Classical music
Robert Beale
Though billed as a “concert performance”, this was really much more than that. With the resources of their own theatre, Opera North’s team present a staging that employs a big, built-up and raked floor, with a simple platform in the centre and a starry-night black back-cloth, and their principals and chorus move and act in simple but effective style.There are costumes, there is theatre lighting, and there are sound effects – thunder and rushing wind noises tell us we’re visiting the land of the dead and abode of the Furies (as well as Gluck’s music, of course). I’ve seen poorer production Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You invariably come away from an Aurora Orchestra concert with ears refreshed and mind revived. As a storm swept across London on Sunday, the audience at Kings Place enjoyed their own cleansing wind in the form of this genre-spanning gig in the “Voices Unwrapped” season, led by tenor Nicholas Mulroy. It took us all the way from Baroque Europe to the socially-committed “new song” movements of modern Latin America. Mulroy sang – with consistently fine tone, phrasing and colour, not to mention exemplary clarity of diction – in four languages (English, Spanish, Italian, German). Ten Aurora Read more ...
graham.rickson
The Playhouse Sessions: Bjarte Eike, Barokksolistene (Rubicon)The Playhouse Sessions is a follow-up to the irresistible Alehouse Sessions, in which Bjarte Eikke and his Barokksolistene recreate a 17th century London pub gig, where sea shanties and rumbustious dance tunes rub shoulders with Purcell. I was very disappointed to miss the recent live London outing for both these projects (reviewed by David Nice for theartsdesk) and while nothing can quite match being in the room, the Playhouse Sessions in recorded form still offers more musical revelation and sheer fun than anything else I Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the third time I’ve heard Path of Miracles live this year and I’d happily hear it another three times before Christmas. I reviewed the amateur Elysian Singers sing it in February, and the BBC Singers took it on for the first time in May – but last night’s triumphant version by Tenebrae was surely the best of the lot. This is a profound and moving piece, symphonic in its scope, surely one of the masterpieces of the recent choral repertoire, back where it started, with Tenebrae.Joby Talbot's Path of Miracles, which describes the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, was Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Good conductors should surely be seen as well as heard. Positioned behind Emanuel Ax’s piano in Brahms’s first piano concerto, with the two flanks of the London Philharmonic’s strings spread wide on either side across the stage, Karin Canellakis sometimes looked from the stalls of the Royal Festival Hall as if she were directing the chamber ensemble of horns and woodwind just in front of her. Thankfully, the sounds she spun from the LPO and her much-loved veteran soloist told a much more comprehensive story. Ax embraced the work like the old friend it is to him, perhaps holding back Read more ...
David Nice
A 150th birthday cornucopia was anticipated: vintage chamber and vocal Vaughan Williams in a big Wigmore Hall three-parter alongside music by other great Brits. It turned out, instead, to be a handsome if overlarge horn sounding several cracked notes.None of those had to do with the performances, which were first-class throughout: could it be otherwise with players from the Nash Ensemble, baritone Roderick Williams and 14 other remarkable British-based singers? Let’s get the moans out of the way first. This was proof that VW’s Five Mystical Songs and Serenade to Music, typical of his taste in Read more ...
Robert Beale
Within its own aspirations, Orpheus is a complete triumph. “Monteverdi reimagined”, as Opera North subtitled it from the start, is an attempt to unite (and contrast, and compare, and cross-fertilise) early baroque opera with South Asian classical music.That’s a big ambition, as the two might seem to have little in common. But Anna Himali Howard’s simple production concept of a marriage celebration, where Orpheus is a white British guy and Eurydice an Asian girl, set in the back garden of a semi-detached house – probably in Leeds – is a symbol of the whole enterprise.The design (Leslie Travers Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
This was one of those rare occasions when a somewhat diverse collection of pieces knits together into a rather satisfying programme. To start at the end, the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony is a rumbustious crowd pleaser not least because of its theatrical appeal: the lone organist sitting way above the orchestra unleashing the final peroration in a great surge of full-fat romantic harmony.“Feel how it moves the air”, as the late great Carlo Curley once told me, of the then partially defunct Usher Hall organ. Now in fine fettle, this great civic instrument by Norman and Beard makes light work of Read more ...
David Nice
If there’s a dud or a dullard among Sibelius’s 116 official opus numbers, I haven’t heard it. Yet catching even many of the outright masterpieces live in concert isn’t easy; the brevity that can show us a world in under 10 minutes makes some difficult to programme.All hail, then, to the BBC and scholar/biographer Daniel Grimley for mapping the Finn’s legendary universe in three concerts of wall-to-wall Sibelius and another placing his two main pupils’ choral music alongside his own.Missing Grimley’s morning introduction was excusable: at exactly that time I was submitting to the pneumatic- Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
When Roberts Balanas was at the Royal Academy of Music he was asked to perform something “different” for an open day. The Latvian violinist already had a reputation for being as experimental as he was virtuosic. He began with a rendition of the Andante from Bach’s Sonata 2 in A minor – a tricky polyphonic piece in which the violinist must accompany the melody with repeated notes on the lower string. Yet as the piece progressed he started to introduce some of his own harmonies, gently shifting the polyphony till it sounded more like something from…ABBA.This witty, teasing musical hybrid Read more ...
David Nice
A double-sided A4 sheet is better than a programme online only – the default for several London venues now – but the Wigmore Hall missed a vital trick in failing to tell us what Boris Giltburg intended in a transcendental sequence which should have been headed “death and remembrance”, He’s an eloquent writer, too; his own note would have been much better than the disconnected observations we got about Bach/Busoni, Ravel, Chopin and Medtner.No matter: the unity in variety was both stunning and perfectly placed in a recital of two equally compelling but very different halves. Everything, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Colourise London Choral Sinfonia/Michael Waldron, with Roderick Williams (baritone), Andrew Staples (tenor), Elena Urioste (violin) (Orchid)Colourise, the latest album from by the London Choral Sinfonia, proved revelatory: I came for the Vaughan Williams, but got unexpectedly drawn in by the Lennox Berkeley. His Variations on a Hymn by Orlando Gibbons gets its premiere recording and is a piece I am very pleased to know: it grows engagingly from a humble beginning, solo strings quietly mimicking viols, before growing to fill its 19-minute duration without feeling a moment too long. Read more ...