Classical music
David Nice
The heading may be a bit misleading. There were no vocalists at this year’s ingeniously adapted East Neuk Festival – live events held exclusively in the big space of the Bowhouse, St Monans, to a compulsorily limited audience – and the only rain was that which pelted down on the roof of the venue during the most intimate moments of Beethoven’s D major Quartet, Op.18 No.3, with the Castalian Quartet valiantly persisting. But all the players in the six concerts I heard sang from the heart, as any good instrumentalist should, and the weather was wildly varied, with four seasons in rapid Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This programme was a bit of a calling card from the Carducci Quartet. They have previously recorded all three works, and the three composers, Haydn, Shostakovich, Beethoven, clearly play to their strengths. Add to that a modest running time, the Shostakovich Seventh and Beethoven op. 95 are the two composers’ shortest quartets, and the result is a perfect offering for casual Sunday morning recital.Not that the Carduccis ever rest on their laurels. They have a distinctive tone, rich and darkly burnished with real complexity and depth, and they bring a keen interpretive sensibility to every Read more ...
Clark Rundell
It’s taken me a day to try to find some words to share at the passing of my dear friend, mentor and guardian angel Louis Andriessen and I’m grateful to theartsdesk for giving me the space. It is such a profound loss because of the profound gifts he gave us. His fabulous music is deep, tender, highly personal and achingly beautiful but also funny, ironic, joyful and deliciously vulgar. Generations of composers will attest to the inspiration and encouragement he gave, challenging performers and creators alike to reach new heights. He was unbelievably kind to me and the faith he showed in me Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Edinburgh-based Dunedin Consort are regular visitors to the Wigmore Hall, and their concert on Saturday night was greeting by a full house. In these Covid times, that meant an audience of just 200, but from the applause, they were clearly enthusiastic for John Butt’s programme, centred around two Bach favourites, the D minor Two-Violin Concerto and the cantata Ich habe genug. The ensemble is a period instrument orchestra who play one to a part. That is a controversial choice in Bach, as there is little evidence that he used such small groups himself. However, it suits the generous Read more ...
graham.rickson
Reicha Rediscovered, Volume 3 Ivan Ilić (piano) (Chandos)Antoine Reicha’s L’Arte de varier tantalises before you’ve heard a note; the composer’s Opus 57, its theme followed by 57 variations. Reicha was an exact contemporary of Beethoven and reportedly the two composers discussed their approaches to variation form. Reicha’s Op. 36 set of fugues had ruffled feathers upon their publication in 1804, and this large-scale set of variations on a simple F major theme is similarly intriguing. All but eight of the variations share the theme’s key signature, the theme usually instantly Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
During early lockdown in 2020 Howard Goodall published an article pondering the role of the composer in a pandemic. His answer was that music has throughout history been successful at memorialising people and events, and that it could do so again. On the back of the article, the London Symphony Chorus invited Goodall to create such a piece for the care and health workers who had lost their lives to Covid. The first version of Never to Forget was released online in July 2020, the ‘virtual’ LSC singing the names of the then 122 workers who had died. A year later the piece has been expanded – Read more ...
David Nice
While the big choral societies are asking, with good cause, why they remain silenced when it’s OK for football fans to sing on the terraces, the top voices of smaller ensembles are being heard again by select audiences. Not so small, in the case of the 24-strong young opera choruses of Garsington (times two, the groups divided between operas) and Grange Park Opera. Tenebrae in the wide-spread group its director Nigel Short (pictured below by Sim Canetty-Clarke) offered us in the welcoming space of Saffron Hall came close at 20 singers, and expressively unsurpassable in a typically ambitious Read more ...
Héloïse Werner
It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to perform with musicians like the ones I’ll be sharing the St John’s Smith Square stage with on Saturday 3 July; organist Kit Downes and cellist Colin Alexander are some of the best musicians I know. I say “share the stage”, but that’s not technically correct. We will be spaced out across the hall and play around with that use of space through the music we create. The audience will be surrounded by our sounds in all kinds of ways. Kit will be in the organ loft, Colin on the main stage opposite the organ on the other side of the hall, while I’ Read more ...
Jess Gillam
For over a year, many concert halls' doors have been firmly shut, the curtains drawn and the lights out. As we begin to emerge into a new world and live performance makes a comeback, I feel we are facing a bittersweet moment in the arts. As some musicians are taking those nerve-wracking steps from the dressing room to the stage, others are at home in despair, still facing hellish uncertainty and some have been forced to walk away from the profession entirely.It’s at once heartwarming to see audience and performers reunited but heartbreaking to see those who haven’t yet felt the glow of warmth Read more ...
Roxanna Panufnik
A month ago, I sat in St Martin-in-the Fields listening to London Mozart Players recording my orchestral version of Letters from Burma. I have never been to Burma but I was inspired to compose this work after reading a collection of 54 letters by Aung San Suu Kyi. The first excitement that morning was to be in the presence of an orchestra. In these times of the pandemic, with borders closed, this novelty can’t to be underestimated – I am devastated not be able to travel to attend the birth of another compositional “baby” at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw next month.The second excitement was that Read more ...
Robert Beale
Tabita Berglund is that rare species, an up-and-coming orchestral conductor attracting enough attention to secure repeated international bookings in even these straitened times. She also happens to be female and young, which until relatively recently would have been seen as another major handicap to success. But this was her return to the Hallé, having conducted a set of concerts in late 2019 with them - and she’s no stranger to the north west of England, either, since she took part as a young cellist in Lake District Summer Music’s masterclasses 10 years ago.Berglund is a more mature, but Read more ...
graham.rickson
One Movement Symphonies: Music by Barber, Scriabin and Sibelius Kansas City Symphony/Michael Stern (Reference Recordings)Placing these three single movements together serves to highlight just how great Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7 is, and just how hard it is to create a genuinely cohesive single movement symphony. Schoenberg’s early Chamber Symphony is another convincing example, sounding far less cohesive in the composer’s orchestral transcription. Samuel Barber wrote his Symphony No. 1 in the mid-1930s. If you’ve only heard Barber’s Adagio or the Violin Concerto you’ll be surprised by Read more ...