Classical music
graham.rickson
Does classical music still matter? Of course it does – sample any one of these ten discs and discover why. All of them are available as CDs as well as downloads – the classical CD shop may be almost extinct, but the physical product refuses to die.CPE Bach: Symphonies Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Rebecca Miller (Signum)You wonder what facial expressions JS Bach might have pulled when listening to these five symphonies composed by his second son Carl Philipp Emmanuel, whose career blossomed during a 28-year spell under the employ of Frederick the Great in Berlin. These short Read more ...
David Nice
Relatively recent tweaks to the abundant London concert scene have resulted in top-end events right up to Christmas. We have in part to thank the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square, postponing the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s holidays, putting them together with superb soloists and choirs, and serving up major Handel and Bach. One snag: their Christmas Oratorio when I last went to hear it turned out to be only four cantatas out of the sequence of six.You’d have to pay two period-instrument horn players if you included Part Four – the OAE didn’t – and yet as Richard Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
L'Arpeggiata seem to revel in being L'Anachronista. The baroque-jazz group led by the Graz-born theorbo player Christina Pluhar has been proudly and brazenly flouting the dictates of those who set the rules of Historically Informed Performance (HIP) for all 15 years of their existence.The printed programme, for example, mentioned “Francesco Turrisi – harpsichord”, and described in detail the delicious and lengthy agonies of tuning which his 1624 Ruckers copy harpsichord would have gone through prior to the concert; but what it didn't mention was that Turrisi would be spending roughly Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Is it possible for a carol concert to have a cult following? Ex Cathedra's annual Christmas Music by Candlelight performances in St Paul’s Church have quietly grown into a Birmingham institution. The audience has evolved its own rituals: camping out through the long interval in the box pews, and sharing improvised picnics of mulled wine and mince pies.The formula, devised by Ex Cathedra’s director Jeffrey Skidmore back when Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter was still lit by gaslight, is simple enough to allow creative elaboration: a candlelit sequence of mostly a capella, mostly modern choral Read more ...
David Nice
In 1981 a 20-year-old Swedish trumpeter on national service turned up in the town – city, by Swedish reckoning – of Örebro as soloist in Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. The ensemble, then a mix of amateurs and professionals, some of them from the local military academy, is now the much-recorded and award-winning Swedish Chamber Orchestra; the trumpeter, Håkan Hardenberger, is probably the most famous in the world, and certainly the most adventurous – he still fights for contemporary composers to take first place in musical creation. Earlier this month the SCO and Hardenberger Read more ...
David Nice
This is difficult. An official obituary, such as the one I’ve just finished for The Guardian, has no problem in pointing out the achievements of Kurt Masur’s distinguished career. Whatever his party-line status in Honecker’s East Germany, which he used to get the Leipzig Gewandhaus rebuilt to his own satisfaction, Masur did play a crucial role as one of five spokesmen preventing a Tiananmen Square-style massacre before the Berlin Wall fell. In 2001 he responded swiftly with his New York Philharmonic to give a memorial performance of Brahms’s A German Requiem, motivated players to give free Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Magnificat Dunedin Consort/John Butt (Linn)This disc's academic credentials are impeccable, but my reasons for loving it are purely musical; John Butt's Bach programme allows us to party as if it was, er, 1723. This is a reconstruction of Bach's first Leipzig Christmas – a cantata and a magnificat, interspersed with organ music and chorales. Butt begins proceedings with a Gabrieli motet and a sonorous organ prelude, before Bach's cantata Christen, ätzet diesen Tag erupts into life. Opening with a swinging chorus, the grandeur is bolstered by four trumpets. The choral forces are Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Imagine knowing Hamlet as a four-act play, or The Ambassadors without its bottom third. Imagine Mozart’s Requiem as a torso that halts eight bars into the Lacrymosa, or Mahler’s Tenth as the lone Adagio (as, indeed it too often appears). We might admire them all the more for what we ached to feel whole as their creators intended.So it is with Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, hitherto almost universally known as a three-movement torso. Almost four years ago the Berliner Philharmoniker played and recorded the final version of the most convincing of many attempts over the years to complete the Read more ...
David Nice
It’s boasting, but surely true, to claim that London offers the biggest number of classy Christmas concerts in the world. How could it be otherwise with established seasonal festivals based around Spitalfields, St John’s Smith Square and the over-restored but still amazing Temple Church whose founder Knights Templar bring Dan Brown fans in droves and an inevitable daily admission fee of a fiver? To these three shrines come most of the best choirs from Britain and further afield, and on the evidence of A Wondrous Mystery on the second evening of the Temple Winter Festival, there’s none more Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Jaap van Zweden is going places. At 55, he is already 16 years into a second high-profile musical career. His first, as a violinist, saw him appointed leader of the Concertgebouw, the youngest ever to hold the position. From there, he moved to the conductor’s podium, and is now Music Director of the Dallas Symphony and the Hong Kong Philharmonic. According to some rumours, he is also under serious consideration for the New York Philharmonic. But when we met, our conversation began with a more immediate engagement, the première of Magnus Lindberg’s Second Violin Concerto with Frank Peter Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hindemith: The Long Christmas Dinner American Symphony Orchestra/Leon Botstein (Bridge)Hindemith's delectable pantomime Tuttifäntchen remains one of my favourite seasonal discs, and now we have the first English-language recording of one of the composer's last works. The Long Christmas Dinner is a single act opera written in 1960 in collaboration with Thornton Wilder, an adaptation of his 1931 play. This is a highly affecting, gently moving piece, compressing 90 years into 50 minutes; Wilder and Hindemith show us the rise and fall of a middle class family through a sequence of seasonal Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Nobody knows de trouble I see is a popular concerto, but it’s an unlikely hit. Zimmermann maintains a distanced relationship with the spiritual on which the work is based, and, while there are jazz elements too, this is a long way from crossover. Zimmermann maintains his modernist/serialist perspective throughout, and all the jazz ideas – the trombone glissandos, the sax section replacing the French horns, the vaguely improvisatory trumpet writing – are configured within a strict and austere single-movement structure.Fortunately, both trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger and Read more ...