Classical music
Bernard Hughes
The latest instalment of the Americana ’18 series at St John’s Smith Square last Friday saw the Dmitri Ensemble and conductor Graham Ross present a survey of American minimalist music for string ensemble. In a brilliantly conceived programme, the ensemble found fresh energy and propulsion in these classic works, but also a subtlety and humanity in a style that can be mechanistic.The ensemble of young players, sitting on the floor in the middle of St John’s rather than elevated on the stage, was 13-strong, placing it between a genuine chamber group and a "proper" string orchestra. It allowed Read more ...
graham.rickson
Abbandonata: Handel Italian Cantatas Carolyn Sampson (soprano), The King’s Consort/Robert King (Vivat)The young Handel’s desire to be an opera composer prompted him to spend the years 1706-1710 in Italy. He was already a superb academician and master of counterpoint, but a colleague recorded that Handel felt that his melodic gifts needed honing. Where better to go than Italy? There, he composed much church music, a couple of successful operas and scores of chamber cantatas. These were mostly written in Rome – a city in which opera had been banned by papal decree as penitence for an Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder’s first concert in the Hallé Thursday series for 2018-19 was on clearly mapped Hallé territory – Richard Strauss and Elgar. They have a reputation, and a tradition, of playing these composers’ music very well. They’ve already recorded Elgar's Second Symphony and, judging by the microphones around the platform, they’re doing the same right now with Strauss’s Don Quixote.The soloists were their own principals, cellist Nicholas Trygstad (pictured below) and viola player Timothy Pooley. Though it won’t be discernible in any purely audio document of the occasion, they and their Read more ...
David Nice
Presenting the last Mozart symphonies as a three-act opera for orchestra, as Richard Tognetti and his febrile fellow Australians did on Monday, was always going to be a supreme challenge. It worked, as Boyd Tonkin reported here. Since then, the Barbican's grandiosely-named "International Associate Ensemble" has opened up the repertoire, synchronising with film (on Tuesday) and ending its mini-residency with the kind of vibrant rattlebag for which it's rightly celebrated. How it all added up remains to gel in the mind, but the bonuses were splendid: world-class Australian soprano Nicole Car Read more ...
David Nice
Here it comes - get a grip. The tears have started flowing in the trio "Quid sum miser" and 12 minutes later, as the tenor embarks on his "Ingemisco" solo, you have to stop the shakes turning into noisy sobbing. The composer then lets you off the hook for a bit, but only transcendent beauty in singing and playing can achieve quite this effect in Verdi's Requiem. No one conducts it with more sense of nuance, more space and silence at the right points, than Antonio Pappano, last night giving the perfect base for an outstanding solo quartet, his own Royal Opera Orchestra on top form and the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Think Glastonbury, not Salzburg. It struck me at Milton Court last night that the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s ebullient, rock’n’roll Mozart would go down a storm at the sort of music festival renowned for canvas more than canapes. As listeners now expect from the ensemble that director-leader Richard Tognetti has steered since 1990, the ACO shook the Barbican’s junior venue with an electrifying account of the three great symphonies – numbers 39, 40 and 41 – with which Mozart said his revolutionary farewell to the form in 1788. But if the ACO – all of them (sparing cellos) on their Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Kings Place takes a broad and "curated" approach to season programming, and events often have to fit into very nebulous and abstract themes. This concert by the London Sinfonietta was part of a strand called "Time Unwrapped" and sought to explore the role of time in music. In the event, this potentially infinite subject became an opportunity to showcase various diverse strands of the Sinfonietta’s programming, under a broad rubric about absolute and perceived notions of time. The former was acknowledged by having each of the three sections begun exactly on the hour – of seven, eight and nine Read more ...
The Triumph of Time and Truth, Higginbottom, Kings Place review – time well spent, despite the words
Boyd Tonkin
You can always depend on Handel to turn verbal dross into musical gold. The chasm between lumbering doggerel and soaring sound can seldom have yawned wider, though, that in several numbers from the third, English version of The Triumph of Time and Truth. “Melancholy is a folly, Wave all sorrow until tomorrow,” poor Mhairi Lawson had to sing, like some game trouper in a village panto scripted by the vicar after one too many cream sherries. Then, as her carpe diem aria swings into “Life consists in the present hour”, Handel at his finest blazes through with a bravura flame, tended by an Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bernstein: The Complete Naxos Recordings Marin Alsop (conductor) (Naxos)One of the best reasons for investing in this superb Bernstein box set lasts less than two minutes and isn't even by Lennie. Turn to Disc 7 and John Corigliano’s contribution to A Bernstein Birthday Bouquet, eight 70th birthday variations on On The Town’s “New York, New York” from composers with personal connections to Bernstein. Corigliano mixes Copland with Sinatra, to brilliantly witty effect. You hope that the dedicatee was amused. Luciano Berio's opener is a treat, and there's plenty of fun to be had in Read more ...
David Nice
Single adjectives by way of description always sell masterpieces short, and especially the ambiguous symphonies forged in blood, sweat and tears during the Stalin years. The Barbican's advance blurb hit one aspect of Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony - "startlingly buoyant" - and another in Prokofiev's Sixth - "contemplative". Yet you could also, piling on the adverbs, call one fiercely disorenting and the other nightmarishly expressionistic. Sakari Oramo conducting a BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form focused all facets without selling the unsettling underbelly short - while in between, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
There’s always a special atmosphere when the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra returns to Birmingham Town Hall, and it’s not just because of the building’s Greek Revival beauty: the gilded sunburst on the ceiling, or the towering, intricately painted mass of the organ, topped with its cameo of Queen Victoria. Or, for that matter, the sense of history: that you’re occupying the space where Mendelssohn, Dvořák and Elgar premiered major choral works, and where Gounod narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of a jilted mistress (advanced students of Birmingham musical history can savour Read more ...
Robert Beale
Edward Gardner was back amongst friends when he opened the Hallé’s Thursday series concerts. This was the place where he made his mark, as the Manchester orchestra’s first ever assistant conductor (and Youth Orchestra music director), and he’s been a welcome visitor ever since. There’s an air of personal authority to him now, and a physical style a little less reminiscent of Sir Mark Elder – from whom he undoubtedly learnt a lot in those early days – and both the Hallé Orchestra members and the Hallé Choir gave him of their best.Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra was characterized by Read more ...