composer pictured below by Frank Schramm), could have been charged, too, Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
What a delight to see an almost full Queen’s Hall for a programme solely of contemporary music. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s New Dimensions series, launched this season, sees a host of newer classical works performed and appears to be drawing in regular audience members as well as a younger crowd.Opening with James MacMillan’s Tryst, the orchestra wove together the sometimes angular strands of the music with concise conducting from principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. They were then joined by trumpet soloist Sergei Nakariakov for Jorg Widmann’s invigorating trumpet concerto Ad Absurdum Read more ...
David Nice
At the end of an exhausting week in which Holocaust Memorial Day struck a more urgent note than ever as fascism started tearing through the USA, parts of this concert were bound to hit hard. That they did so to the power of 100 was thanks to the extraordinary impact of Jakub Hrůša, now recognised as one of the greats by British audiences as he waits to take up the full-time reins at the Royal Opera. The BBC Symphony Orchestra burned for him in fullest focus.Shostakovich’s Eleventh is one of his symphonies which require special pleading (which is much better than bad, the only adjective to Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just now, music about survival, transcendence and the afterlife may have a special resonance for the BBC Singers. After all, the supremely versatile century-old chamber choir has endured its own near-death experience – at the hands of the BBC top brass who, in 2023, planned to axe them.At Kings Place, with the Aurora Orchestra and its conductor Nicholas Collon, the Singers made a typically refined and resourceful contribution to a concert in the venue “Earth Unwrapped” strand. Sense and spirit merged in a programme that began with three a cappella numbers and concluded with the 1893, chamber- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Reynaldo Hahn: Piano Quartet, Piano Quintet, Songs Karim Sulayman (tenor), Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective (Chandos)I’ve been a fan of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective for some time, having heard them in concert and on their excellent previous albums, which often seek out under-recorded composers and give them the spotlight: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Fanny Mendelssohn, Alma Mahler, Luise Adolphe le Beau. This album is another example of that, comprising chamber and vocal pieces by Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947), not someone whose music I was previously familiar with. From being a darling Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After a week of illness, heading out into the Sunday afternoon cold and rain was not something I was overjoyed to undertake. But in the event this short Wigmore Hall recital by three young singers and their fellow student pianists was thoroughly cheering, sending me back into the mizzle with a spring in my step. Both in their repertoire choices and their delivery of those choices there was so much to like and I am glad to have been there.The Song Circle of the Royal Academy of Music pairs up auditioned singers and pianists and offers them a number of performing opportunities through their Read more ...
Robert Beale
There was excellent music making in the Hallé concert in Manchester last night, and there was self-admitted “noise”. Briefly, the two coincided in one work.The outstanding music making of the evening came from pianist Giorgi Gigashvili, winner of the 2024-25 Terence Judd-Hallé Award, now fulfilling the opportunities that success gave him. Together with the orchestra and conductor Roderick Cox, he gave a beautiful and stylish performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 (in C major – the one they used to bill as “the Elvira Madigan concerto”, if your memory goes back that far).His playing was Read more ...
David Nice
Serious realisation of the seven often thorny Martinů string quartets is a major undertaking. When I spoke to Veronika Jarůšková and Peter Jarůšek after an East Neuk Festival concert, they said they intended to do it slowly, with absolute commitment. Tuesday night’s performance of the stupendous Fifth sealed the pledge. It held central place in a concert which only brought relief from Czech grittiness with the great cathartic melodies in Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet.Every performance by "the Pavel Haases" blends searing energy with supreme refinement, and this was no exception; with regular Read more ...
David Nice
When Vladimir Jurowski planned this typically unorthodox programme, he could not have known that a disaster even greater, long-term, than 9/11 was going to befall the USA two days after the concert. There is no bad time for a tricky commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks, but close to a presidential inauguration would have been right whatever the outcome. As for an 18th century “Mass in Time of War”, clearly Ukraine and Gaza would still be on the agenda.Come the event, and neither of the main works on the programme quite stirred the soul: absolutely no fault of Jurowski’s meticulous Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Once again, Glasgow’s annual winter festival of traditional music from all parts of the world is formed of an astonishingly packed programme of music, dance, trails and poetry in venues throughout the city. This year’s opening weekend saw two distinctly different orchestral concerts, each pushing the boundaries of what an orchestra can be.Returning to the Celtic Connections stage on Friday evening was Orchestral Qawwali Project with their signature blend of Sufi, Indian classical and western classical music. The two soloists – and the driving forces behind the ensemble – were magnetic Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What better way to start a season about the Earth than by looking back on it from an astronaut’s perspective? At a time when the activities of assorted billionaires and emerging superpowers are making the space race topical again, it feels more than appropriate for Kings Place to begin its Earth Unwrapped programme with Terry Riley’s Sun Rings.As one of the deities of minimalism and experimental music, Riley was an obvious choice when NASA was looking for a composer to celebrate 25 years since the launch of the Voyager space programme. His ten-part composition – liberally punctuated with high Read more ...