Classical music
theartsdesk
Remember how, back in the summer of 2020, we all wondered if large-scale symphonies would be back in the repertoire any time soon? I pessimistically predicted a decade of slow orchestral reconstruction.Yet right at the beginning of the 2021-2 season, the Philharmonia kicked off with two Strauss blockbusters. The Proms, having made last-minute readjustments to the 2021 programme, had inserted Sibelius’s Second Symphony into a magnificent first night from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Dalia Stasevska. But only this year are the great visiting orchestras back - and how.You may question Read more ...
David Nice
For once, a festival theme has meaning. “Tra la carne e il cielo”, “Between flesh and heaven”, is how Pier Paolo Pasolini, the centenary of whose birth we mark this year, defined his early experience of hearing the Siciliana movement of Bach’s First Violin Sonata (adding that he inclined to the fleshly). It provided the perfect epigraph to the four Ravenna Festival performances I attended this year, three of them as stunning as any hybrid event I’ve ever witnessed.The choice of return dates – regretfully missing out on Riccardo Muti's "Roads of Friendship" this year, though I did by chance Read more ...
Angela Slater
When I applied to the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Young Composers programme and found out that I had been accepted, I was expecting to be working on a new orchestral work as in previous years. However, this year, we were invited to explore the concerto form instead.I was delighted by this news, as it combines my two favourite modes of composing: writing for a soloist and writing for orchestra. Writing for a solo instrument allows you to delve deeply into the sonic potential of a single instrument. The apparent limitation offers a fascinating opportunity to seek an orchestral palette of Read more ...
David Nice
Last year’s relatively slimline East Neuk Festival felt like a feast in time of plague. This July everything was back to full strength in numerous venues, with the most remarkable line-up, and the greatest single day of concerts, I feel certain, ENF has ever seen. But that was in spite of the apocalyptic signs all around.Covid is, of course, rampant again, and casualties included guitarist Sean Shibe as well as the festival’s director Svend McEwan-Brown, who had to head home at the midway point with a stricken husband. Avian flu had hit the seabird community; more than half the gannet Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven, Berg, Bartók: Violin Concertos Frank Peter Zimmermann Berliner Philharmoniker/Daniel Harding, Kirill Petrenko, Alan Gilbert (Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings)Recent Berliner Philharmoniker own-label releases have included hefty Bruckner and Mahler cycles; this one is a more modest two-disc set comprising Frank Peter Zimmermann’s live readings of four large-scale violin concertos, taped under three different conductors between 2016 and 2020. Large-scale doesn’t include Bartók’s unfairly overlooked Violin Concerto No. 1. Written in 1907 for the violinist Stefi Geyer, it was Read more ...
David Nice
Semi-standing ovation at a lunchtime concert in a London church? Predictable, perhaps, from the first recital I heard George Xiaoyuan Fu give at the Two Moors Festival, an avian programme which made me long to hear him play Messiaen’s complete Catalogue d’oiseaux. Yesterday’s “Chopin Revisited” sequence heightened the sense of originality in planning and confidence in presentation. This is one of the most exciting young pianists of our time, no question.It's often said that Chopin's supreme originality is to be heard in his Mazurkas. Not exclusively so, of course, but Fu's selection certainly Read more ...
Valeriy Sokolov
A fortnight ago I performed Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the Aurora Orchestra, joining them and their Principal Conductor Nicholas Collon in Cologne. Tonight we shall present the same programme at the Royal Festival Hall. These are my first appearances with Aurora and as a Ukrainian, I feel so grateful that even during a terrible time like this, I can continue making music. The situation in my homeland feels so overwhelming that getting on with music right now is the best thing to do for now, at least mentally.I was born in Ukraine but grew up and studied in England so I have strong Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective were back on home ground last night in the tour of a programme featuring the first performances of a new song cycle by Edmund Finnis, Out of the Dawn’s Mind. Soprano soloist was the amazing Ruby Hughes.It was home ground for her, too, in a sense: as a former student at Chetham’s School of Music she’s an old friend of the Collective’s leader and artistic director, Rakhi Singh.Ruby Hughes and the Collective created a moving and stimulating online streamed programme from the Lakeside Arts venue at the University of Nottingham in February last year – Dowland, Debussy, Mahler Read more ...
Richard Wilson
In today’s near-normal times it is easy to forget how hard COVID-19 had hit the music industry, especially for touring orchestras like the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Masked, socially-distanced performances; streamed concerts from empty venues; and an outpouring of home-made YouTube films helped to keep musicians working and audiences culturally fed. However, there was a feeling across the industry that something more inspiring was needed.At the end of November 2020, a month into the second lockdown, the Academy asked us at One31Studio to make a film inspired by Mendelssohn’s Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov concluded their three-concert survey of Beethoven’s violin sonatas on the warmest day of the year. But the Wigmore Hall is always comfortable, and the temperature was well under control. The heat deterred the audience, but those who did attend made up with their impressive enthusiasm, unusual even for the ever-engaged Wigmore regulars.The performance was given on period instruments, still more the exception than the rule for Beethoven chamber music. For the first half, the Sonatas Nos. 4 and 5, Melnikov played a fortepiano appropriate to the era, 1800–01 Read more ...
Gavin Higgins
I was a strange child, I didn’t really fit in. I would twitch and distort my face into awkward shapes. I obsessively bit my fingers and knuckles till they bled. I collected leaflets and piled them high in neat stacks in the corner of my room. I was constantly bombarded with invasive thoughts that would leave me completely paralysed. Teachers would admonish me for ‘showing off’, people would stare, doctors would shrug.It turns out I had Tourette’s Syndrome and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Finally learning what was "wrong" with me gave my strangeness context but didn’t stop me feeling Read more ...
David Nice
The organisation now proudly and legitimately re-named the Dublin International Chamber Music Festival may be half a century old – of its 52 seasons, those of the two lockdown years can be lopped off the live reckoning – but its outlook is youthful and progressive in so many ways.Of the four (out of seven) concerts I managed to attend, the one that summed it up most strongly for me was its presentation of five Irish women pianists each playing a piece significant to the performer during lockdown, and another chosen by a key frontline worker – a surprisingly deep and emotional programme Read more ...