Classical music
Boyd Tonkin
A full house, and television cameras: rarer events at the Proms than they used to be (or should be). Both lent a sense of occasion to the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s visit to the Royal Albert Hall with their Conductor Laureate, Tadaaki Otaka. The cameras (for a BBC Four broadcast on Friday) had descended not for Cardiff’s long-serving Japanese stalwart – who first led BBC NOW in 1987 – but for Elena Urioste’s performance of the Violin Concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The Proms first hosted this work to considerable acclaim in 1912, just weeks after the African-British composer’s Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This Prom by the BBC Philharmonic was billed as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Royal Northern College of Music, in distant Manchester.By design or lucky accident, the RNCM was well represented, with a new work by recent graduate Grace-Evangeline Mason, and a concerto performed by slightly less recent graduate Sir Stephen Hough (he was ennobled last week). Conductor Mark Wigglesworth (pictured below, image Mark Allan) has no obvious connection with the college or the orchestra, though he did study at Manchester University. He is always an asset on the podium, and each of the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Pekka Kuusisto, making his Proms debut as conductor in the first half of this concert, and then as violinist/conductor/ringmaster/energiser in the second, brought lightness, playfulness, and a Finnish sense for the absurd to the Albert Hall. He is an absolutely live-wire performer and has a hugely charismatic musical presence. He radiates joy in his craft and also unfailingly communicates his appreciation for those around him.Lightness and a sense of the dance were certainly there in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1. Recent recordings of the Carl Friedrich Ebers chamber ensemble version of this Read more ...
David Nice
Came for the music, returned for the theatre. I oversimplify: Riccardo Muti’s Roads of Friendship events, meetings of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra with players from other places – since 1997, they have included Sarajevo, Lebanon, Kenya, Iran and this year Jordan – will always be the big cornerstones of the Ravenna Festival.Yet since I joined Teatro delle Albe’s big collaborations with local citizens in 2019’s Purgatorio, second instalment of their Dante Divina Commedia triptych finally completed, after Covid interruptions, last year, this unique, highest level dramatic experience has Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Even before the Just Stop Oil protesters hit the stage after the interval, this was destined to be one of the most politically charged Proms the Royal Albert Hall has witnessed for a while. The rousing cheer that greeted the BBC Singers was hopefully all the beleaguered BBC bosses needed to realise – after the ill-advised attempt to abolish them in March – what a key part of our music culture they remain today.On top of this there was the programme, featuring two nationalist Nordic composers – one especially famed for his anti-Russian stance – and a contemporary Ukrainian, presided over by a Read more ...
Elgan Llŷr Thomas
“No one makes money from CDs anymore”; “Remember, once it’s out there it’s out there forever”; “Everyone’s making recordings these days, it’s a very cluttered market”; “You’ll struggle to make a mark…”These are just some of the things uttered to me when I first told people I was thinking of recording a new album. Are these statements untrue? Not entirely, but neither were they reasons enough to stop me from embarking on what has been an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery.The last few years have been a difficult time for musicians, but they also gave me a lot of space to ruminate. I Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michael Blake: Afrikosmos Antony Gray (piano) (Divine Art)It’s all in the name; the six volumes of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos were indeed the model for Afrikosmos, a sequence of 75 short pieces by South African composer Michael Blake (b.1951). As with the Bartók, Blake’s epic work is a six-volume compendium of studies, dances and character pieces in ascending order of technical difficulty, Blake seeking to explore “the range of traditional music in sub-Saharan Africa”. Each of the three discs in this set can be listened to as a discrete hour-long programme, Blake further categorising the Read more ...
David Nice
To give the first performance of a dazzling fantasia in the context of a rangy sunny-evening-to-night concert, as pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy did in glorious Blythburgh Church, merits a gold medal in piano-duo enterprise. To premiere 15 new works in a single programme and adapt perfectly to the various styles, the Ligeti Quartet’s crowning glory of three events celebrating their namesake’s centenary, is simply superhuman."That must have been very atmospheric." commented a fellow audience member at the Ligeti experience who'd not been able to get to the Kolesnikov/Tsoy special (I Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1, Florence Price: Violin Concertos 1 and 2, Adoration Randall Goosby (violin), Philadelphia Orchestra/Yannick Nézet-Séguin (Decca)There’s much to enjoy here, but how frustrating that this disc’s sleeve notes reveal next to nothing about the main reason for listening to it. Thank goodness for Wikipedia, which tells us that Florence Price’s two violin concertos date from 1939 and 1952 and were rediscovered in 2009 as part of a stash of papers and manuscripts found in her abandoned Illinois summerhouse. In Alex Ross’s words, “a large quantity of Price’s music Read more ...
Lukas Ligeti
The music of various African regions and cultures has played a significant role in shaping my own music. My exposure to African traditional music, which started not long after I began my own composition studies, helped me develop my unique artistic voice as a composer, and I owe this influence in part to my father and, indirectly, to his composition class in Hamburg.After graduating high school in 1983, I discovered a passion for music that I had never explored before. Despite never studying with my father, I did attend his composition class a few times over the years, including a final visit Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Artist-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall Hilary Hahn brought her residency to an end with a collaboration with the exciting Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, a notably youthful and ethnically diverse group, who brought with them a notably more youthful and ethnically diverse crowd than the hall usually entertains.The programme was American music, combining a couple of mid-20th century masterpieces with newer works by living composers. The older music largely came out ahead.Although I have known and loved the Samuel Barber String Quartet for 30 years I had never previously heard it live. I don’t Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You don’t expect to visit the Britten-Pears shrine in Suffolk and come back raving about Edward Elgar. Yes, Elgar. On Sunday evening, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London brought the composer’s Second Symphony to Snape Maltings: that marshland temple to every anti-Elgarian current in post-war British music.With transformative daring and dash, they made it sound like a work that even the Aldeburgh Festival's founder-saint himself might have appreciated. (Benjamin Britten once confessed himself “absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar for more than two minutes”.) Indeed, the middle weekend of Read more ...