Classical music
Bernard Hughes
There is much to love about the latest Voces8 Live from London online festival. It goes beyond having a purely choral line-up, embracing instrumental music for the first time, while maintaining its focus on vocal performances of the highest standard.In addition, the production values remain unimpeachable and the group has shown that there is a market across the world – they boast of selling tickets in 75 countries – for streamed concerts if the quality is good enough. But perhaps most admirable is the generosity of Voces8 in sharing their spotlight. The festival offers valuable performance Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What does it mean to be Classical? It’s the question award-winning Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has consistently asked in a career that has collided music from Bach to Debussy, presenting them as part of a single conversation and continuum. Here, in a striking BBC Proms debut, he continued to probe and challenge, with a little help from the Philharmonia Orchestra and Paavo Järvi.A late substitute for the Philharmonia’s new music director Santtu-Matias Rouvali (a casualty of pandemic travel logistics), Järvi was able to present the programme unchanged, preserving the careful logic that Read more ...
graham.rickson
Louise Farrenc; Symphonies 1&3 Insula Orchestra/Laurence Equilbey (Erato)Louise Farrenc’s music is good as you’d expect from a precocious talent who’d studied piano with Hummel and composition with Reicha. Born in 1804, Farrenc’s misfortune was to be a female composer in 19th century Paris, a city with a highly progressive musical culture but antediluvian sexual politics. She was a renowned pianist and teacher, becoming a Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatoire in 1842 and having to fight to receive the same salary as her male colleagues. Farrenc’s three symphonies are Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
We finished with a pure Hollywood moment when John Gilhooly – as Chair of the Royal Philharmonic Society – popped up after the warm applause to announce that the Society had awarded its gold medal to Vladimir Jurowski. Oddly, Covid rules meant that the actual handover took place backstage. So Jurowski leaves the London Philharmonic Orchestra after 14 years as principal conductor– to lead the Bavarian State Opera in Munich – armed with the gong formerly bestowed on Brahms, Barbirolli, Bernstein, Barenboim and Brendel (that’s just the Bs). Richly merited, of course, and last night’s farewell Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s nobody’s fault, but – try as they might – the BBC Proms can often feel rather middle-aged. Whether it’s the lumbering albatross of a building, the ushers in their dated, casino waistcoats or the tone of zealous jollity (Have fun! But silently and according to the rules!), it somehow all adds up to a lack of freshness, spontaneity. Thank goodness for Aurora Orchestra.Nicholas Collon’s ensemble has taken a one-off novelty – an orchestral performance from memory – and made it an annual festival fixture. There’s a formula, of course, but thanks to Collon himself and co-presenter Tom Service Read more ...
David Nice
To excel at one massive Brahms piano concerto in a standard concert hall is cause enough for celebration. To master two over one evening in a very unorthodox space – namely, below the roof of Peckham’s former multi-storey car park – brings the performer close to recreative genius. The vision in this case was shared between pianist mover and shaker Samson Tsoy, Bold Tendencies – the wonderful organisation which has put together a series of concerts from remarkable artists beyond even its usual ken this summer, from Isata Kanneh-Mason and the Peckham Multi-Story Orchestra to the Jess Gillam Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In this most atypical Proms season this was actually an archetypal Proms programme: a world premiere: a neglected masterpiece and a good solid 19th-century symphony for those put off a bit by the first two. But this American-themed programme never felt run of the mill. There was a palpable energy in the hall, for both audience and orchestra, to be in the same space again. And if the extended applause at the end seemed a bit indulgent – each section, nearly each player having their own curtain-call – it was clearly born of the thrill of a return to live concert-making.The BBC National Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a normal year, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain descends mob-handed on the Royal Albert Hall for a Prom that complements the sheer quality of the young musicians’ work with joyful, raucous, roof-raising quantity. I recall a Turangalîla symphony in the other Olympic season of 2012 that rocked all Kensington with its heaven-storming, gold-medal exuberance. This summer, with caution still the proper watchword, the NYO has built its admirable “Hope Exchange” programme into a series of steps into the musical future.They begin with the members' personal dreams and ideals, and grow Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
After meeting on the Genesis Sixteen Young Artist Scheme, this vibrant vocal ensemble has been rapidly gaining momentum since their debut at St John’s Smith Square in 2017. Under the direction of conductor Sarah Latto, the final concert in their UK tour was polished, poised and subtly powerful. The concert had been planned to take place in the Midland Arts Centre's Hexagon Theatre, but a last minute change put it in a gallery space, surrounded by paintings that form visual artist Caroline Walker’s Women’s Work exhibition (which, if you’re in the area, is well worth a visit on its own). It’s a Read more ...
David Nice
Nominally, this was a programme of three symphonies. The first, though, sounded like music re-cut and pasted from a very British film and the second was a suite, albeit impressively reworked, from an opera. The real deal, Brahms’s Third, is a very personal masterpiece, more inward than outward looking, and that, too, may have been why Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s latest Prom with her City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra was less electrifying than its predecessors.Would “the Gipps Second Symphony” have made a reappearance had its composer been called Ralph and not Ruth? She is remarkable for her Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Two nights after the Scottish Chamber Orchestra had brought the first great E flat major symphony to the Proms – Mozart’s 39th – a serendipitous change of programme on Tuesday gave us the second: Haydn’s “Drumroll”. An equally serendipitous change of conductor saw Ben Gernon get the evening off to a deceptively simple start: no fancy-dan cadenza from the BBC Philharmonic’s timpanist, just enough of a flourish to get everyone’s attention as Haydn probably had in mind. Then the happy-face Dies Irae of the introduction’s theme, bassoon and basses nicely to the fore, and it was soon clear that Read more ...
Brooke Simpson and Erin Black
The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain’s Hope Exchange is an explosive return to the concert platform for hundreds of teenagers like us, playing a variety of new pieces, with the preparation beginning in hundreds of primary schools across the country. What Brené Brown writes in The Gifts of Imperfection perfectly summarises how we both feel about the project: “The belief in music’s incomparable ability to touch and resonate with the human spirit traces back to ancient civilisation through storytelling and philosophical musings”.This is our opportunity to build on a previous Read more ...