Classical music
Robert Beale
’Tis the season for big children’s choirs to show off their end-of-season projects, and the Hallé Children’s Choir and Orchestra had something exceptional to present under Sir Mark Elder’s baton on Sunday afternoon: the world premiere of Jonathan Dove’s A Brief History of Creation.Commissioned by the Hallé for the children’s choir, it formed the second part of a concert that began with the First Suite from Bizet’s L’Arlesienne music and Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. There’s little doubt that Dove's new work will be a piece other accomplished children’s choirs allied Read more ...
David Nice
"He is one of the few pianists who will not make them sound like angry birds," said young pianist-animateur Víkingur Ólafsson in Reykjavík when I told him that in little over 24 hours' time I'd be hearing Pierre-Laurent Aimard work his way through Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux at dawn, in the afternoon and evening and close to midnight at the Aldeburgh Festival. Of course there are a few ferocious birdcalls in the craggier of Messiaen's landscapes, but Vikingur was right: a more lucid, rhythmically alert and, where necessary, hypnotically even performance of this music you will never hear. Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A couple of hours of certainty really were very welcome during referendum week, and Murray Perahia did indeed bring clarity, poise, and an unquestioned masterpiece – Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata – to a full Barbican Hall last night. And not a single note of music written after 1893.The finest moments of truth and revelation in this recital with a first half of Haydn, Mozart and Brahms, and then the Hammerklavier in the second, were the slow movements. There was a serene beauty about the A major Andante cantabile con espressione of Mozart’s A minor Piano Read more ...
David Kettle
It should have been a complete disaster. Not announcing your festival’s programme until barely a week before it started ought to have guaranteed that nobody knew about it – no press, no audiences, other plans made, other things booked.But still they came. It’s testament to the Cottier Chamber Project’s now firmly established place in Scotland’s summer musical life – this is its sixth year – that even keeping audiences in the dark as to what was planned didn’t deter them.That bizarre delay was down to questions over two major funders, artistic director Andy Saunders has explained. And it can’t Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ilya Beshevli: Wanderer (Village Green)Siberian musician Ilya Beshevli's background will resonate with anyone who's resented learning an instrument. The son of a composer and a musicologist, Beshevli grew to dislike his enforced piano lessons, envious of his non-musical peers who were allowed to play outside while he practised. He returned to the instrument by chance in his early twenties. In his words, “I feel like I'm lacking basic knowledge... nevertheless, I'm studying music at university at the moment and we'll see what this will bring...” This is a hard album to pigeonhole: best to Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Crazy-faced space-hopper, playmobil fireman, marble run: toys from my own childhood, staring at me now from out of glass cases, alongside an 18th century marionette, thread-bare rocking horses and a headless Georgian doll. This concert in the Museum of Childhood could have been a wallow in nostalgia. Instead, with their usual brand of ingenuity, the Multi-Story Orchestra kindled musical artefacts into vibrant life.It began with the trembling bow of Sally Pendlebury’s cello, open fifths sounding almost painfully vulnerable in the museum’s wide hangar. American composer Caroline Shaw’s In Manus Read more ...
David Nice
Flashback to 1981, when the Bolshoy Ballet danced Swan Lake Act Two to a tinny Melodiya recording in Istanbul's Open-Air Theatre (seats were cheap for Interrailing students). Turkey was friends with the Soviet Union then. It hadn't been in the 1950s, when Turkish pianist and citoyenne du monde İdil Biret was advised not to play a Prokofiev sonata in her motherland. And it isn't friendly with Russia now, which didn't stop the first world-class Turkish symphony orchestra, the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic, playing an all-Russian programme featuring controversial 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Nothing galvanises an audience quite like physical risk. As soprano Sarah Tynan rose on a hoop into the darkness, intoning the final words of "Départ" from Britten's song cycle Les Illuminations, you could almost hear her heart race. Beneath, a troupe of circus performers held the rope – and her life – in their hands.In choreographer/director Struan Leslie’s vision, performers decked out as Rimbaud’s "sturdy rogues" brought sinew, grace and heart-stopping spectacle to a night illuminated by explosive, raw-fresh string music: it was all about the vertical.For Leslie, Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nimrod Borenstein: Suspended opus 69 das freie orchester Berlin/Laércio Diniz (Solaire Records)The splendidly monikered Nimrod Borenstein’s Suspended opus 69 deserves our attention for being the soundtrack to a juggling performance, namely Gandini Juggling’s 4x4 Ephemeral Architectures (“conceptualised as a piece of imaginary architecture and a fusion of the world of juggling and ballet”). Hmm. Fear not. Listen blind and what we hear sounds very much like a ballet score, its string writing looking back to Stravinsky’s Apollo. As well to the pastoral English tradition – parts of it recall Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If you needed further proof of the intelligence, the thoughtfulness of Daniil Trifonov’s musicianship, the programme for his four-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall would go a long way towards providing it. How many young soloists of Trifonov’s standing would choose to turn song-accompanist for an evening of lieder? And how many, having done so, would deliver so generous and self-effacing a performance?The evening belonged, as it should, to baritone Matthias Goerne. Having crafted a sequence of songs opening with Berg’s Vier Lieder Op.2, moving through Dichterliebe, Michelangelo settings Read more ...
David Nice
On the itinerary of musical tourists around Europe, the opening of the Prague Spring Festival comes a close third to the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year's Day Concert and the Bayreuth experience. That said, Smetana's Má vlast (My Homeland) – the immoveable opener – is more of an acquired taste than Johann Strauss or Wagner.Too often Má vlast's six-tone poems have been served up as slabs of a national monument, with only two – Vltava (otherwise Germanised as Die Moldau) and From Bohemia's Woods and Fields – offering guaranteed bliss. This year Estonian Paavo Järvi gave the Czech Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Goldberg Variations Bassoon Consort Frankfurt (MDG)The only performances of Bach's Goldbergs which don't hit the spot for me tend to be those played on harpsichord. Piano will always be best, but I've enjoyed versions for harp, guitar, string orchestra and accordion. This improbable new transcription is for nine bassoons: eight regulars plus a contra. It feels reassuringly ‘right’ – presumably because we’re so used to hearing bassoons in baroque music. Henrik Rabien’s arrangement sticks to Bach’s keys, the only significant alteration being the transposition of many lines an octave down Read more ...