Classical music
Boyd Tonkin
For 30 years, La Serenissima have re-mapped the landscape of the Italian Baroque repertoire so that its towering figures, notably Vivaldi, no longer look like isolated peaks but integrated parts of a spectacular range. The ensemble founded by violinist Adrian Chandler delves deep into the archives to recover neglected music not just as a nerdish passion (though there’s nowt wrong with that) but the basis for practical performing editions that restore these lost sounds to life.At the Wigmore Hall, their “Giro d’Italia” series will span the 18th-century peninsula. It began with a seven-course Read more ...
David Nice
Is this the same Roman Rabinovich who drew harp-like delicacy from one of Chopin’s Pleyel pianos, and seeming authenticity from a 1790s grand which may have belonged to Haydn, both in the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands, Surrey? He clearly cares about the possibilities of any instrument on which he plays, so the natural consequence is maximum sonority on a modern Steinway. Too cultured to deafen, as Beatrice Rana did in this small space, he still compels you to listen to every note.You feel that Haydn would have loved the startling fullness with which the Sonata in F, HXV1/29 began. Rabinovich Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Carmina Burana isn’t a masterpiece: it’s primarily a bit of fun; fun to listen to, fun to play, really fun to sing.Few and far between are the performances where it ever manages to be much more than that, though this RSNO concert came close, mainly thanks to the conducting of Marzena Diakun, making her debut with the orchestra. The faster, louder sections were kept on an admirably tight leash so that the opening two "Fortuna" choruses really crackled, and the rumbustious choruses in the tavern were a hoot, the percussion giving it what can only be described as “welly.”The bite and precision Read more ...
Robert Beale
Anna Clyne’s This Moment had its UK premiere at Saturday’s BBC Philharmonic concert. She’s the orchestra’s composer in association, and this seven-minute piece was first played by the Philadelphia Orchestra last year.Inspired by the calligraphy of the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Zen Master and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, it’s (in the words of the composer) “a response to our collective grief and loss in recent years” and very much a meditation on death. Not too cheerful a subject, you might think, but Thích Nhất Hạnh said that when you meditate on death you love life more, and that was Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Victims of their own success in the postwar era of well-recorded sound, the Brandenburg Concertos first arrived in the ears of listeners from my generation via glossy, plush and polished recordings by heavyweight orchestras of a sort that would have baffled Bach. Four decades ago, period-conscious bands began to strip the gloopy varnish off and let the strange, bold paintwork beneath shine. Yet the look, and sound, of these six pieces “for several instruments”, rather obsequiously dedicated by the job-seeking Bach to the Margrave of Brandenburg in 1721, can still startle audiences. Last Read more ...
Alec Frank-Gemmill
One former teacher of mine said of their recording of the Mozart horn concertos “I’m not really sure why I bothered”. Said recording is excellent, so they were probably just being excessively modest. Nevertheless, every new version of these pieces does beg the question, why do we need another one? I was lucky enough to be offered a contract with the record label BIS 10 years ago on the understanding that I would definitely record Mozart’s horn concertos, among other things. It has taken me this long to get around to it. My experiences making discs on period instruments, of transcriptions Read more ...
David Nice
Out of innumerable Rite of Springs in half a century of concert-going, I’ll stick my neck out and say this was the most ferocious in execution, the richest in sound. Others may have wanted a faster, lighter Rite. But the two things that make every concert conducted by Klaus Mäkelä so extraordinary are that he inhabits the music to a visibly high level, and that he gets the fullest tone and urgent phrasing from every instrument.This was a love-in between players and conductor, and an exciting first for the London Symphony Orchestra. I remember former tuba-player Patrick Harrild saying of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Until 2022, the lovely 18th century church of St Mary-le-Strand was a traffic island, ignored and unloved and rarely visited. Then came the pedestrianisation of the section of the Strand outside Somerset House, transforming the area from somewhere polluted and dangerous, to a walkable piazza, and transforming the church into what is now dubbed “The Jewel in the Strand”. In recent times its musical offering has been similarly revived, both liturgically (there is now a regular Choral Evensong) and as a concert venue, under the auspices of Warren Mailley-Smith, as both impresario and pianist. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Piano Sonata No. 1, Schubert: Wanderer Fantasy Alexandre Kantorow (piano) (BIS)I’d previously encountered pianist Alexandre Kantorow via his exuberant set of Saint-Saëns piano concertos, sparky, lovable performances conducted by his father Jean-Jacques. This solo disc contains weightier repertoire but the Kantorow’s elucidatory abilities prevent things ever getting oppressive; if there’s a more accessible reading of Brahms’s Op. 1 Piano Sonata on disc, I’ve not heard it. Questions of technique don’t arise here, and unless you follow with a score it’s easy to forget how Read more ...
Robert Beale
Pavel Kolesnikov returned to the Hallé last night with a bobby-dazzler of a concerto. He’s a laid-back dude in appearance, with no tie, flapping jacket and cool appearance – quite a contrast with the full evening dress worn by the orchestra members – but the music says it all for him.Saint-Saëns’ Second Piano Concerto (three movements, getting faster each time) is a vehicle of naked, virtuoso pianism in a hotch-potch of styles ranging from the imitation Bach organ toccata at the start to a comic episode in the central movement that could be illustrative of one of the species that missed Read more ...
David Nice
As Steven Isserlis announced just before the final work, in more senses than one, of a five-day revelation, the 79 year old Fauré’s last letter told his wife that “at the moment I am well, very well, despite the little bout of fatigue which is caused by the end of the Quartet. I am happy with everything, and I should like everyone to be happy all around me, and everywhere”.The world is an unhappier place than ever this morning, yet somehow that incandescent performance of a uniquely beautiful string quartet made things not so hard. Today there’s calm resignation, though that probably won’t, Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic were right to bill Garrick Ohlsson, soloist in Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, as the main attraction in Saturday’s concert.The septuagenarian American is a force of nature and an exceptional artist: his playing of Rachmaninov in his last visit to Manchester remains in the memory as an exhibition of mastery. So it was again, in another concerto thick with notes.But those notes were played with entrancing grace and melodic power, as well as virtuosity, and delicacy of touch as well as insight. Clara Schumann (whose performances did much to establish it at first) said there Read more ...