Classical music
graham.rickson
Song of Paradise: Piano music by Reginald King Mark Bebbington (Somm)Reginald King (1904-1991) was a child prodigy, and taught at the Royal Academy of Music in the 1920s. In 1927 he formed a light orchestra to play in the restaurant of a West End department store. He broadcast for the BBC regularly between 1929 and 1964, by which time popular tastes were shifting decisively away from "light" music. King’s talents as a composer and conductor were praised by Elgar, and he devoted his final decades to composition. There’s a nice anecdote in Alan Hughes’s sleeve note, describing how King arrived Read more ...
David Nice
Not every Yuletide fixture need be commercial and routine. Certainly St John’s annual Christmas Festival packs them in, but why wouldn’t it when the voices for the last two events, backed up by no less than the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, are the best you could possibly find for the great monuments of Handel and Bach?Admittedly, Bach’s cornucopia of celebration isn’t an oratorio like Handel’s Messiah, rather a sequence of six self-contained cantatas, of which last night’s team omitted two which are in no way inferior to the others (indeed, Part Four, with its horns adorning two Read more ...
David Nice
Nothing tests small-hall acoustics better than that most exuberant of holies, the Sanctus from Bach’s B minor Mass. After one of the year’s big disappointments, the blowsy sound coming from chamber ensembles in the Barbican/Guildhall School’s new Milton Court – a surprise miscalculation from Arup acousticians - it seemed imperative to get back to Kings Place’s Hall One, which feels bigger but is some 200 seats smaller (420 to Milton Court’s 608). And oh, the clarion cries of the 32 young Cambridge choral singers! The piercing but never ear-splitting beauty of perhaps the greatest Read more ...
David Benedict
There’s a reason why many people think Handel and, particularly his Messiah, is dull. Relatively easy to play, his music is incredibly difficult to perform well. Take this Temple Winter Festival outing with choral expert David Hill conducting the immensely skilled BBC Singers who can, and largely do, sing everything; four soloists all banishing grandiose, wobbly vibrato from days of yore; and the accomplished St James’s Baroque. There was nothing wrong with the performance... Unless, that is, you wanted the intensity, passion and, yes, the drama that Handel wrote.Scale is the key factor in Read more ...
Mark Valencia
Although worlds away from festive mangers and mince pies, the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s pre-Christmas offering spread good cheer aplenty thanks to an absorbing programme of Austro-German repertoire that explored the outer reaches of Romanticism without ever quite leaving its orbit. The about-to-be-born Second Viennese School would circle a different sun from the one at the centre of Edward Gardner’s sumptuous programme – a lure that would soon draw in both Berg and Webern (though never Richard Strauss), but not quite yet.Gardner’s decision to present Wagner as the father of modernism was Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake (complete ballet) Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra/Neeme Järvi, with James Ehnes (violin) (Chandos)This team's Swan Lake is every bit as revelatory as last year's complete Sleeping Beauty. As you'd expect, four acts, uncut, are comfortably squeezed onto a pair of CDs. Some conductors slow down with age. Neeme Järvi demonstrates again that he's speeding up, though you suspect that the extra zip in this performance also stems from not having to accommodate the demands of exhausted dancers. Swan Lake is still regularly performed in a version prepared by Riccardo Drigo, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A rare thing indeed. A British singer/pianist duo has had the patience, and also been given the opportunities over a number of years, to own and to inhabit a thoroughly individual and intelligent interpretation of Schubert's Winterreise.Tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook were in recital at Temple Church last night as part of the Temple Winter Festival, their performance also broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. They were at their best when giving a reminder of quite how much beauty, balance, subtlety and variety there is in the songs of Schubert's winter journey. Comparing last night's Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Exactly what constitutes “the End of Time” in Olivier Messiaen’s extraordinary Quartet for piano, violin, cello and clarinet? Not surely “the end of days” but rather the end of measured time; music unfettered, music of the spheres, music without frontiers. Famously written when Messiaen was “doing time” in a prisoner of war camp, this unique expression of faith, of eternal life unbounded, was his “escape” in every sense of the word - and to hear it played with such astonishing abandon and consummate musicianship by Mitsuko Uchida and three Musicians from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Read more ...
Iestyn Davies
“A cold coming we had of it,” grumble the three kings in T S Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” later set by Britten as his Canticle IV. “Just the worst time of year for a journey,” they complain, carried onwards by the ungulate bass notes of the piano. Barely 48 hours after having stepped foot on the harsh, wintry Russian soil my two travelling companions (Ian Bostridge and Peter Coleman-Wright) and I lined up on the stage of the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and delivered Britten’s five Canticles, weary eyed and journey worn. One could say this was life imitating art, save for Read more ...
David Nice
For seasonal fare that’s also profound, few pre-Christmas weekends in London can ever have been richer than this one. Hearts battered by John Adams’ nativity oratorio El Niño last night, one hoped for more soothing medicine this afternoon in the naïve and sentimental music of Berlioz’s sacred trilogy, first performed some 145 years earlier. With similarly perfect casting of soloists, an even more remarkable chorus and a guiding hand that was both firm and tender from the versatile François-Xavier Roth, superlative standards continued – making me wonder what on earth’s the point of compiling a Read more ...
David Nice
John Adams’ millennial conflagration of musical poems about childbirth, destruction and the divine made manifest not only served as a seasonal farewell and a transcendent epilogue to the Southbank’s year of 20th-century music The Rest is Noise; it also stood pure and proud as a masterpiece.This is what maverick director Peter Sellars’ multimedia information overload had not allowed this already complex work to seem in the Barbican performance following the December 2000 Paris premiere (Adams soon came to admit the mistake of giving free rein to his usually trusty collaborator). God knows the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Christmas Oratorio Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Stephen Layton (Hyperion)A flurry of timpani and a pair of trilling flutes kick things off nicely. The OAE's oboes and trumpets are also in fine form, but what really makes this Bach recording a joy is the weight and richness of the choral sound. So many period performances have just one or two voices per part, so hearing close to 40 singers chirping away is an unexpected treat. Choruses and chorales alike proceed with plenty of bounce, and Layton never lets the narrative grind to a halt. Read more ...