Classical music
Robert Beale
It’s probably a bit early to be getting misty-eyed about the approaching end of Sir Mark Elder’s time as music director of the Hallé, but the programme he and they have just finished touring in the North of England will have been, for many, his real farewell.Its last outing was at the Bridgewater Hall yesterday, and it was (characteristically) a blend of the much-loved and familiar and something adventurous and new.That second element comprised the European premiere performances of a new piano concerto written and played by Sir Stephen Hough – titled The World of Yesterday, it was Read more ...
Robert Beale
There’s a sense of cheerful abandon about Manchester Camerata’s Mozart concerts with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Gábor Takács-Nagy that is hard to resist.So it wasn’t exactly the programme originally advertised, and the concept of performing and recording all Mozart’s piano concertos with all his opera overtures has stretched a bit as time has gone by, but this was the penultimate in a series that began not far off 10 years ago – and they were going to have fun.The concerto element, in strict fact, was Johann Christian Bach as recycled by Mozart: three piano sonatas by the London Bach turned Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The sixteen voices of the Dunedin Consort raided the large store of music inspired by the Song of Songs and the sonnets of Petrarch in a sensual programme at the Wigmore Hall last night. Combining the very old and the very new it offered a range of perspectives on texts that have attracted composers over centuries, and showed off the ensemble as one of the best in the business.I was not entirely convinced by the decision to put (most of) the newer pieces in the first half, and the older in the second. I prefer it when this kind of programme throws up unlikely but revealing juxtapositions. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Programme notes for Mahler’s monumental symphonies will often blithely chat about the works’ epic struggle between life and death, creation and destruction, joy and dread. In a comfy hall with a slick orchestra and a polished maestro, all of that can feel abstract and remote. Not last night at the Barbican. In 2021, Michael Tilson Thomas – conductor laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra – was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain tumour. Recent outings for the San Francisco Symphony have been greeted almost as farewell performances. Yet, despite his obvious frailty Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Gesualdo was, in the words of New Yorker critic Alex Ross – “irrefutably badass”, a double murderer, sado-masochist and black magic enthusiast who also found time to write music that was – according to some – centuries ahead of its time. He was the El Greco of sound, a rebel against perfectly balanced Renaissance proportions, who went on to influence cultural figures ranging from Stravinsky to Werner Herzog.In Renaissance Moderns, performed by Britten Sinfonia and The Marian Consort, the 16th century Neapolitan composer was the dark beating heart of a programme that ranged from the 15th Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sir Neville Marriner: The Complete Warner Classics Recordings (Warner)Assembling Sir Neville Marriner’s complete discography would probably require a crate; this weighty but compact box (80 CDs), released to celebrate his centenary, collects just the discs he recorded for EMI between 1970 and 2000 (he also worked extensively with Decca and Philips). Marriner rivalled Herbert Von Karajan as one of the classical industry’s most-recorded conductors and the majority of these performances were made with his own Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The group began life in the late 1950s as a Read more ...
David Nice
No soloist gets to perform Shostakovich’s colossal First Violin Concerto without mastery of its fearsome technical demands. But not all violinists have the imagination to colour and inflect the Hamlet-like monologue of its withdrawn first movement, or the madness of a 20th century Lear in its poleaxing cadenza, a movement in itself. From her first, deeply eloquent phrases, Karen Gomyo told us that she was one of the few who could.It’s vital not to have one violin sound, however impressive, for the kaleidoscope of sadness, rage, despair and manic exultation Shostakovich gifted to the great Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective have come a long way since their early days of chamber music in dark and dingy Salford basements and former MOT test centres. But they haven’t forgotten what made those pioneering performances special: the sense of a unique experience, and a readiness to chat to the audience as well as playing.Now, with the virtuoso chamber choir Sansara, they’ve given four shows in a week, in London, Leverkusen, Antwerp and Manchester, with a trio of world premieres in the setlist (as they like to call it), each commissioned by themselves and all invited as responses to Morton Feldman’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
As a human being of immense warmth, humour and erudition, Andrew Davis made it all too easy to forget what towering, incandescent performances he inspired. Now is a good time to recall those properly to mind, to listen to his huge discography, and to assess his proper place among the top conductors – again, as one of such versatility and range that, to adapt what Danny Meyer writes below, he might have been labelled a jack of all trades when he was a master of all.The range of tributes here reminds me both what an extraordinarily fine interpreter of operas he was – respected at Glyndebourne Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong, the Hallé’s principal conductor from the coming autumn season, presided in the Bridgewater Hall for the first time yesterday since the announcement of his appointment.It was in the last of the four “Rush Hour” concerts recently introduced, which begin at 6pm and are shorter than usual evening programmes, with fairly mainstream classical content and no interval. They seem to be succeeding very well in attracting audiences of all ages.But this one was a bit special, because Wong had his first chance to conduct the Hallé Choir along with the orchestra. The centrepiece of the menu Read more ...
David Nice
While the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra were performing Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie – weirdly, despite its size and difficulty, a repertoire staple – over at the Royal Festival Hall, their Guildhall School counterparts presented a programme of stunning originality.It was, in effect, the final of student instrumentalists’ competition for the coveted Gold Medal, alternating with singers (their turn again in 2025). The draw for collectors of the rich and rare were Argentinian top composer Ginastera’s Harp Concerto and the Divertimento concertante for double bass and orchestra by Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Masaaki Suzuki has not just travelled into pastures new but proved himself thoroughly at home in them. The founder-director (in 1990) of Bach Collegium Japan, a distinguished harpsichordist-organist as well as one of the most rigorous and scholarly interpreters of the Baroque legacy, has just completed a tour with the Philharmonia that joyfully embraced a selection of Romantic masterworks. They returned from Spain to the Royal Festival Hall (pictured below) with a programme that saw Suzuki, stick-less and relaxed but fiercely attentive to every fine Read more ...