Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
Programming a concert is a tricky business. Programming an entire Proms season almost unthinkably difficult. But even allowing for the odd evening of leftovers, those artists, anniversaries and concertos that just can’t be fitted in anywhere else, last night’s Prom 15 was a muddle.A first half of Tchaikovsky and Anthony Payne might look reasonable on paper, but in practice two nature-driven, symphonic tone-poems for chorus and orchestra – variations on a theme – offered too little contrast and no discernable emotional or narrative arc, leaving us much where we began, and not in a Four Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The last time but one that the Three Choirs Festival was in Gloucester the main offering was Elgar’s oratorio The Kingdom, and there’s a kind of inevitability about the same work turning up again, same place, same occasion, six years later. After all, the Three Choirs has not survived for almost 300 years by a fidgety policy of constant renewal. The festival may be a much more varied affair now than in its Barchester days, but the core image is still of a packed cathedral listening to Elgar or Vaughan Williams or Mendelssohn – and all these composers figure this time, with the bold, slightly Read more ...
David Nice
The last time I heard Beethoven's setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy in the finale of his Ninth Symphony, it was as European anthem at the end of this May's Europe Day Concert, and everybody gladly stood. That hopeful occasion was distinguished by Andrew Manze's Rameauisation of the melody, stylishly played by Rachel Podger and the European Union Baroque Orchestra. We've been through the mill since then, so last night it was appropriate to hear before it not only the rest of Beethoven's initially turbulent drama in Vladimir Jurowski's typically unusual vision, but also the fraught fanfares of Read more ...
David Nice
It's not often you think you detect a future Brünnhilde in a soprano performing a great Verdi role, but that was the case when American Tamara Wilson made her UK debut last autumn as a stunning Leonora in the ENO production of Verdi's The Force of Destiny. So would she sing the Ring? Not for 10 years at least, she said. But then Mark Wigglesworth, a conductor she knew she could trust as partner, proposed the final scene of Die Walküre at the Proms, and the rest should go down in history.Not that just the last father-daughter confrontation, albeit one of the greatest in all opera, is an Read more ...
David Nice
It's never easy readjusting to the weird and sometimes wonderful acoustics of Albert's colosseum at Proms time, least of all when the first thing you hear there comes from a period-instrument band. Tuning in to Jérémie Rhorer's Le Cercle de l'Harmonie didn't take too long, however, while the urgent projection and diction of a splendid new Italian soprano on the block, Rosa Feola, did the hall proud. And all this to a packed house of 5,000 or so – not bad for relatively unknown performers, though the neat Mozart-Mendelssohn programme must have helped to sell all the seats.Rhorer (pictured Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Mass No. 3 in F minor Soloists, Bavarian Radio Choir, Bamberg Symphony Orchestra/Robin Ticciati (Tudor)Good Bruckner recordings aren’t just the preserve of elderly conductors. Robin Ticciati’s version of the youthful F minor Mass is both musically satisfying and emotionally involving: his non-interventionalist approach reaping huge dividends. He’s helped by the performers: the Bamberg players’ burnished warmth irresistible alongside supple, rich singing from the Bavarian Radio Choir. Their dynamic control is glorious – sample the “Gloria”’s full-throated opening, the choir’s tone Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Even in a performance as well-organised as this one, masterminded by Gianandrea Noseda, there is still something of the codebook about the Missa solemnis. Its length and scale simultaneously attract devotion and repel the kind of affection drawn by earlier, spaciously conceived and more abstractly “spiritual” works such as the “Pastoral” Symphony and Violin Concerto.On a practical level, Noseda staged the work to best advantage across the resounding space of the Royal Albert Hall. The 200-strong combined forces of the Hallé Choir and Manchester Chamber Choir made no concession to the kind of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It is interesting to note how, in the space of a few short decades, so-called “period instrument” performances of classical music have moved from edgy experimentation to the mainstream of the tradition. In last night’s Prom, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), born in 1986, was paired with the choir of King’s College Cambridge, tracing its origins back to 1441, to largely happy effect.The programme was dominated by two very different mass settings: Haydn’s Mass in Time of War, marking a period of political uncertainty, and Fauré’s Requiem, offering gentle solace in the face of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Happy returns of various kinds last night at the Wigmore Hall, where hall regulars the Brook Street Band (violins Rachel Harris and Farran Scott, cellist Tatty Theo and harpsichordist Carolyn Gibley) took to the stage along with a number of musical friends for a 20th birthday celebration concert. An all-Handel programme paid tribute to the composer whose London address gives the group its name, expanding outwards from the opening intimacy of trio sonatas and suites to finish with soprano and baritone cantata Apollo e Dafne.The Trio Sonata from Saul offered an overture of sorts, previewing all Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Royal Opera’s Boris Godunov production made the short trip from Covent Garden to South Ken for the company’s appearance at the 2016 Proms. The opera (here in its original 1869 version) is a good choice for concert presentation: as Antonio Pappano writes in the programme, much of its music approaches oratorio. That is particularly true of the choral numbers, and the work is a tour de force for the Royal Opera Chorus. But every aspect of the music is this production is strong, so the gains balanced the losses, despite the minimal visual presentation.Little of Richard Jones’s visual Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s impossible to get the measure of the Cheltenham Music Festival in just one day. Lasting more than a fortnight, this is the festival that made the running in postwar British music: that helped put Malcolm Arnold and Robert Simpson on the map and defined a genre - the “Cheltenham Symphony”. Times change and financial pressures increase, but under the artistic directorship of Meurig Bowen, Cheltenham is still a powerful (if undervalued) force in contemporary classical music. Of the 120-odd composers in the 2016 Festival, at least one third are alive. The programme boasts 15 world premieres Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The first notes of the first night of the Proms weren’t the ones expected. Instead of either “God Save the Queen” or simply the start of the Tchaikovsky, the “Marseillaise” rang out into the Royal Albert Hall, the Tricouleur projected in coloured light across the organ. Everyone stood. A fervent tribute to the tragedy of Nice, it set the tone for a strange and startlingly appropriate season opening.In one of those supreme ironies, given that it was planned ages ago, the programme couldn’t have been better for the occasion. Even if the Tchaikovsky Fantasy-Overture “Romeo and Juliet” was Read more ...