Classical music
graham.rickson
Chopin: Études op.10 & op.25 Yunchan Lim (Decca)Chopin Nicolas van Poucke (Night Dreamer)I’m reviewing these two Chopin discs by a pair of young men together, even though there are lots of differences between their playing, and the way the albums have been put together. Yunchan Lim is just 20, the youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn competition, in 2022. His first album, on Decca, is of Chopin’s Études (the op.10 and op.25 sets), which are favourites of mine, and perfect “young man’s music” in their unashamed show-offiness and heart-on-sleeve emotionalism. That they are Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The French cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca confesses that – like so many classical musicians – he was at a loss during lockdown as to how to develop his musical career. Then, at a recording for a TV show, he met the street dancer Yaman Okur, who made his name with the hip hop collective Wanted Posse and has collaborated with performers including Madonna.It was immediately clear to both of them that a collaboration could yield dividends, precisely because it was so counterintuitive. Four years later, we sat in the crypt of St Martin-In-The-Fields to see what they had devised for a programme Read more ...
David Nice
Advice to young musicians, as given at several “how to market your career” seminars: don’t begin a biography with “one of the finest xxxs of his/her/their generation”. From my side, I’m allowed to use it occasionally: surely Timothy Ridout is the finest viola-player of his generation, and last night he struck sparks off four other artists at the top of their game: violinists Maria Włoszczowska and Tim Crawford, fellow viola-player Ting-Ru Lai and cellist Tim PosnerWith any other musicians, I might have regretted not checking the programme carefully before I went: the Mozart string Read more ...
mark.kidel
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital. In her native France, and in the rest of Europe, she has gathered ecstatic reviews for her performance and recording of a range of repertoire that stretches from the Baroque and Mozart to Richard Strauss, Debussy and Poulenc.Accompanied by Mathieu Pordoy, she offered the rapt audience at the Wigmore an artfully designed programme of Mozart and Strauss, weaving her way through surprising segues and contrasts with seamless ease. On the face of it, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Billed as a “Viennese Whirl”, this programme showed that there are different kinds of music that may be known to the orchestral canon as coming from Vienna.For a start, there’s the classical tradition of Mozart, Beethoven and those who aimed to be their successors. Then there are the 19th century dance creations and operettas of Johann Strauss II and his contemporaries. And there’s also the “Second Viennese School” … and conductor Anja Bihlmaier (pictured below) offered all three.The last was represented by Berg’s Violin Concerto, probably the most endearing and enduring of works written Read more ...
David Nice
Anyone who’d booked to hear soprano Sally Matthews or to witness the rapid progress of conductor Daniele Rustioni – the initial draw for me – could not have been disappointed in their late-stage replacements. Elizabeth Watts is as much of a national treasure among singers as Matthews, and Jader Bignamini, music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, negotiated his first Barbican concert with absolute mastery.The short curtain-raiser, Camille Pépin’s Les eaux célestes, immediately gave us a BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form, but there was nothing very freshwater here: pretty textures, Read more ...
David Nice
All three works in the second of this week’s Neville Marriner centenary concerts from the ensemble he founded vindicated their intention to reign for ever and ever. Those very words as set by Handel in his “Hallelujah” Chorus were treated fugally by Mendelssohn in the coruscating finale of his Octet, and as part of her own homage in the Partita for String Octet, Sally Beamish approached them very differently. Her ethereal fugue deserves immortality, too.Introducing her work at the begiinning of the concert, Beamish (pictured below by Ashley Coombes EPCSCOTLAND) told us how her mother played Read more ...
Colin Alexander and Héloïse Werner
For tonight’s performance at Milton Court, the nuanced and delicate tones of strings, voices, harmonium and chamber organ will merge and mingle together to tell tales of a rain-speckled landscape, luck and misfortune, forgotten valour, daily creative rituals and memories slowly vanishing into flames.The five composer-performers (we are to be joined by Kit Downes, Aidan O’Rourke and Alice Zawadzki) have each brought an image-driven work of their own to be reimagined by the whole group in a performance of guided improvisation dedicated to transforming these visions into seemingly living stories Read more ...
Joseph Middleton
Everyone needs friends and everything is connected. As we throw the doors open on to the 2024 Leeds Lieder Festival I am struck by just how remarkable classical music can be for a community, particularly when it is looked after and invested in by its own community.It was well documented that last year the Leeds Lieder Festival was dealt a blow by Arts Council England, when they rejected a Festival grant application for the first time in our decades long history. Ironically that Festival welcomed the highest number of first-time concert attendees and was praised in The Guardian for Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven: Symphonies 1-9 National Symphony Orchestra/Gianandrea Noseda (NSO)I’m old enough to remember the BBC offering free downloads of the complete Beethoven Symphonies under their then Principal Conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Back in 2005, downloading was still a bit of a black art and I think I managed to hear just a couple of the recordings, in decent if thin sound. Wikipedia states that the files were downloaded 1.5 million times. Presumably those performances are languishing on a CD-ROM in a locked BBC vault. Noseda’s new Beethoven set, taken from live performances given in Read more ...
David Nice
Purple patches flourished in the first half of this admirable programme: it could hardly have been otherwise given Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s devotion to a new work in his repertoire, and the current strength of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko. Even so, it was the culmination, Rachmaninov’s multifaceted “Choral Symphony” The Bells, which truly dazzled.It seems so obvious: Petrenko just knows this idiom and is completely at ease with the difficult Rachmaninov rubato. The Philharmonia Chorus was simply electrifying: hard to believe they weren’t professionals with a knockout Read more ...
David Nice
Antonio Pappano fervently believes that talking about music is a vital part of his communicative art, and nobody does it better. Given that the London Symphony Orchestra's enterprising Half Six Fix format is scheduled for an hour each time, and that Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé lasts almost that long, there wasn’t going to be much room for pre-performance demonstration yesterday evenng, but what we got still hit the mark.Pappano asked his LSO players to float away with the opening of “Daybreak”, start of the more often heard Second Suite but occurring some 40 minutes into the full ballet Read more ...