Classical music
Sebastian Scotney
There's a whole fairytale backstory to be told here. The residents of Saffron Walden and the surrounding area still can't quite believe their good fortune. The North Essex town and its state secondary school have been gifted a new 730-seat concert hall with a fine acoustic by a philanthropist with twin passions for state education and classical music.The hall's run of good fortune has continued, right up to this concert, arguably its biggest coup to date. The hall's manager Angela Dixon had managed to book Nicola Benedetti for just one performance, and when all the tickets for the violinist's Read more ...
stephen.walsh
You might imagine that composers in general would write songs. On my way to the BCMG’s programme of pieces from the songbook assembled by John Woolrich and Mary Wiegold for the Composers’ Ensemble 30-odd years ago, I tried and failed to think of a significant 19-century composer who didn’t write songs. But in the 20th century song seems to have become a dirty word, associated with mere popularist geniuses like Gershwin, Irving Berlin and John Lennon, then grafted back on to “classical” (as opposed to “music”) as a CD track label. “Serious” modern composers, it turns out, have to be more Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Six Cello Suites Viola de Hoog (Vivat)Two hours of solo instrumental music may sound daunting. Bach's six cello suites are anything but. They were composed when the cello was beginning to supersede the fretted viola de gamba, an instrument well-suited to polyphony, whereas the cello's design and tuning pattern means that the harmonies usually have to be implied, the chords broken and arpeggiated. This gives the Bach suites a very distinctive feel, and newcomers could do worse than dipping into Canadian journalist Eric Siblin's engaging, accessible exploration. Bach's music is Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Even by trumpeters’ standards, Håkan Hardenberger is a flamboyant figure. He sports a sharp, tailored suit and a wing-collared shirt, and his stage presence is all swagger and pomp. HK Gruber has captured his spirit perfectly in his jazzy, experimental trumpet concerto Aerial, which has become the trumpeter’s calling card. That proved the highlight of the evening here, though, as it was followed by a lacklustre Mahler Five, a rare disappointment from the usually reliable conductor Andris Nelsons.The Gruber concerto is in two movements – one slow, one fast – but even in the slow movement there Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The brothers Erik, Ken, and Mark Schumann founded the Schumann Quartet in 2007 and it might well have been an all-family affair had the cellist’s twin sister chosen to switch from violin to viola and join them. The Schumann brothers are of German-Japanese heritage – an interesting mix of temperaments – and perhaps because of their sister they were drawn to a female becoming the fourth among equals. The Estonian violist Liisa Randalu did so in 2012 and in this audio podcast she is spokesperson for the group – only fitting since she is at the centre of the sound – and talks about the quartet’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610 The Sixteen/Harry Christophers (Coro)The first few minutes of Monteverdi's Vespers are a knockout. Rarely has one sustained chord been so fruitfully deployed, and the big plagal cadence at the end is wonderful. Heard live, in a big, reverberant space, the Deus in adiutorium is invariably thrilling, no matter how much detail gets lost. David Nice reviewed a recent live performance by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen in Winchester Cathedral, but their second recording was taped in the more congenial surroundings of St Augustine's, Kilburn, and acoustically it Read more ...
David Nice
Hair-raising guaranteed or your money back: that might have been a publicity gambit, had there been one, for Sakari Oramo’s latest journey with the BBC Symphony Orchestra around a Nielsen symphony. That he knows the ropes to scale the granite cliff face of the Danish composer’s Fourth, “Inextinguishable”, Symphony was not in doubt (he gave a shattering performance with his own City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the 1999 Proms). Less expected was his confounding of much-maligned Barbican acoustics with layered impressionism in a Sibelius tone-poem and Zemlinsky songs, and of an utterly Read more ...
David Nice
Rattle and the Berliners went home at the beginning of the week with vine-leaves in their hair. There's now something else to celebrate. Exactly one week on from the second concert in their Sibelius cycle, the Barbican hosted even more of an all-out stunner, starting with Sibelius no less compellingly conducted than the best of last week’s symphonic cycle and ending with a performance of the "Inextinguishable" Fourth Symphony by this year’s other 150th birthday composer, the great Dane Carl Nielsen, which electrified from start to finish.In his first ever concert with a major London orchestra Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s all over: the final note of the Berliner Philharmoniker’s London Residency, for which many music-lovers bought tickets about a year ago, has risen into the ether, leaving most questions concerning Sir Simon Rattle’s future plans as yet unanswered. Following a red-hot Sibelius cycle at the Barbican, the Berliners came over to the Royal Festival Hall to complete the weeklong residency with Mahler’s Symphony No 2, which sold out twice on two consecutive evenings.On the final day the 12-strong cello section, which has an independent life, gave a lunchtime concert; and in the afternoon Sir Read more ...
David Nice
Even in a big orchestral concert, you’re bound to note Berlin Philharmonic principals as among the best instrumentalists in the world. I cited five in the central instalment of Simon Rattle’s Sibelius cycle on Wednesday. Of those, only viola-player Amihai Grosz figured in the Octet, joined by seven more players of peerless sophistication. Rattle may have been taking the evening off – unless he was brainstorming plans for a new concert hall elsewhere in London – and the keynote here was freed-up enjoyment. But there was no self-satisfied coasting: chamber music takes supreme concentration and Read more ...
geoff brown
Teetering on the edge of a Steve Reich weekend, Friday’s concert in the Minimalism Unwrapped series at Kings Place gave us a very mixed grill called “Pulses: Steve Reich and his Influences”. In the process it didn’t offer all that much of the concert’s organisers, the Aurora Orchestra – two flutes, two clarinets, two vibraphones, two pianos, two violins and cellos, and we were done. Still, Reich has never been at his best writing for conventional orchestral forces. And besides, Nicholas Collon, Aurora’s boss, is currently engaged with the Ulster Orchestra. Can’t be in two places at the same Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nielsen: Symphonies 5 and 6 New York Philharmonic Orchestra/Alan Gilbert (Dacapo)Nielsen told the press that his sixth and final symphony was “in a lighter vein than my other symphonies – there are cheerful things in it.” There are cheerful things in the other five too; the blazing positivity of this composer's music is its most endearing characteristic. No. 5 closes with an incandescent major chord, while No. 6 bids farewell with a farting bassoon pedal that would have pleased Haydn. This is a strange, occasionally baffling symphony, more capricious and wayward than its predecessors. Read more ...