Classical music
theartsdesk
Are you a young blogger, vlogger or writer in the field of the arts, books and culture? If so, we've a competition for you to enter.The Hospital Club’s annual h Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. For the second year running they are teaming up with theartsdesk – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to launch a hunt for young talent.This year the Special Award is for theartsdesk / h Club Young Influencer Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
John Eliot Gardiner was 75 in April, and to celebrate, the Barbican Centre staged a weekend devoted to his favourite composer. Gardiner himself provided the backbone of the event, three concerts of cantatas with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, while most of the other events were chamber music recitals. That felt like a random combination, and no justification was given for the mix. Even the name was provisional: it was originally marketed as a "Bach Marathon", but became the "Bach Weekend" to prevent it sounding like an endurance test. Fortunately, the individual events Read more ...
graham.rickson
Peer at the small print and it’s clear that Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill is actually a spruced-up repackaging of a show originally devised by Gene Lerner and arranger Newton Wayland, about whom Opera North’s programme tells us nothing. The cabaret-style production’s two halves take us neatly through Weill’s career, the linking narrative divvied out among the 11-strong cast in a manner that suggests a primary school class assembly.But it works handsomely. Veteran director Giles Havergal’s hands-off approach would surely have pleased Weill’s testy collaborator Brecht. And having the songs Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Secret Mass: Choral works by Frank Martin and Bohuslav Martinů Danish National Vocal Ensemble/Marcus Creed (OUR Recordings)We're lucky to be able to hear Frank Martin’s Mass for two four-part choirs at all; this most fastidious and self-critical of composers beavered away for decades before he felt he'd found his mature compositional voice. If you're not yet familiar with Martin, rush out now and pick up a recording of his sublime Petite Symphonie Concertante. It deserves be a popular classic, but Martin is still dismissed as a dour Swiss technician by those poor souls who've never Read more ...
David Nice
"Get those creatures off the stage, or I won't answer for what I'll do". The exclamation of the Prima Donna in the backstage prologue of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, about to share her grand opera with lower forms of theatrical life, seems to have been shared by a head teacher at the first Setúbal Music Festival in Portugal eight years ago, faced with the arrival of special-needs children to join his pupils. It was a sink-or-swim moment, but artistic director Ian Ritchie stood firm, and the festival has gone swimmingly ever since. All levels now work together without anything other Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If you ever find yourself in Leipzig at a weekend during school term, the Bach motet (and occasionally cantata) performances in the great cantor’s old church, the Thomaskirche, are an absolute must. But if you happened to be in that city this weekend just past, you will have been able to immerse yourself in practically a whole year’s worth of cantatas in the space of a little more than forty-eight hours. The Leipzig Bach Festival is an annual event. But it has surely never been quite like this before. The festival’s artistic director, Michael Maul, and the president and director, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Juanjo Mena, chief conductor of Manchester's BBC Philharmonic for the past seven years, took his official leave of them with a programme reflecting his great love, the music of his Spanish homeland. Albéniz and Falla, to be precise, and the greater part was a complete concert performance of the latter’s opera La Vida Breve. A quality list of Spanish singers had been engaged – notable among them Nancy Fabiola Herrera, as Salud – along with the Spanish Radio and TV Chorus, Coro RTVE.So there was a festive feeling in the air from the outset: the concert was to be a celebration of a warm Read more ...
graham.rickson
Haydn: Piano Sonatas 32, 40, 49, 50 Paul Lewis (Harmonia Mundi)One of the many good things about Haydn's piano sonatas is their brevity. You can easily squeeze four or five on to a single disc, though the ones chosen by Paul Lewis for his debut Haydn disc all feel like deceptively big pieces. Lewis takes a commendably non-interventionist approach: rhythms are nicely sprung and his clear, crisp articulation is a joy. He doesn't over-accentuate the quirkiness: Haydn doesn't need any extra help. Take the opening to the Sonata in C, its fragmentary, staccato major triad quickly blossoming Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Marking his departure as the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's Music Director after six years, Peter Oundjian definitely left on a high, conducting a gripping, visceral performance of Mahler’s last completed symphony. Its beginnings were glassy and clear, matched with a lyrical softness, before the orchestra erupted into powerful, passionate swells. Woodwind were crisp and piercing, cutting through the strings’ density, and con sordino horns were solemn and ominous.As the first movement progressed, through more pastoral passages with tender horn and clarinet playing, to the more dark and Read more ...
Franco Fagioli
I started singing when I was nine years old in my primary school choir. I sang plenty of solos there before moving on to another children’s choir; that was a formative experience for me. At this point, I was singing the soprano part and from here I was invited to sing in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. This was my first experience of opera, and one that gave me great joy and satisfaction.My first major performance was as Hansel in Humperdinck's fairy-tale opera at the Teatro Colón of Buenos Aires. This was a special experience, on the one hand because it was one of my first leading roles and on the Read more ...
David Nice
Serendipity as well as luxury saw to it that the night after Simon Rattle gave his farewell Festival Hall performance as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic, his imminent successor appeared over at the Barbican with another excellent German orchestra. We've only rarely encountered Kirill (not to be confused with honorary Liverpudlian Vasily) Petrenko in the UK up to now, so the contrast was instructive. While one shouldn't compare incomparables, it's tempting on this evidence to suggest that Rattle is more earth, Petrenko airier, with a shared fire when the Englishman's at his best. But Read more ...
graham.rickson
Messiaen: Catalogue d’Oiseaux Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Pentatone)The title Catalogue d’Oiseaux suggests a dusty ornithological textbook. And Messiaen implied that all he’d done to compose this ear-tickling sequence of piano pieces was to sit down somewhere quiet and scribble down the birdsong within earshot. But, as Nigel Simeone’s excellent booklet essay points out, “birds don't sing to a conventional twelve-note chromatic scale, nor do they sing within the range of a piano.” Messiaen's birdsong transcriptions are best heard as brilliant reimaginings. Though the 13 movements are Read more ...