Classical music
Robert Beale
When it was first announced that Mark Elder was to become music director of the Hallé, I phoned a friend who knew him well from serving on his staff at English National Opera in earlier years. “He’s completely devoted,” he said. “He never does anything superficially, he’s always well prepared, he’s a good orchestra trainer, and he’ll last longer than other conductors.” It was a description and prediction that was amply fulfilled in the following quarter-century.And, with characteristic meticulous planning and awareness of what was right for the occasion, Sir Mark chose to present a European Read more ...
David Nice
Peerless among the constellation of Irish singers making waves around the world, mezzo Paula Murrihy first dazzled London as Ascanio in Terry Gilliam’s English National Opera production of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini. Since then she’s become a major star on the continent, not least as a superb Octavian in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, less so in the UK, though that should have changed with her Proms appearance last year as Didon in Les Troyens.The Wigmore Hall hardcore don’t seem to have got the message – last night’s concert, far from being the sellout it should have been, was relatively Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The concert offering at St-Martin-in-the-Fields has transformed in recent years, under Director of Music Andrew Earis. There is still a decent amount of “Four Season by Candlelight” but this tourist-bait now sits alongside some brilliant programming featuring choirs like Tenebrae, Ex Cathedra and the Monteverdi Choir.And a fairly recent innovation has been the creation of St Martin’s Voices, a chamber ensemble of young professional singers and who gave this hour-long recital of music about biblical beginnings. The ten-strong choir, under Earis’s avuncular guidance, sang beautifully in some Read more ...
David Nice
“Saint-Saëns: The Renaissance Man” proclaimed the big screen at the first remarkable programme I attended within the 2024 Sheffield Chamber Music Festival. The same epithet could be applied to this year’s curator, Steven Isserlis, so remarkable a cellist that one forgets until coming face to face with his other talents what a unique speaker and programmer he is.Sheffield's resident live wires in Ensemble 360 anticipated the generosity by granting his requests, among other things, for the showing of a silent film, probably the first (1908) to have a live score by a major composer (Saint-Saëns Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Kudos to the Wigmore Hall for continuing to make efforts to diversify its roster of performers and repertoire. Last year I reviewed the Kaleidoscope Collective, and noted how the different profile of their players attracted a younger and less universally white audience to the hall, and the same happened again last night when the American Sphinx Organization were given the stage. Make no mistake, the Wigmore Hall remains a bastion of Beethoven and a haven for Haydn, but an effort is being made and that should be noted and applauded.Sphinx is a Michigan-based, multi-faceted “social justice Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten: Spring Symphony, Sinfonia da Requiem, Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Simon Rattle (LSO Live)Here’s as good a Britten sampler as you’ll find, opening with a truly terrifying account of the early Sinfonia da Requiem. Commissioned by the Japanese government in 1939 to mark 2,600 years since the founding of the Japanese dynasty, the young Britten delivered an uncompromisingly dark showpiece, “a short symphony” nominally paying tribute to his late parents but all-too-audibly a response to global events. The Japanese authorities deemed the work Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Like his baggy white suit, pitched somewhere between Liberace and Colonel Sanders, Pavel Kolesnikov’s playing was spotless at the Wigmore Hall last night. It comprised two very different halves, the first a miscellany of apparently unrelated pieces, the second devoted to a single set of pieces by a single composer. Both parts worked wonderfully, and made a very satisfying whole, the overlong Philip Glass encore the only misjudgement of the evening.The American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-72) assembled disparate everyday objects in a glass-fronted box in his work Celestial Navigation, which Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Better (much better, indeed) late than never. The Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique should have given their cycle of Beethoven symphonies at St Martin-in-the-Fields in May 2020, after touring to Spain and the US. A lot has happened since. The pandemic scuppered the original timetable, while his own alleged actions – after he reportedly attacked a singer during rehearsals in France last year – have kept the ORR’s founder John Eliot Gardiner off the podium.So last week the period-instrument ensemble arrived at St Martin’s under the baton of Portuguese wunderkind Dinis Sousa. I caught the Read more ...
Robert Beale
It’s probably a bit early to be getting misty-eyed about the approaching end of Sir Mark Elder’s time as music director of the Hallé, but the programme he and they have just finished touring in the North of England will have been, for many, his real farewell.Its last outing was at the Bridgewater Hall yesterday, and it was (characteristically) a blend of the much-loved and familiar and something adventurous and new.That second element comprised the European premiere performances of a new piano concerto written and played by Sir Stephen Hough – titled The World of Yesterday, it was Read more ...
Robert Beale
There’s a sense of cheerful abandon about Manchester Camerata’s Mozart concerts with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Gábor Takács-Nagy that is hard to resist.So it wasn’t exactly the programme originally advertised, and the concept of performing and recording all Mozart’s piano concertos with all his opera overtures has stretched a bit as time has gone by, but this was the penultimate in a series that began not far off 10 years ago – and they were going to have fun.The concerto element, in strict fact, was Johann Christian Bach as recycled by Mozart: three piano sonatas by the London Bach turned Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The sixteen voices of the Dunedin Consort raided the large store of music inspired by the Song of Songs and the sonnets of Petrarch in a sensual programme at the Wigmore Hall last night. Combining the very old and the very new it offered a range of perspectives on texts that have attracted composers over centuries, and showed off the ensemble as one of the best in the business.I was not entirely convinced by the decision to put (most of) the newer pieces in the first half, and the older in the second. I prefer it when this kind of programme throws up unlikely but revealing juxtapositions. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Programme notes for Mahler’s monumental symphonies will often blithely chat about the works’ epic struggle between life and death, creation and destruction, joy and dread. In a comfy hall with a slick orchestra and a polished maestro, all of that can feel abstract and remote. Not last night at the Barbican. In 2021, Michael Tilson Thomas – conductor laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra – was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain tumour. Recent outings for the San Francisco Symphony have been greeted almost as farewell performances. Yet, despite his obvious frailty Read more ...