Classical music
alexandra.coghlan
Earlier this year early music ensemble Stile Antico released a really fabulous disc. The Phoenix Rising is a collage of the Tudor church-music classics that all gained their status and familiarity thanks to the work of the Carnegie Trust and their Tudor Church Music edition. The recording has – very deservedly – won or been nominated for a handful of awards, and if this were a CD review I’d be able to leave it at that. Unfortunately it’s a concert review, and last night’s performance at Cadogan Hall was a different matter.In a UK market saturated with early music singing groups – The Sixteen Read more ...
David Nice
You may have noticed an unholy silence from theartsdesk in the immediate aftermath of Sir John Tavener’s death a week ago today, just under three months short of his 70th birthday. Three of us in the classical team felt we just didn’t know his music well enough in the round, or care enough, to give an authoritative judgement.There were the early achievements – his trailblazing 1968 cantata The Whale, for instance – and then what felt like an increasing law of diminishing musical returns as Tavener took up the mantle of the Russian Orthodox Church. What ideas there were seemed spread thin over Read more ...
joe.muggs
Oliver Coates is the very model of a modern musical generalist – able to jump, or ignore, the boundaries between musical categories yet retaining deep understanding of the nuances of each category or genre. He has feet firmly in both the concert hall and the artier side of the electronica world, and has collaborated broadly over recent years – though is only now emerging as a solo artist.In the classical world, his cello has taken the lead in concerto performances with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Britten Sinfonietta, performed Music for 18 Read more ...
Mark Valencia
As farewell galas go it was less an obituary, more a celebration of an artist who has earned every whoop of the rock-star welcome she received from an adoring crowd. Dame Felicity Lott – "Flott" to her friends (i.e. pretty well everyone present) – was cheered to the echo by her fans and eulogised at either end of the evening by Wigmore Hall director John Gilhooly. The recital she gave in between defied criticism and made a nonsense of any attempt at an abbreviated star rating because (saving pianist Graham Johnson’s presence) this was a one-star event – and, like all astral bodies, Flott was Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: The Symphonies, Orchestral works Gewandhausorchester /Riccardo Chailly (Decca)Riccardo Chailly's sensational modern-instrument Beethoven cycle hasn't been bettered, and this Brahms symphony set repeats the trick. Pretty much everything is judged to perfection. Brahms never included metronome marks in his music. Chailly recognises that “this ensures a certain amount of licence", but is anxious to emphasise what the notes call "an uninterrupted evolutionary flow". Keep changing gear, and the music will grind to a halt, in other words. That never happens here. Chailly's swiftish Read more ...
David Nice
Among the diaspora of younger-generation Russian or Russian-trained pianists, there are at least four whose intellect and poetry match their technique. Three whose craft was honed at the Moscow or St Petersburg Conservatories – Yevgeny Sudbin, Alexander Melnikov and the inexplicably less well-feted Rustem Hayroudinoff – have made England their home. Boris Giltburg - the youngest of the group with a fifth, Denis Kozhukhin, close on his heels - left Moscow for Tel Aviv when he was a child and has had a different training. Coltish and capricious at times, his imagination may yet turn out to be Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This year I’ve sat through Carrie Cracknell’s Wozzeck dry-eyed, seen a handful of Mimis take their last consumptive breath without so much as a tremor, even heard Shostakovich’s shattering Symphony No. 13 without obvious emotional distress. I was beginning to think I was getting irretrievably jaded, hardened; then a bunch of Welsh kids with ukuleles and a folk trio from the Highlands came along and everything changed.Music education in the UK has never been more embattled, more fragile. The music centres across the country that gave my generation that first addictive taste of ensemble music- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A previous visit to the Wigmore Hall saw the Jerusalem Quartet make headlines for all the wrong reasons, after political protestors disrupted the live-broadcast concert. Last night however all was mercifully calm and music-focused for the start of the first three-concert sequence in the quartet’s Shostakovich cycle, though audience members did have to brave the rather incongruous bouncers, lined up in their casual-with-just-a-hint-of-don’t-even-think-about-it chic outside the hall doors.Working chronologically through Shostakovich’s chamber repertoire, the quartet’s triptych of concerts gain Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The Southbank’s artistic director Jude Kelly was out in force at this penultimate weekend of The Rest is Noise festival, delivering little triumphalist, Ryan Air-like fanfares, reminding us how pioneering they had been to programme composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Philip Glass - composers who no one had ever heard of before they'd bravely decided to put them on. She also proclaimed that two-thirds more tickets were sold than is normal for contemporary classical concerts, which could have been true had the festival actually contained any Read more ...
David Nice
How many reviews of War Requiem do you want to read in Britten centenary year? This is theartsdesk’s fourth, and my second – simply because though I reckon one live performance every five years is enough, Rattle’s much-anticipated Berlin Philharmonic interpretation fell almost entirely flat, and I wanted to hear at least one good enough to move me to tears.Last night’s under the special circumstances of Remembrance Sunday wasn’t just good; it hit the heights and plumbed the depths, with no weak link in any of the soloists, choirs, orchestra or instrumental soloists. So much so that the tears Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Cello Concertos Steven Isserlis (cello), Mahler Chamber Orchestra/Daniel Harding (Hyperion)How wonderful to hear a familiar work sounding so fresh and potent. Steven Isserlis's Dvořák anthology is revelatory, in so many ways. There's the sumptious orchestral playing from Daniel Harding's Mahler Chamber Orchestra. It's warm, rich, but never overwhelms the solo line, and Dvořák's wind and brass writing has rarely sounded more clean and clear. I'm thinking of the nostalgic horn solo which steals into the B minor concerto's first movement, or the quiet trumpets in the same work's Read more ...
theartsdesk
Following theartsdesk's Monday opinion piece on reasons for moving towards a boycott on Valery Gergiev's concerts, and in the general climate created by other reports and protests, the conductor has issued the following statement, to which David Nice responds with an open letter.Valery Gergiev's statementI am aware of the gay rights protest that took place at the Barbican last week prior to my concert with the LSO. I have said before that I do not discriminate against anyone, gay or otherwise, and never have done, and as head of the Mariinsky Theatre this is our policy. It is wrong to suggest Read more ...