Classical music
graham.rickson
William Mathias: Choral Music St John’s Voices, The Gentlemen of St John’s, Graham Walker (director) (Naxos)I've a soft spot for neglected instruments, so any CD which includes a credit for chime bars is all right with me. Here they're deployed by percussionist David Ellis in William Mathias’s sublime A May Magnificat, scored for double chorus. Mathias requested that the choirs be of equal size and placed apart, and this Naxos recording really lets the antiphonal effects register. Feeling a little deflated this morning? Buy or download this disc now; it's kept me smiling for weeks. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
"Let’s make an album” is an easy thing to say but an infinitely more difficult thing to actually make happen. But at some point in early 2016 conductor Tom Hammond said it to me (or I said it to him, we can’t remember which) and four years later Not Now, Bernard & Other Stories is about to be released: four years of hard work, setbacks, stress – but also days of wonderful creativity and a sense of achievement.Although things have worked out very much for the best, almost every detail of how things have panned out is different from how we provisionally mapped it in 2016 – not least in that Read more ...
David Nice
In Beethoven anniversary year, there will probably be many more "Moonlight"s, meaning the Sonata, than the real thing (though we've been lucky to see the crescent in close conjunction with Venus these past two nights). Not many pianists would dare to place it at the beginning of a programme. Denis Kozhukhin's paradoxically no-nonsense poetry meant that a constant sense of motion culminated in the whirlwind of the finale, a steady move towards implosion mirrored in the piano transcription of Ravel's La Valse at the end of the programme. In between came perfection in the form of pure song from Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
When I reviewed the Philharmonia’s Weimar season last year I expressed a hope to hear more Hindemith performed in London. When, also last year, I reviewed chamber music at Conway Hall I looked forward to my next visit. So a Conway Hall programme including Hindemith’s Clarinet Quartet was like a magnet. And I wasn’t disappointed by the Hindemith, or by Messiaen’s extraordinary Quartet for the End of Time that made up the second half.Conway Hall is an enterprising venue, as much community centre as concert hall, with a long tradition of Sunday evening chamber music. The attendance was Read more ...
David Nice
"Citizen. European. Pianist," declares Russian-born, Berlin-based Igor Levit on the front page of his website. One should add, since he wouldn't, Mensch and master of giants. High-level human integrity seems a given when great pianists essay epics: certainly true of Elisabeth Leonskaja and Imogen Cooper tackling respective sonata trilogies by Beethoven and Schubert, or András Schiff in Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier. Last night was on that level. Questions may linger over the nature of Shostakovich's many-headed hydra of a homage to Bach, but none about Levit's expressive intent and execution Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Jukka-Pekka Saraste doesn’t visit London much these days. He was Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and there were rumours that he was in line for the top job. That didn’t happen, and his career soon took him elsewhere – which was a great shame if last night's evening’s Shostakovich was anything to go by.Saraste is an enigmatic figure, relaxed on the podium and undemonstrative. His interpretations can lack punch, especially when compared to some of his more dynamic contemporaries, but he has a real feeling for mood, and for subtly developing the music’s perspective over Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ginastera: Harp Concerto, Variaciones concertantes Sidsel Walstad (harp), Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Miguel Harth-Bedoya (Lawo Classics)Alberto Ginastera divided his compositional career into three, later two, distinct periods, charting a move away from Argentinean folk influences to mainstream European trends. He's a fascinating figure, the best of his works suggesting a Latin American Bartók, a composer fluently mixing popular music with astringent modernism. You hear this in his Harp Concerto, premiered after a long gestation period in 1965. There's a typically restless, nervy opening Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Dubbed “classical music’s guitar hero”, the 36-year-old London based Montenegrin guitarist Miloš Karadaglić – more commonly known by just his first name – is back on the international stage. He returned in 2019 after a devastating hand injury which led him to take time out from playing professionally around the time of the launch of his 2016 release Blackbird: The Beatles Album. Playing to a packed out Birmingham Town Hall on Tuesday evening, he clearly delighted fans with his return. He opened his recital with his own transcription of Bach’s Suite in C minor, originally written Read more ...
David Nice
Not long after noon on Sunday, strange bells began ringing. In just 11 bars, Bach summons pairs of flutes, oboes and violas da gamba against pizzicato strings and continuo to tintinnabulate against the alto's recitative lines about a "vibrating clang" to "pierce our marrows and our veins". These hallucinatory sounds and harmonies could have been composed yesterday. Instead they're at the service of a 1727 lamentation mourning the death of a princess.That you can find such moments of sheer astonishment in just about every Bach cantata - there is another towards the end of "Laß, Fürstin, laß Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Concert programmes that set out to tell us a story can prove a mixed blessing. Yes, it’s valuable and stimulating to find ideas, and narratives, embodied in the musical flow. But great pieces, well-performed, have a habit of cutting loose from the frame of concepts someone has devised for them. At the Royal Festival Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia gathered three singular, idiosyncratic works under the rubric of “Voices of 1945”. No ordinary year, of course: immediately, the title primed us to listen for after-echoes – direct or oblique – of the conflict that had lately shattered Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
#Beethoven250 is in full swing at the Barbican. Like most venues, they are keen to show a different side to the composer in his jubilee year. And the oratorio Christ on the Mount of Olives ticks all sorts of anniversary boxes. The work is utterly obscure - not a single one of the musicians this evening had performed it before - but it’s large-scale and ambitious, with plenty of opportunities to shine, especially for the chorus and soloists. It was paired with Berg’s Violin Concerto, played by Lisa Batiashvili, an equally virtuosic performance, though of a more subdued work. An ideal balance. Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound” wrote Gustav Mahler of his Eighth Symphony. “There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” It’s an image that captures the impossible scale and mind-boggling ambition of this so called “Symphony of a Thousand”. But it doesn’t begin to do justice to the freshness, clarity and sheer headlong energy of this performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and no fewer than five choruses under the direction of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Doesn’t the Earth alone move at 67,000 miles per hour? With around 600 Read more ...