Classical music
Peter Culshaw
As a generalist (or dilettante) who writes about world, jazz, pop and classical music, I have no doubt that 10 years ago Andreas Scholl was one of the great voices of the planet alongside names like Abida Parveen from Pakistan and Caetano Veloso from Brazil, a vocal Sun King. From an early age he had had success upon success, audiences gave him huge standing ovations, women swooned over him (OK – slightly older women like my mum, who followed him around Europe).And all this singing in a countertenor, castrato, feminine high register. In pop music, of course, this was par for the course; you Read more ...
graham.rickson
Roxanna Panufnik: Tallinn Mass - Dance of Life Patricia Rozario, Jaak Johanson, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra/Mihhail Gerts (Warner)Roxanna Panufnik's Tallinn Mass is an occasional piece, written to celebrate the city's spell as European Capital of Culture in 2011. Panufnik was asked to combine a conventional Latin mass setting with contemporary poems by a pair of leading Estonian poets, their texts inspired by a 15th century painting entitled Dance of Death on display in a Tallinn church. Britten's War Requiem must have been a model, though Panufnik's work is a breezier, less oppressive Read more ...
edward.seckerson
There were, it seemed, enough trumpets to serve Gabriel throughout eternity - and, as fanfares go, this one was stretching a point and then some. LSO On Track had commissioned it from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and, true to the spirit of this enterprise seeking to field young musicians of mixed abilities alongside players from the London Symphony Orchestra, Fanfare: Her Majesty’s Welcome commandeered its battalions of extra wind from the nearby Guildhall School and gave “Her Majesty”, and us, an earful - the kind of public racket that would easily be heard all the way over in Buckingham Palace Read more ...
graham.rickson
Holst: The Hymn of Jesus, Delius: Sea Drift, Cynara Roderick Williams (baritone), Hallé Choir, Hallé Youth Choir, Hallé Orchestra/Sir Mark Elder (Hallé)Surprising musical effects are often achieved with relatively simple means. Holst's Hymn of Jesus contains several striking moments. Such as the bold modulation during the full chorus's “Glory to Thee, Father!” at the beginning of the second part. It could suggest a novice composer fiddling aimlessly with a sequence of unrelated major triads, but here it'll have the hairs on the back of your neck standing up. Holst's ecstatic setting of Read more ...
philip radcliffe
There are occasions when just one band isn’t enough. Hence the rare experience of the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic joining forces for a performance, in the Strauss’s Voice series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, of An Alpine Symphony under Juanjo Mena. With around 130 players at his command, on stage and off, along with wind and thunder machines, xylophone, castanets, cowbells and other paraphernalia, Mena had the palette for vividly bringing out all the richness of the orchestral colour.Since this was Strauss’s last tone-poem, 15 years in the making since a day Read more ...
geoff brown
A question flitted through my mind in advance. Was I down to review La Nuova Musica’s modern premiere of Conti’s baroque opera Issipile, or was it Issipile’s opera Conti? To many music lovers, even those well grounded in history, both possibilities must be equally plausible. But then the penny quickly dropped: this Conti is Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (1681or so to 1732), the Florence-born composer based at the Hapsburg court in Vienna, who wrote among others the opera David, stunningly brought back to life on CD six years ago by another period instrument group, Alan Curtis’s Il Read more ...
theartsdesk
Claudio Abbado became the Principal Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1989 and continued his association with the world's most illustrious orchestra until very recently. Two members of the Berlin Phil's famous horn section share their memories of playing under the modest maestro.FERGUS McWILLIAMI am of the generation who in late 1989 elected Claudio Abbado to succeed Herbert von Karajan. I remember him being quoted by some journalist as having said (years before) that whoever followed HvK would be a "transition conductor". Ironic that it should turn out to be himself. He was truly Read more ...
theartsdesk
“It is at the end that a composer can achieve his finest effects,“ declared Richard Strauss. He was thinking of his great operatic and symphonic epilogues, but apply that to the art of conducting, adjust the “at” to “towards”, and it applies supremely well to Claudio Abbado, who has died at the age of 80.Having undergone radical surgery for stomach cancer in 2000, Abbado not only lived to tell the tale but went on to what he, the most modest and objective of men, would have been the first to admit were even greater heights and depths. No one would have thought he could do better than with the Read more ...
graham.rickson
A Festival of Britten National Youth Choirs of Great Britain (Delphian)Britten's 1961 Fancie opens this collection – a tiny, sublime choral coda to the opera A Midsummer Night's Dream. It lasts barely a minute, and you'll hopefully want to wind back and listen to it again. And again. Has any composer written so well for childrens' voices? One of the pleasures of this anthology of sacred and secular choral music is the prevailing positivity, a necessary reminder that Britten's output is not all darkness and sorrow. Eight different groups perform here, collectively under the banner of the Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The first half of this concert was quite the family affair: Martinů’s Concerto for Two Pianos featuring the eternally youthful Katia and Marielle Labèque, with the latter’s husband Semyon Bychkov conducting.Any natural rapport took a while to manifest itself, though much of that should be laid at the composer’s door – the first movement of this curious piece favours constant and rather directionless motion over more traditionally concerto-like interplay. The result is a thick texture, with lots going on in the middle but the whole somehow failing to sound lush. The second Read more ...
David Nice
Baleful prophecies were rife before the concert. Was Vladimir Jurowski right to let Mahler’s only total tragedy among his symphonies, the Sixth, share the programme with anything else, least of all a new viola concerto in which the solo instrument’s naturally pale cast of thought seemed likely to be indulged by James MacMillan – another composer not afraid of rhetorical angst?As it turned out, the concerto had as much of the healthily extrovert about it as MacMillan’s immediate predecessors in the form for oboe and violin, while Jurowski’s Mahler wasn’t, it seemed, out to blitz us after all. Read more ...
Mark Valencia
Of Schubert’s two great cycles, the youthful ardour of Die schöne Müllerin sits best with a tenor while the bleak wretchedness of Winterreise lends itself to the baritone voice. These, of course, are personal prejudices, for both works can be sung in either range (and indeed beyond, as the presence in the Wigmore Hall audience of a leading female exponent of Winterreise, Alice Coote, reminded us), but it’s what experience has taught me. On this occasion Coote, like the rest of us, was there for a baritone, for it was Gerald Finley’s moment to mount an assault on this forbidding summit among Read more ...