Classical music
philip radcliffe
Sir Mark Elder has a penchant for taking on large-scale works in Manchester, from operatic concert performances of Wagner and Verdi to Hollywood musicals. Following that line, he kicked off the new Hallé season with Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé ballet score in its entirety, described by the composer as “a vast musical fresco faithful to the Greece of my dreams”. We are used to hearing the odd suite, but rarely the whole work. It calls for large forces for the three parts with 13 scenes and lasts about an hour. Commissioned by Diaghilev, it evokes the glory days of the Ballets Russes and that Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
London homelessness charity The Passage was set up in 1980 and has been growing steadily so that it now provides a day centre, short-term hostel and long-term housing in an effort to help street sleepers get their lives back on track. Its annual "A Night Under the Stars" gala concert is the central event on its fundraising calendar, and assembles an extremely high standard of musician. The evening was compered by Jo Brand and Petroc Trelawny, both safe pairs of hands in their distinct ways.The Orion Orchestra, a cross-conservatoire group of students and recent graduates, was set up ten years Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Stratford-upon-Avon calling. The City of London Sinfonia has embarked on a series of three Bard-based October concerts in London to commemorate the 450th anniversary year of Shakespeare's death. The first of the three stopping-off points last night was Southwark Cathedral, in some ways a logical starting-place, since the building proudly asserts its credentials as the parish church nearest to the Globe Theatre. The main work of the evening was Mendelssohn's charming and graceful incidental music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, presented semi-staged, which occupied the whole of a delightful Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nielsen: Symphonies 1 and 4 New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert (Dacapo)Alan Gilbert tears into the opening of Nielsen 4 with some ferocity, sustaining the forward motion very nicely indeed. Until, well, we'll get to that later. This symphony needs to feel slightly unhinged, a boiling cauldron of sound. You suspect that this performance works so well because Gilbert hasn't micromanaged things, letting an on-form New York Philharmonic let rip. The brass scythe through the first movement with precision and abandon, and Gilbert's especially good at managing the tempo and metre changes. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
2014 is the 250th anniversary of the death of Jean-Philippe Rameau, France’s baroque giant and maverick. To say that the UK celebrations have been muted is to put in generously, reconfirming a national trend that has long sidelined this repertoire in favour of more familiar Italian and German contemporaries. So it was especially good to see the Wigmore Hall full for an anniversary concert from instrumental ensemble Les Paladins and soprano Sandrine Piau.But, emerging back out onto Wigmore Street after barely more than an hour of performance, I found myself baffled. Was this brief evening of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The first time I interviewed Richard Tognetti he told me a story. Prior to touring the Australian Chamber Orchestra to Japan, the group’s leader and artistic director was discussing publicity with a local PR. Faced with disappointing ticket sales he asked for advice. The response? Remove two letters from the orchestra’s name and transform it into the Austrian Chamber Orchestra – problem solved. It was a tale told with a smile and a roll of the eyes, but one that still had a frisson of Old World/New World truth about it.I had cause to remember the anecdote last week, when I found myself in Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Daniil Trifonov, 23, has shot to prominence as one of the hottest pianistic properties of the moment. With multiple competition wins behind him, including the Tchaikovsky in his native Russia, plus a recording contract with DG and a frenetic globe-trotting schedule, he is now a very busy young man. Last night’s London appearance was his recital debut at the Royal Festival Hall, a venue only accorded to the biggest names in the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, the new season of which he was opening.A sizable though not quite capacity crowd of pianophiles largely took this young Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
French soprano Sandrine Piau, born in 1965 in a south-western suburb of Paris, has an agile, supple voice. It soars, so critics reach readily for all those bird metaphors: nightingale, sparrow, "she leaves the earth on wings of song" and so on. She has worked regularly with more or less the entire pantheon of baroque and early music specialists: William Christie, René Jacobs, Philippe Herreweghe, Christophe Rousset, Emmanuelle Haïm, Sigiswald Kuijken, Gustav Leonhardt, Ivor Bolton, Ton Koopman, Marc Minkowski and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.Away from Baroque repertoire, Piau sings Mozart - a Read more ...
David Nice
As a town of 70,000 or so people, Bamberg boxes dazzlingly above its weight in at least two spheres. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, risen to giddy heights under its chief conductor of the last 14 years Jonathan Nott, is decisively among Germany’s top five, and acknowledged as such in its substantial state funding (to the enviable tune of 80 percent, a figure known elsewhere, I believe, only in Norway). And a galaxy of great buildings has won the place UNESCO World Heritage status. Strange, then, that the British don’t seem to realise, as do the Americans, Chinese, Japanese and Italians – Read more ...
theartsdesk
He was not only a bracing conductor/harpsichordist pioneer in period-instrument authenticity, writes David Nice, but also a gentleman and a scholar. My only direct acquaintance with Christopher Hogwood, who died earlier this week at the age of 73, was in two projects dear to his heart: the recording of Handel’s Orlando, mentioned by its countertenor star James Bowman below as a highlight of his career, and his phenomenally well researched Haydn symphonies series, both for that handsomely logo-ed early music branch of Decca known as L’Oiseau-Lyre.Hogwood was very much a part of my own Read more ...
graham.rickson
Kalevi Aho: Theremin Concerto, Horn Concerto Carolina Eyck (theremin), Annu Salminen (horn), Lapland Chamber Orchestra/John Storgårds (BIS)The theremin is the only instrument untouched by its player, whose left and right hands have to move in space to control volume and pitch respectively. Nip across to the Musée de la musique in Paris and you can try one for yourself. It's almost impossible to play well, and after aimlessly trying to play a tune you'll probably resort to frenzied atonal whooping up and down the seven-octave range. Finnish composer Kalevi Aho's magnificent 2011 Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Hector Berlioz knew from early on in life which aspects of death he would want to avoid. He had seen quite enough of the medical textbooks that his father had tried to foist upon him. He had even got as far as smelling the dissecting table as a medical student in Paris, desperately counting the days before he could make his escape into music. The composition commission he received just a few years later in 1837 from the Minister of the Interior was exactly what he wanted and needed him to free himself from those memories, to write a requiem full of grandeur, glory and the sound and the sheen Read more ...