Classical music
Helen Wallace
Crazy-faced space-hopper, playmobil fireman, marble run: toys from my own childhood, staring at me now from out of glass cases, alongside an 18th century marionette, thread-bare rocking horses and a headless Georgian doll. This concert in the Museum of Childhood could have been a wallow in nostalgia. Instead, with their usual brand of ingenuity, the Multi-Story Orchestra kindled musical artefacts into vibrant life.It began with the trembling bow of Sally Pendlebury’s cello, open fifths sounding almost painfully vulnerable in the museum’s wide hangar. American composer Caroline Shaw’s In Manus Read more ...
David Nice
Flashback to 1981, when the Bolshoy Ballet danced Swan Lake Act Two to a tinny Melodiya recording in Istanbul's Open-Air Theatre (seats were cheap for Interrailing students). Turkey was friends with the Soviet Union then. It hadn't been in the 1950s, when Turkish pianist and citoyenne du monde İdil Biret was advised not to play a Prokofiev sonata in her motherland. And it isn't friendly with Russia now, which didn't stop the first world-class Turkish symphony orchestra, the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic, playing an all-Russian programme featuring controversial 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Nothing galvanises an audience quite like physical risk. As soprano Sarah Tynan rose on a hoop into the darkness, intoning the final words of "Départ" from Britten's song cycle Les Illuminations, you could almost hear her heart race. Beneath, a troupe of circus performers held the rope – and her life – in their hands.In choreographer/director Struan Leslie’s vision, performers decked out as Rimbaud’s "sturdy rogues" brought sinew, grace and heart-stopping spectacle to a night illuminated by explosive, raw-fresh string music: it was all about the vertical.For Leslie, Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nimrod Borenstein: Suspended opus 69 das freie orchester Berlin/Laércio Diniz (Solaire Records)The splendidly monikered Nimrod Borenstein’s Suspended opus 69 deserves our attention for being the soundtrack to a juggling performance, namely Gandini Juggling’s 4x4 Ephemeral Architectures (“conceptualised as a piece of imaginary architecture and a fusion of the world of juggling and ballet”). Hmm. Fear not. Listen blind and what we hear sounds very much like a ballet score, its string writing looking back to Stravinsky’s Apollo. As well to the pastoral English tradition – parts of it recall Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If you needed further proof of the intelligence, the thoughtfulness of Daniil Trifonov’s musicianship, the programme for his four-concert residency at the Wigmore Hall would go a long way towards providing it. How many young soloists of Trifonov’s standing would choose to turn song-accompanist for an evening of lieder? And how many, having done so, would deliver so generous and self-effacing a performance?The evening belonged, as it should, to baritone Matthias Goerne. Having crafted a sequence of songs opening with Berg’s Vier Lieder Op.2, moving through Dichterliebe, Michelangelo settings Read more ...
David Nice
On the itinerary of musical tourists around Europe, the opening of the Prague Spring Festival comes a close third to the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year's Day Concert and the Bayreuth experience. That said, Smetana's Má vlast (My Homeland) – the immoveable opener – is more of an acquired taste than Johann Strauss or Wagner.Too often Má vlast's six-tone poems have been served up as slabs of a national monument, with only two – Vltava (otherwise Germanised as Die Moldau) and From Bohemia's Woods and Fields – offering guaranteed bliss. This year Estonian Paavo Järvi gave the Czech Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Goldberg Variations Bassoon Consort Frankfurt (MDG)The only performances of Bach's Goldbergs which don't hit the spot for me tend to be those played on harpsichord. Piano will always be best, but I've enjoyed versions for harp, guitar, string orchestra and accordion. This improbable new transcription is for nine bassoons: eight regulars plus a contra. It feels reassuringly ‘right’ – presumably because we’re so used to hearing bassoons in baroque music. Henrik Rabien’s arrangement sticks to Bach’s keys, the only significant alteration being the transposition of many lines an octave down Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I had been looking forward to last night's concert since it was first announced over a year ago. For a Stravinsky nut the chance to hear pieces whose live performances are vanishingly rare was not one to be missed. And it turns out there are enough other fans of austere late Stravinsky to sell out St John’s Smith Square, which proved a very suitable venue for this programme.Although presumably only pressed into service because of the ongoing refurbishment of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a deconsecrated church was the ideal space, both acoustically and atmospherically, for this collection of Read more ...
Richard Bratby
“Our Shakespeare” is the name of the CBSO’s current season. They're making the same point that Ben Elton makes slightly less subtly in Upstart Crow: that Shakespeare was basically a Brummie. And by implication, that four centuries of musical Bardolatory, from Purcell’s The Fairy Queen to Verdi’s Falstaff, is all on some level Made in Birmingham. Falstaff, conducted by Edward Gardner, is coming next month; the usual Shakespearean warhorses (Prokofiev, Walton, Tchaikovsky) have already been despatched. That left tonight’s “Seven Ages of Shakespeare”, which, like any concert that puts Purcell Read more ...
Eric Richmond
When I was first commissioned by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment I never dreamed that it would turn into a marriage of such long duration. The length and breadth of the collaboration has lasted over 20 years now, and long may it continue. It has afforded me the opportunity to get to know many of the players, which as time passes allows for an intimacy and trust that's very rare in photography, a profession which, like the proverbial shark, requires constant forward movement.Some of the musicians have been in front of the camera since the very first shoot back in 1996, some have Read more ...
David Nice
Anger and fear in Elgar, introspection in middle-period Beethoven: these are undervalued qualities in each composer’s music. Yet such moods were vividly present in two hyper-nuanced interpretations last night. It was easy to believe that no other solo violinist in the world today strikes a finer balance between sweet tone in the upper register and overall strength than Nikolaj Znaider; and on this evidence it sounded as if Antonio Pappano, a perfect concerto partner and a master of symphonic light and shade, might have made an even better choice of LSO Music Director than Simon Rattle.The Read more ...
Professor Gareth Williams
Culture, said Aneurin Bevan, comes off the end of a pick. A hundred years ago there was no shortage of picks when a quarter of a million coalminers were employed in south Wales. By now the mines have gone but many of the choirs they created are still here, for the male voice choir is one of the distinctive emblems of Welsh identity.The south Wales coalfield is the longest continuous coalfield in Britain and its choral tradition is just as unbroken. It began when the first tramload of the best steam coal in the world trundled out of the Bute Colliery in Treherbert at the top of the Rhondda Read more ...