Classical music
Bernard Hughes
During early lockdown in 2020 Howard Goodall published an article pondering the role of the composer in a pandemic. His answer was that music has throughout history been successful at memorialising people and events, and that it could do so again. On the back of the article, the London Symphony Chorus invited Goodall to create such a piece for the care and health workers who had lost their lives to Covid. The first version of Never to Forget was released online in July 2020, the ‘virtual’ LSC singing the names of the then 122 workers who had died. A year later the piece has been expanded – Read more ...
David Nice
While the big choral societies are asking, with good cause, why they remain silenced when it’s OK for football fans to sing on the terraces, the top voices of smaller ensembles are being heard again by select audiences. Not so small, in the case of the 24-strong young opera choruses of Garsington (times two, the groups divided between operas) and Grange Park Opera. Tenebrae in the wide-spread group its director Nigel Short (pictured below by Sim Canetty-Clarke) offered us in the welcoming space of Saffron Hall came close at 20 singers, and expressively unsurpassable in a typically ambitious Read more ...
Héloïse Werner
It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to perform with musicians like the ones I’ll be sharing the St John’s Smith Square stage with on Saturday 3 July; organist Kit Downes and cellist Colin Alexander are some of the best musicians I know. I say “share the stage”, but that’s not technically correct. We will be spaced out across the hall and play around with that use of space through the music we create. The audience will be surrounded by our sounds in all kinds of ways. Kit will be in the organ loft, Colin on the main stage opposite the organ on the other side of the hall, while I’ Read more ...
Jess Gillam
For over a year, many concert halls' doors have been firmly shut, the curtains drawn and the lights out. As we begin to emerge into a new world and live performance makes a comeback, I feel we are facing a bittersweet moment in the arts. As some musicians are taking those nerve-wracking steps from the dressing room to the stage, others are at home in despair, still facing hellish uncertainty and some have been forced to walk away from the profession entirely.It’s at once heartwarming to see audience and performers reunited but heartbreaking to see those who haven’t yet felt the glow of warmth Read more ...
Roxanna Panufnik
A month ago, I sat in St Martin-in-the Fields listening to London Mozart Players recording my orchestral version of Letters from Burma. I have never been to Burma but I was inspired to compose this work after reading a collection of 54 letters by Aung San Suu Kyi. The first excitement that morning was to be in the presence of an orchestra. In these times of the pandemic, with borders closed, this novelty can’t to be underestimated – I am devastated not be able to travel to attend the birth of another compositional “baby” at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw next month.The second excitement was that Read more ...
Robert Beale
Tabita Berglund is that rare species, an up-and-coming orchestral conductor attracting enough attention to secure repeated international bookings in even these straitened times. She also happens to be female and young, which until relatively recently would have been seen as another major handicap to success. But this was her return to the Hallé, having conducted a set of concerts in late 2019 with them - and she’s no stranger to the north west of England, either, since she took part as a young cellist in Lake District Summer Music’s masterclasses 10 years ago.Berglund is a more mature, but Read more ...
graham.rickson
One Movement Symphonies: Music by Barber, Scriabin and Sibelius Kansas City Symphony/Michael Stern (Reference Recordings)Placing these three single movements together serves to highlight just how great Sibelius’s Symphony No. 7 is, and just how hard it is to create a genuinely cohesive single movement symphony. Schoenberg’s early Chamber Symphony is another convincing example, sounding far less cohesive in the composer’s orchestral transcription. Samuel Barber wrote his Symphony No. 1 in the mid-1930s. If you’ve only heard Barber’s Adagio or the Violin Concerto you’ll be surprised by Read more ...
David Nice
Why travel to Glyndebourne for a concert? Well, for a start, none of us has heard a Mahler symphony live in full orchestral garb for at least 15 months, and though the Fourth is smaller-scale than some, its innocent beginnings belie the cosmic adventures ahead. Only a handful of us got to see the London Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Festival Hall during the semi-lockdown period; its departing music director Vladimir Jurowski had to make do with overwrought film presentation only when he bowed out with Tchaikovsky’s complete Swan Lake ballet score. And any programme which segues from Read more ...
Joseph Middleton
April 2020 was to have been the celebratory 10th Anniversary Festival of Leeds Lieder, the organisation I’ve been fortunate enough to direct since late 2014. I’d called the Festival Ode to Joy and in a curious turn of programming, geekery had come up with an opening gala I hoped would appeal to our audience: an acrostic programme that spelt out "Happy Birthday, Leeds Lieder" using the highways and byways of the song literature. It included a starry line-up of friends and tickets had flown out of the box office, continuing Leeds Lieder’s success for growing audiences over the past Read more ...
David Nice
In the beginning, 38 years ago, came a career-making Mahler Third Symphony for Esa-Pekka Salonen in his first concert with the Philharmonia. Reassembling that vast epic wouldn't be possible under present circumstances. Last night, ending 13 years as the orchestra’s music director, Salonen returned to the purest source, Bach, cannily but also movingly referencing two of his predecessors in the post, Klemperer and Sinopoli, in two arrangements, and ended where the first of these farewell concerts started, with Beethoven in C major, homaging another early partnership, with the wonderful Mitsuko Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra believes that its current post-lockdown summer series features the largest orchestra currently performing live in the UK. It’s not an easy claim to verify, and the full string section certainly wasn’t on stage for this matinee performance under the orchestra’s associate conductor Michael Seal. What’s clear though, is that the platform at Symphony Hall, stripped of risers and choirstalls, offers ample space for a large orchestra that’s socially distanced but doesn’t sound like it. The Hall’s pristine acoustic isn’t suited to every kind of music, but Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
By chance, I started watching this streamed concert shortly after hearing a live BBC broadcast of the Philharmonia playing in front of an audience for the first time in over a year. Much though I love the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, steadfast companion over many Edinburgh winters, from student standby to bus pass, there is no doubt where I would have rather been. A link, a click and a screen in my office do not even approach the palpable excitement in the Royal Festival Hall that evening (David Nice was there and confirmed that in his review). Orchestral music needs an audience, and it Read more ...