Classical music
graham.rickson
The few ensemble lapses and moments of insecurity during the first half of this concert had nothing to do with Richard Farnes’s conducting, or with the playing of an augmented Orchestra of Opera North. It’s in rude health; Farnes has refined and deepened the orchestra’s string sound, and the winds and brass are world-class.But they weren’t able to compete with Hurricane Desmond. You could almost feel the building buckling under the strain, and at several points you feared that large chunks of Leeds Town Hall’s roof were about to blow off. It can’t be easy to play securely when you’re worried Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night’s Wigmore Hall recital by countertenor Iestyn Davies and tenor Allan Clayton, accompanied by James Baillieu, was an all-round triumph: brilliantly programmed, superbly sung and very thought-provoking. Mixing solo items with duos, the programme encompassed Purcell, Britten, Adès, Barber and the young American composer Nico Muhly. If it had been a competition – which it wasn’t – Britten would have been the champion. But he was also responsible for the most troubling of the pieces.Britten’s Canticle II of 1952 sets the story of Abraham and Isaac, as told in the medieval mystery plays Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Mass in B Minor Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists/John Eliot Gardiner (SDG)John Eliot Gardiner's 1985 B Minor Mass still sounds good, a perfect marriage of smart period practice and theatrical nous. Modern instrument performances can feel impossibly bloated and stodgy. Gardiner's forces dance, but lack nothing in weight. Vaclav Luks' Czech version is my current favourite, but Gardiner's DG recording comes in as a close second. This new version was taped in March 2015. The named forces are the same, though the personnel have changed considerably over 30 years. The newer set's Read more ...
David Nice
Why play a very substantial act of ballet music in concert? In the case of Aurora’s wedding entertainment from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, there are at least three good reasons. It embraces the most inventive and unorthodox of divertissements in any ballet – the one in The Nutcracker comes a close second – and a symphony orchestra deserves the chance to perform at least a substantial chunk of what Stravinsky called Tchaikovsky’s chef d’oeuvre. Besides, you won’t have heard every sequence in any choreographed version, not even the very thorough one by Matthew Bourne, who includes more Read more ...
Richard Bratby
You can read a lot into the first two chords of Beethoven’s "Eroica" Symphony. Classical portico or violent detonation? Majestic assertion of E flat major, or the first shocking glimpse of a drama that’s already under way? Michael Seal, conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, accelerated through those first two bars before sweeping into a sleek, swinging first subject. He could afford to let his players sing. Those asymmetrical opening chords had done just enough to subvert the polished surface – to hint at the music’s latent potential for violent disorder.And at critical points Read more ...
geoff brown
There are 12 of them, standing in a semi-circle. No conductor in sight. Instead they start singing by striking some invisible match. Immediately the hall is blazing with heat, light, and the ecstatic sounds of Tudor polyphony. Now celebrating its tenth concert season, the British unaccompanied choral group Stile Antico have been singing this repertoire since they first came together; and this Wigmore Hall shindig, exuberantly received by a packed house, marked the anniversary by revisiting the music sung on their very first CD, Music for Compline, in 2007.Have they got bored with this Read more ...
David Kettle
Glasgow has a brand new concert hall, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra has a brand new home. A move for the Orchestra from Henry Wood Hall, a converted church in the city’s West End it has occupied since 1979, has been on the cards for several years, but few could have predicted the scale and intricacy of the final project. The New RSNO Centre snuggles conveniently right next to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, and brings new offices, an education suite, a digital centre and practice rooms right to the city centre. The project’s centrepiece, however, is the RSNO Centre’s auditorium, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Schubert: Piano Music Steven Osborne (Hyperion)This is marvellous, an unexpected treat from a versatile pianist more commonly associated with 20th-century repertoire. Though Steven Osborne does have form in Schubert, having made a superb Hyperion disc of the composer's piano duet music several years ago. He gives us gloriously clear-sighted, lyrical performances of two posthumously published works. The D935 Four Impromptus are described in Misha Donat's notes as a sonata in disguise. Play them in order and you've an expansive 37-minute-long sequence, the last movement in the same key as Read more ...
David Kettle
James MacMillan’s sacred drama Since it was the day of preparation… got its first outing at the Edinburgh International Festival back in 2012. But it was an entirely different experience hearing it in a cavernous Edinburgh cathedral on a chilly November evening – in a welcome re-performance from co-commissioners the Hebrides Ensemble plus Synergy Vocals – to catching it amid the city’s August festival mayhem. And one that suited the piece’s slow-moving, contemplative atmosphere far more strongly, too.In fact, it’s a moot point what the work actually is – sometimes operatic, sometimes Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It is not surprising that Piano Circus rarely play on six real pianos (although the photo on last night’s programme cover shows just that). The expense, the stage space required and the logistical complexity all militate against it. But the sound produced by six highly amplified digital keyboards is so far removed from that of six pianos as to be another thing entirely, and the overriding memory of this concert is an unpleasant, and unpleasantly loud, piano-ish blast of sound beating me about the ears.Which is a shame as some of the playing was spectacular, incredibly tight and together. Read more ...
David Nice
It was a massive but never overbearing three-parter, a three-and-a-half hour celebration, a mini-festival of youth and experience. Wouldn’t we all want to mark a major birthday in the company of friends of all ages? Elisabeth Leonskaja, much-loved torchbearer for the comprehensive manner of mentor and duo-partner Sviatoslav Richter, played with them all – members of the Doric Quartet, genius composer and most vivacious of clarinettists Jörg Widmann, Vienna Phil double-bass doyen Alois Posch and, most bracingly of all, three of her own acolytes making their very distinguished ways in the world Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last month, Ludovico Einaudi's album Elements debuted at No 12 on the UK album charts, which made it the highest-charting modern classical album since Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs reached No 6 in 1992. It was proof of the quietly burgeoning allure of Einaudi, which has been stealthily expanding around the world since his first solo release, 1988's Time Out.Subsequent albums such as Le Onde, Eden Roc and I Giorni have lodged several of his limpid and haunting compositions in the ether, whence they might descend to be played on radio, or heard in commercials or on movie Read more ...