Classical music
Christopher Lambton
The justification for playing Brahms with a chamber orchestra is well rehearsed. In fact, I have on my desk a Telarc boxed set of the four symphonies “in the style of the original Meiningen performances”, recorded by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under the visionary Sir Charles Mackerras in 1997. Then, as now, the idea was to lighten the texture and give greater prominence to the woodwind. By drawing back the dense curtain of string sound, the light could shine through and Brahms’ contrapuntal delicacy be revealed.That was 18 years ago: a long time in the history of an orchestra only just Read more ...
Michael Church
Never has the world of music been so open to exploration, nor so rich in paradox. Recording is abolishing history – the music of the past is being subsumed into a voracious and ever-expanding musical present. The shrinking of the globe to a digital village is abolishing geography: everyone can listen to everyone else’s music, wherever they happen to be. But in a piquant irony, just as the short-lived “world music” CD boom was whetting people’s appetite for new sounds, so those sounds were becoming homogenised out of existence, in response to the demands of the global pop market.The lament for Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The music of Olivier Messiaen lends itself ideally to the kind of multimedia project created by Cordelia Williams. His titles tell stories of terror and redemption, Man, men, God and angels. His chords burst with colour, not only the green and gold of Christmas or the red and purple of Crucifixion but the pulsing of a slow journey, stripes of redemption, layers of wakefulness. The only drawback is that the composer himself was very sure about what those stories and colours were, leaving little room for later interpreters to add their own perspectives.Nothing daunted, Williams commissioned Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Stravinsky and Bartók both escaped Europe at the start of the second world war to live in the USA. For Stravinsky it was the start of 30 years of mostly happy exile, while Bartók was to survive for only five years. Works from their time in America featured in Valery Gergiev’s penultimate concert as principal conductor of the LSO last night.Stravinsky’s neoclassical Symphony in C is not often heard in concert – it was the first time I had heard it live – and this performance was not a great advertisement for the piece. Written half in Europe, at a time when the composer’s wife, mother and Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
This Barbican concert began with a Mendelssohn overture and ended with a Haydn symphony. But on stage were the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. What did you expect in between, a Mozart piano concerto? Not likely. Instead they gave the first performance of No.48 (night studio) by Richard Ayres. English-born but resident in the Netherlands and working mostly on the Continent, Ayres has impeccable post-Minimalist credentials (studies with Louis Andriessen and Morton Feldman) which do no more than hint at how his music behaves – like a kid in a well-stocked acoustic sweet-shop. Or at a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Erkki-Sven Tüür, Brett Dean: Gesualdo Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir/Tõnu Kaljuste (ECM) Hearing composers engaging with the music of the past is invariably fascinating. Stravinsky's Pulcinella prompted me years ago to investigate Pergolesi (though many of the pieces adapted for that ballet weren't actually by him), and this stunner of a disc invoked shock, wonder and delight, sending me onto Spotify in search of choral music by the quirky Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo. His harmonically adventurous vocal ouput still casts a spell, though he's Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
How many tuba concertos are there? How many pieces are there where the guys from the heavy battalion can really shine as soloists? Well, possibly, here is one: this was the world première of Robin Holloway’s Europa and the Bull, billed as a concertante for tuba and orchestra. It is a joint commission between the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. But Liverpool won the toss to perform it for the first time in Philharmonia Hall.The main thing to bear in mind is that the tuba is a lyrical instrument, capable of all sorts, not just the bass notes in Wagner music-dramas Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
If you’re going to employ tens of extra musicians for Strauss’s gigantic Alpine Symphony, it’s probably just as well that a few other "biggies" are programmed in the same concert. So it was at the Philharmonic Hall, where the Strauss shared the programme with a new orchestration of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons as well as a selection of Canteloube’s haunting Songs of the Auvergne. All three pieces are evocations of a place or a season, so this whole concert was almost a musical novel or an orchestrated visit to an art gallery.The Strauss is a blockbuster of a work, with members of the audience Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
To keep a string quartet on the road for 20 years requires patience, devotion and staying power. Therefore the Wigmore Hall's participation in the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the Belcea Quartet, which is being marked in several European concert halls, is fitting testimony to the achievements of these players. Last night's concert was the first of their London series.The Belcea Quartet in fact has only two members who have stayed the course since the 1990s, first violin Corina Belcea and violist Krzystof Chorzelski. The other two are more recent: the French cellist Antoine Lederlin Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This was Henryk Górecki beyond the Third Symphony. His otherwise ubiquitous masterpiece was notable by its absence from yesterday's programme. That was surely a conscious decision, and a wise one, allowing his many other important works to come out from its shadow. Górecki turned out to be an ideal subject for the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s “Total Immersion” treatment. His music gradually evolved throughout his career, from acerbic neoclassicism, to esoteric serialism, and then to austere minimalism. But the links between the phases outweigh the differences, so hearing music from each in close Read more ...
graham.rickson
Adams: Absolute Jest, Grand Pianola Music San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas, with Orli Shaham and Marc-André Hamelin (pianos), Synergy Vocals (SFS Media)Beethoven's scherzos can be deceptively weighty, the fun allied with serious intent. John Adams' brilliant Absolute Jest takes Beethoven's approach to extremes, in the form of a vast 25-minute scherzo cheerfully quoting from the great man's quartets and symphonies. Some are instantly recognisable. Like the Seventh Symphony's insistent 6/8 rhythm, which dominates the opening section. This is such clever, engaging music, with Read more ...
David Nice
One of the summer’s greatest pleasures has been to confirm an often untested truism: that you may hear some of the finest and rarest music-making in out-of-the-way places. Just take a local who’s made the grade – in this instance, violinist and conductor Thomas Kemp – and who can gather friends and colleagues of equal calibre around him, harness the most atmospheric and/or unusual local venues, here spread around beautiful Kent country in the vicinity of heavily wooded North Downs and the Pilgrims’ Way, and you have a top-notch festival. Whether its reputation and its financing can make a Read more ...