Classical music
Peter Quantrill
Imagine knowing Hamlet as a four-act play, or The Ambassadors without its bottom third. Imagine Mozart’s Requiem as a torso that halts eight bars into the Lacrymosa, or Mahler’s Tenth as the lone Adagio (as, indeed it too often appears). We might admire them all the more for what we ached to feel whole as their creators intended.So it is with Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, hitherto almost universally known as a three-movement torso. Almost four years ago the Berliner Philharmoniker played and recorded the final version of the most convincing of many attempts over the years to complete the Read more ...
David Nice
It’s boasting, but surely true, to claim that London offers the biggest number of classy Christmas concerts in the world. How could it be otherwise with established seasonal festivals based around Spitalfields, St John’s Smith Square and the over-restored but still amazing Temple Church whose founder Knights Templar bring Dan Brown fans in droves and an inevitable daily admission fee of a fiver? To these three shrines come most of the best choirs from Britain and further afield, and on the evidence of A Wondrous Mystery on the second evening of the Temple Winter Festival, there’s none more Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Jaap van Zweden is going places. At 55, he is already 16 years into a second high-profile musical career. His first, as a violinist, saw him appointed leader of the Concertgebouw, the youngest ever to hold the position. From there, he moved to the conductor’s podium, and is now Music Director of the Dallas Symphony and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. According to some rumours, he is also under serious consideration for the New York Philharmonic. But when we met, our conversation began with a more immediate engagement, the première of Magnus Lindberg’s Second Violin Concerto with Frank Peter Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hindemith: The Long Christmas Dinner American Symphony Orchestra/Leon Botstein (Bridge)Hindemith's delectable pantomime Tuttifäntchen remains one of my favourite seasonal discs, and now we have the first English-language recording of one of the composer's last works. The Long Christmas Dinner is a single act opera written in 1960 in collaboration with Thornton Wilder, an adaptation of his 1931 play. This is a highly affecting, gently moving piece, compressing 90 years into 50 minutes; Wilder and Hindemith show us the rise and fall of a middle class family through a sequence of seasonal Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Nobody knows de trouble I see is a popular concerto, but it’s an unlikely hit. Zimmermann maintains a distanced relationship with the spiritual on which the work is based, and, while there are jazz elements too, this is a long way from crossover. Zimmermann maintains his modernist/serialist perspective throughout, and all the jazz ideas – the trombone glissandos, the sax section replacing the French horns, the vaguely improvisatory trumpet writing – are configured within a strict and austere single-movement structure.Fortunately, both trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger and Read more ...
graham.rickson
The few ensemble lapses and moments of insecurity during the first half of this concert had nothing to do with Richard Farnes’s conducting, or with the playing of an augmented Orchestra of Opera North. It’s in rude health; Farnes has refined and deepened the orchestra’s string sound, and the winds and brass are world-class.But they weren’t able to compete with Hurricane Desmond. You could almost feel the building buckling under the strain, and at several points you feared that large chunks of Leeds Town Hall’s roof were about to blow off. It can’t be easy to play securely when you’re worried Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night’s Wigmore Hall recital by countertenor Iestyn Davies and tenor Allan Clayton, accompanied by James Baillieu, was an all-round triumph: brilliantly programmed, superbly sung and very thought-provoking. Mixing solo items with duos, the programme encompassed Purcell, Britten, Adès, Barber and the young American composer Nico Muhly. If it had been a competition – which it wasn’t – Britten would have been the champion. But he was also responsible for the most troubling of the pieces.Britten’s Canticle II of 1952 sets the story of Abraham and Isaac, as told in the medieval mystery plays Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Mass in B Minor Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)John Eliot Gardiner's 1985 B Minor Mass still sounds good, a perfect marriage of smart period practice and theatrical nous. Modern instrument performances can feel impossibly bloated and stodgy. Gardiner's forces dance, but lack nothing in weight. Vaclav Luks' Czech version is my current favourite, but Gardiner's DG recording comes in as a close second. This new version was taped in March 2015. The named forces are the same, though the personnel have changed considerably over 30 years. The newer set's Read more ...
David Nice
Why play a very substantial act of ballet music in concert? In the case of Aurora’s wedding entertainment from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, there are at least three good reasons. It embraces the most inventive and unorthodox of divertissements in any ballet – the one in The Nutcracker comes a close second – and a symphony orchestra deserves the chance to perform at least a substantial chunk of what Stravinsky called Tchaikovsky’s chef d’oeuvre. Besides, you won’t have heard every sequence in any choreographed version, not even the very thorough one by Matthew Bourne, who includes more Read more ...
Richard Bratby
You can read a lot into the first two chords of Beethoven’s "Eroica" Symphony. Classical portico or violent detonation? Majestic assertion of E flat major, or the first shocking glimpse of a drama that’s already under way? Michael Seal, conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, accelerated through those first two bars before sweeping into a sleek, swinging first subject. He could afford to let his players sing. Those asymmetrical opening chords had done just enough to subvert the polished surface – to hint at the music’s latent potential for violent disorder.And at critical points Read more ...
geoff brown
There are 12 of them, standing in a semi-circle. No conductor in sight. Instead they start singing by striking some invisible match. Immediately the hall is blazing with heat, light, and the ecstatic sounds of Tudor polyphony. Now celebrating its tenth concert season, the British unaccompanied choral group Stile Antico have been singing this repertoire since they first came together; and this Wigmore Hall shindig, exuberantly received by a packed house, marked the anniversary by revisiting the music sung on their very first CD, Music for Compline, in 2007.Have they got bored with this Read more ...
David Kettle
Glasgow has a brand new concert hall, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra has a brand new home. A move for the Orchestra from Henry Wood Hall, a converted church in the city’s West End it has occupied since 1979, has been on the cards for several years, but few could have predicted the scale and intricacy of the final project. The New RSNO Centre snuggles conveniently right next to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, and brings new offices, an education suite, a digital centre and practice rooms right to the city centre. The project’s centrepiece, however, is the RSNO Centre’s auditorium, Read more ...