Classical music
Gavin Dixon
With the wealth of online performances during the pandemic, it is easy to forget the regular offerings from the Wigmore Hall. The Hall found itself in a better position than most, as it was able to present its autumn schedule largely unchanged, the only programming issues arising from international travel limitations for the performers. And the finances somehow permitted them to give concerts even without audiences when restrictions dictated, but broadcast everything live on webstreams. An appeal for donations on every broadcast suggests some hardship, but the fact that these broadcasts have Read more ...
David Nice
How strange to experience Saffron Walden’s amazingly high-standard new(ish) concert hall without the usual auditorium – in other words no tiered rows other than in the balcony, but seats around tables, on a level with the musicians (pictured below, the scene before the performance). And what a world-class concert this was, not the sort of thing you’d usually expect at the end of a misty afternoon’s ramble in the Essex countryside.It was a topsy-turvy programme, to be sure, with meditations bright (Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll) and dark (Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder) followed by an anything but tea- Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was the first song recital back at the Wigmore Hall following the second lockdown with a (distanced, 25%) audience. And it was a joy to be back. Great singing. That superb acoustic. A completely rapt audience. And, miraculously, not a single cough.Fatma Said and Joseph Middleton’s 75-minute recital consisted of a very cleverly-constructed two-part programme: the first half with songs about flowers starting with Mozart and progressing to Schubert, the second about dreams, from Schubert to Weill with an encore from Jerome Kern, all sung completely from memory.Said has a lively stage Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Symphonies 3 & 4 Australian Chamber Orchestra/Richard Tognetti (ABC Classic)Why these live performances from 2015 and 2013 have waited so long for release is a mystery; this is the best Brahms symphony disc I’ve heard in ages. Charles Mackerras and Robin Ticciati have shown that small-scale Brahms can work well, but this disc has more energy and feistiness than either. Here, Richard Tognetti leads and directs an augmented Australian Chamber Orchestra of around 50 players. The strings never sound anaemic and there’s some glorious wind and brass playing, the horn solos in Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Hallé have been slow off the mark, compared with some, in their response to the challenge of concert-giving in the Covid era. But now that they have delivered on the first of their winter season performances, it has clearly been worth the wait. They are offering not merely online musical performances but a set of newly made, highly creative films, watchable on Vimeo, built around the works they’re playing and the sight and sound of them doing so. Not less than a "live" performance, but quite a lot more.In "normal" times, you wouldn’t get as close to musicians in full flow as you do in Read more ...
Maxine Kwok
2020: a year that at some point felt like the end of live performance for the world of the performing arts, certainly for the foreseeable future. Artists spent months without any form of collaboration, leading to a serious lack of motivation due to the decimation of performance opportunities. Coupled with the stressful change in their financial circumstances a huge percentage of people with professions in the performing arts found themselves completely rudderless.I myself wandered aimlessly around the Barbican Estate, gazing longingly at the Barbican Centre and feeling empty without the daily Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
It began as a Christmas present in the bleakest of winters. In December 1939, as war engulfed Europe, Bertolt Brecht sent a poem to the exiled Kurt Weill in New York. Weill set it as a bittersweet gift for his wife Lotte Lenya. “Nannas Lied” – the song of a an ageing, resilient, seen-it-all prostitute – tells us (via Brecht’s nod to François Villon) that the worst as well as the best never lasts forever: “Where are the tears we cried last night? Where are the snows of yesteryear?” Yesterday, in the deserted Wigmore Hall, Christine Rice drew deep from their mingled stream of fury, regret and Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
As our friends across the pond celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, a mix of music from America kicked off the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s concert, opening with Massachusetts-born composer Carl Ruggles’s Angels for muted brass. Ruggles originally penned the work in 1920 as the second movement of a three-part piece entitled Men and Angels. It was scored for six muted trumpets, but the 1938 revision which was performed on Thursday features four trumpets and muted trombones; it's also transposed down a minor third. Tenderly played by the brass of the BBC SSO, it had a touching, Read more ...
Avi Avital
The mandolin is an instrument everybody has heard of without necessarily knowing much about it. Its history has been written by lovers of the instrument, often amateur players who are drawn to its approachable and appealing character, integrating it into their own lives, and in turn popularising it throughout the world.More than virtually any other instrument, the mandolin stands for different things depending on time and place. In the 18th century it was the preserve of the wealthy in salons across Europe; by the late 19th century and early 20th it had become popular among the middle classes Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After a brief interlude of concerts with a live audience, we are back to streamed events from empty halls (though many venues in London will be opening up again from next Thursday, concerts in Scotland have never opened up to the public). Some ensembles have opted to sell tickets, others – including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – to broadcast the music free but solicit donations. The economics of both models seem fraught with problems but at the same time the show must go on. But if that means in future I can sit in London and enjoy a concert from the Perth Hall that I would Read more ...
David Nice
It was Mahler as conductor who made the famous declaration that “Tradition ist Schlamperei” (sloppiness), or something along those lines. Where it becomes the opposite of sloppiness is when a national treasure in the lifeblood of Czech musicians over 140 years meets a conductor of absolute rigour, prepared to question himself and the way his (or her) orchestra plays it, but always with reference to the original score. So it was with the Czech Philharmonic and their then-new Russian-born Principal Conductor Semyon Bychkov last autumn, when they performed Smetana’s Má vlast (My Homeland) before Read more ...
graham.rickson
Osvaldo Golijov: Falling Out of Time Silkroad Ensemble (In a Circle Records)Along with many others, I was beguiled by DG’s recording of Osvaldo Golijov's Pasión Según San Marcos a decade ago, an exuberant Latin American take on Bach. After which Golijov slipped under the radar. There’s an illuminating article on The New York Times website where the composer explains the reasons for his disappearance, revealing that while he never actually stopped composing, “the ideas felt half-baked.” Falling Out of Time marks a brilliant return to form, this substantial song cycle based on David Read more ...