Classical music
Helen Wallace
2023 is surely the year the performing arts reach peak "immersive", a word endangered by its own ubiquity. From Punchdrunk’s Burnt City to Danny Boyle’s The Matrix we are promised a swallowing-up by art. Kings Cross is the location for two visual and aural initiatives: David Hockney’s 3D Bigger & Closer at the Lightroom, and Sound Unwrapped at Kings Place, a year-long series of intimate, immersive events kindled by live performance.The roots of the series are two-fold: firstly, the generous offer (from German company d&baudiotechnik) of a 360 degree, 25-speaker Soundscape system Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Ryan Wigglesworth is a man of many talents. He has recently been appointed Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony, but he is also a versatile opera conductor, and an operatic sensibility is clear in the musical personality he projects.Last night, that came in two forms, as the first work was by Wigglesworth himself. The song cycle, Till Dawning, was written for the conductor’s wife, Sophie Bevan, who gave the premiere in Austria in 2018. Serious illness has since interrupted her performing activities (not permanently, we hope), and so this UK premiere was given by soprano Elizabeth Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It was a rare treat to hear Yevgeny Sudbin’s piano artistry quite so close up. World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens is a new venue, in fact just in the process of being born (more about the venue lower down). In the room, with its seated capacity of just 120 on two levels, the sound is so clear and immediate, you could sometimes almost be inside the piano.And that proximity suits Sudbin’s way, which is to reveal every intricacy of the works he plays, to allow absolutely everything to be heard. His technical command is unbelievable, particularly as witnessed from within a few feet. I noted that Read more ...
David Nice
Ian Page’s “journey of a lifetime” with his Mozartists, taking the greatest genius year by year, lands us in 1773 with the adolescent Mozart's first durable crowdpleaser, the pretty-brilliant motet for soprano and orchestra Exsultate, jubilate (last night was its 250th anniversary). The boy wonder still needs annual support from his elders, though, and as usual we got more than just a sampler of what else was going on musically in that year.Page’s scholarly but performance-vivid planning gave us a first half which was a kind of Sturm und Drang sandwich – vivid, angular products of that style Read more ...
David Nice
Haydn and Mozart symphonies from John Eliot Gardiner and his English Baroque Soloists are bound, at the very least, to be high, lucid and bright. Last night the X-factor was there too, and trebled in a surely unsurpassable account of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola and orchestra by two of the world’s most communicative soloists, Isabelle Faust and Antoine Tamestit.There was amazement even as early as the opening orchestral ensemble here, Faust and Tamestit joining their fellow violinists and viola-players and acting as two more conductors to bring a crescendo to a climax even Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dvořák: Symphonies 1-9, Legends, Slavonic Dances Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/José Serebrier (Warner Classics)The advantage of having all the Dvořák symphonies in one handy box is that you can explore the works that rarely get an airing; apart from playing through the scherzo of Symphony No. 4 in a youth orchestra many years ago, I’ve never heard a note of Nos. 1-6 performed live. More’s the pity. There’s some fabulous music in the early symphonies and it’s interesting to hear pre-echoes of Dvořák’s late style. The luminous string writing in No. 4 looks ahead to the radiant G major Read more ...
Robert Beale
Nicola Benedetti and Sir Mark Elder are both in the enviable position of being able to take audiences with them into music territory that might scare some away. So it was a gratifyingly near-capacity house that heard Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto last night as – on the first occasion they have worked together – they presented it to the Hallé audience.It’s long been a favourite of gifted solo violinists, because of its combination of folk-style energy and lyricism (and the cadenza movement, which was written by its first soloist Pawel Kochański and divides the work roughly in two, Read more ...
Jonathan Freeman-Attwood
Why is it important for a music conservatoire to make recordings? What is the educational context? These are questions we have continued to reflect upon at the Royal Academy of Music – celebrating its bicentenary this year – since we took our first steps towards what has become an established and invigorating part of Academy life.Twenty five years ago, we made a conscious decision to equip young musicians with the particular skills required for "the studio". There was also the belief that giving students greater artistic agency would only yield exciting results, empowering them to take a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The adrenalin was in full flow yesterday lunchtime at the Wigmore Hall as the dynamic young Mithras Trio delivered a vigorous, toned performance featuring Beethoven, Bridge and an electrifying new work by Joy Lisney. The trio, who have been together for just over five years, are part of Radio 3’s New Generation Artists scheme and dispatched the repertoire with an intensity and expressive range that was often as beguiling as it was exhilarating.Frank Bridge’s Phantasie Piano Trio in C minor provided a tempestuous start to the concert, with a double forte opening that made it feel as if it Read more ...
David Nice
In precarious times, musical wonders never seem to cease – for now, at least. Who would have thought during lockdown that we’d be back so soon and so frequently to the kind of massive orchestra needed to play a cosmic blockbuster like Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra? Of the three live performances I’ve heard since September 2021, last night’s, the biggest and youngest (160 players aged 14 to 19), was also the freshest and most exciting.To hear young people in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain playing a supremely challenging work which used to be second nature to hardened Read more ...
graham.rickson
At the risk of sounding like a scratched record (or a cracked CD), it’s reassuring to know that you can still buy new recordings in physical formats. Granted, CDs do take up shelf space, but in most cases they sound better than most downloads and usually come with sleeve notes and texts. Pianist Beatrice Berrut’s Jugendstil (la dolce volta) contains the Swiss pianist’s transcriptions of movements from Mahler’s 3rd, 5th and 6th Symphonies and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. They’re highly effective, the “Tempo di minuetto” from the 3rd Symphony a folksy delight and No. 6’s “Andante moderato Read more ...
David Nice
While the call for livening up the concert format remains dubious – beyond unusual settings and a will to communicate, the rest is window-dressing – there’s always a special buzz about festival-like concatenations of events. For that reason, four one- or two-day chamber spectaculars have stood out for me this year.The most innovative was Chamber Domaine’s Bach Brandenburgs Plus day at West Malling Abbey in Kent, masterminded by music@malling’s Thomas Kemp, violinist and conductor. The idea of matching each of the concertos with a new work using the special forces involved isn’t new, but this Read more ...