Classical music
graham.rickson
The John Adams Edition Berliner Philharmoniker, conducted by John Adams, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Kirill Petrenko and Sir Simon Rattle (Berliner Philharmoniker)That the Berlin Philharmonic can release a lavish four-disc collection of music by a contemporary American composer is testament to how much the orchestra has evolved since the Karajan years. Claudio Abbado kickstarted the ensemble's rejuvenation, the process continuing under Rattle’s leadership. John Adams was the orchestra’s Composer in Residence during the 2016-2017 season, and conducts a winning reading of his vast, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Even for a singer as driven, communicative and self-reliant as Joyce DiDonato, the song recital with string quartet is a bold step. Whereas an endless repertoire of songs with piano exists, there is virtually nothing off-the-peg for singer and string quartet; it is a case of commissioning the arrangements, and to some extent building your own art form.Monday night’s programme at Wigmore Hall by DiDonato and the Brentano String Quartet (pictured below by Christian Steiner) naturally received the kind of adulation that will always greet opera stars when they step away from the big stage to Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Just when you can scarcely move for Messiahs, two Christmas Oratorios came along at once on Saturday night. That’s London concert schedules for you. While John Butt and his Dunedin Consort unwrapped four of the cantatas at the Wigmore Hall, Vladimir Jurowski presented all six. Was it too much of a good thing? You’d never say the same of an incomplete St Matthew Passion – at least, I hope you wouldn’t.What Jurowski uncovered was the degree to which the cantatas hang together as a hexaptych – and the extent to which they don’t. To serve for Christmas in Leipzig in 1733, Bach adapted the music Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This time of year lots of choirs give lots of Christmas concerts that are more or less the same: traditional repertoire perhaps sprinkled with a few novelties. But Tenebrae’s concert on Saturday at Kings Place broke the mould with some imaginative programming, giving us just enough Christmas but no more, and some quite stunning choral singing.Although scheduled as the final concert in the year-long "Cello Unwrapped" series, this was really a choral concert with obbligato cello items and a couple of solo cello numbers. But the occasional presence of the cello was enough to offer a distinctive Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Leonard Bernstein is 100 already. Actually, he’s not – his centenary falls in 2018, but the LSO, an orchestra he conducted many times, is building up to the anniversary with a series of concerts featuring his three symphonies. This performance of the Second completed the cycle, but the concert also showcased another side of Bernstein’s work with Wonderful Town, one of his early Broadway shows. It was cut down to a concert version, but was still an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza, regularly overspilling the packed Barbican stage.The big news in the first half was a rare appearance by the Read more ...
David Nice
To compose a masterpiece in your teens is rare enough; to choose the most elaborate form in chamber music, an octet for eight strings, ensures a peculiar kind of immortality. George Enescu, a still-underestimated genius described by protege Yehudi Menuhin as "the most extraordinary human being, the greatest musician...I have ever experienced", thought in complicated and unique ways at 19, leaving to posterity a difficult and elusive work. 16-year-old Mendelssohn, on the other hand, served up a feast of sheer delight, which can't fail in a good performance to leave you feeling buoyant. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Magnificat in E flat, Missa in F Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)John Eliot Gardiner first recorded Bach’s joyous Magnificat in the 1980s. This revisit gives us the work’s less familiar original incarnation, scored slightly different and pitched a semitone higher. It's tempting to think that all music sounds better in E flat, and Gardiner’s approach oozes warmth and geniality. The trumpet writing is phenomenally difficult: there's a stratospheric high note at the close of the ”Fecit potentiam” which had me spontaneously applauding. Baroque Read more ...
Helen Wallace
An icy, wet wind snuck under the door of house number 8 in Fournier Street, where Uri Caine, bundled in coat and woolly hat, conjured Schumann’s darkly powerful "Im Rhein". Beside him, perched on a weaver’s stool, was improvising legend Phil Minton, rasping, whistling and groaning his way through "The wilderness of my life". Caine wove ragtime into plunging storm-tossed sequences, along with polkas, waltzes, blues and honky-tonk; as he plumbed the river’s murky depths, Minton scattered gasped husks of memory upon its surface. Caine’s playing felt too big for the handsome front parlour; but it Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Expectations ran high for Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida in Winterreise. Both singer and pianist are well known for their Schubert, and their deep and intimate relationship with his music was everywhere apparent in this performance of sensitivity and subtly shaded emotion. In a cycle so well documented, there is little room to excel, yet Padmore and Uchida did just that. A directness of expression was key to their success, as if years of accreted sophistication had been stripped from these famous songs, revealing a naked, uncompromising emotion beneath. But there was also a compelling sense Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Chineke! Orchestra has won golden opinions for its ground-breaking work and musical achievement, and Manchester caught up to the extent of a visit from the eight-person Chineke! Ensemble to the Royal Northern College of Music. As with the full orchestra’s performances, the repertoire included its own gesture towards greater recognition of past composers from black and ethnic minority origins – in this case Joseph Boulogne (aka Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges) and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.There are more points of exposure for a chamber group than might be the case with a larger ensemble, so Read more ...
David Nice
After Sakari Oramo's dazzling Sibelius rattlebag with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on the centenary day of Finnish independence, things weren't looking so good for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia at half time last Thursday (★★★). Then along came the Four Lemminkäinen Legends, an early Sibelius masterpiece teeming with invention and strangeness, long a Salonen speciality. Salonen's own compositions have that ambition on steroids, at least since he discovered California after taking up the reins of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1992. Oramo's championship of his fellow Finn, seven years Read more ...
Robert Beale
Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto is a big work in every sense: four movements, plus a solo cadenza before the last one that makes it seem almost like five; a soloist’s role that even David Oistrakh (for whom it was first written) found taxing; symphonic construction and instrumentation which make the orchestral contribution at least as important as the solo one.In the hands of Renaud Capuçon (pictured below by François Darmigny) and the BBC Philharmonic under Juanjo Mena in Manchester it received the quality of performance it needs, and then some. Capuçon was in front of an orchestra Read more ...