Classical music
Danny Driver
There’s an old saying that goes: if life deals you lemons, make lemonade. To say that the COVID-19 pandemic is a lemon would be a huge and trivial understatement – it has had a massive effect on people’s way of life across the globe, it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and permanently scarred many more physically, psychologically and emotionally. In terms of livelihood, performing artists whose work involves close proximity and live audiences in theatres, concert halls and studios have been particularly badly affected, and it is clear that establishing a new modus operandi for the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No. 7 Orchestre National de Lille/Alexandre Bloch (Alpha Classics)Mahler 5’s five movements trace a lucid journey from darkness to light, and No. 6’s tautly-structured outer movements don’t contain a wasted note. Whereas cynics suggest that No. 7 is an unsuccessful rehash of elements drawn from its two predecessors. They’re wrong. This is the Mahler symphony I got to know first, if only because it was the only one available at my local record library (remember those?). I’ve loved it ever since. That the work is now almost standard repertoire is remarkable, given the Read more ...
David Nice
Songs of the beyond versus the profundity of the here and now struck very different depths in the Castalians’ evening concert at the Wigmore Hall and Elizabeth Llewellyn’s recital with equal partner Simon Lepper the following lunchtime. It was good to have the very human anchoring of Haydn’s “Emperor” Quartet, Op. 76 No. 3, before the awfully big adventure of Beethoven’s Op. 132: none of us who’d adapted to the al fresco mix of sophistication and take-it-as-it-comes in the four quartet recitals in Battersea Park Bandstand would willingly swap it for a more lugubrious Temple of Art, but the Read more ...
David Nice
There was a rainbow over the Royal Festival Hall as I crossed one of the Hungerford foot bridges for the first time in six months. The lights and noises inside did not betray the augury. Was it the sheer hallucinatory pleasure of being within the auditorium with a handful of other spectators watching and hearing a full orchestra after what felt like a lifetime? Partly, perhaps, but I’ll swear that the building-out of the stage to accommodate players at a proper distance has made a difference to the sound. Never again will I diss the Southbank Centre’s main auditorium – I didn’t realise how Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
My first time back in a concert hall since March was also, more significantly, the first time back for last night’s Wigmore Hall performers, guitarist Miloš Karadaglić and saxophonist Jess Gillam. Their pleasure in playing live again was palpable – in introducing the encore Miloš said “without an audience we are nothing” – but playing to a one-fifth-full hall must have felt unusual for these two big stars of what used to be called “crossover” music.I had never heard the sax-guitar combination before, and beforehand I had wondered about balance, pitting one of the loudest of instruments Read more ...
David Nice
Even bigger things have happened to Sheku Kanneh-Mason since I last saw him performing alongside his contemporaries in the Fantasia Orchestra – That Royal Wedding, for instance, and a Decca contract. Yet it looks like he will always have the wisdom to hurry slowly. He played Saint-Saëns’ First Cello Concerto with two orchestras on film recently – the Philharmonia pre-recorded event infinitely superior in sound and vision to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s centenary celebration, though the cellist was equally good in both – because he only had three in his repertoire (the others Read more ...
graham.rickson
CPE Bach: Complete Piano Trios Linos Piano Trio (C-Avi)13 piano trios squeezed onto just two discs is a steal, but we’re talking CPE Bach and not Schubert, and there’s the issue of whether these pieces are piano trios in the accepted sense. Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach’s London publisher issued the Wq 89 set in 1776, describing them as “Six Sonatas for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte accompanied by Violin and Violincello”. The composer variously referred to them as trios, sonatas or “Trios (which are also Solos)”. They were an instant success, and Bach added a further set shortly afterwards Read more ...
David Nice
An early hero of lockdown, livestreaming from his Berlin home in terrible sound at first, Igor Levit is a supreme example of how adaptable musicians can survive in times like these. True, he has the advantage of being the go-to pianist of the moment, but who else would take Satie’s 18-hour Vexations into a recording studio for more live broadcasting, or master the complete Beethoven sonatas more thoroughly for the most exciting of live experiences at the Salzburg Festival (in full) and now the Wigmore Hall (a telling selection)?There is focused brilliance in the playing as well as deep Read more ...
David Nice
It wouldn’t be true to say I’d forgotten what a solo cello in a fine concert hall sounds like; revelation of an admittedly sparse year will undoubtedly remain Sumera’s Cello Concerto played by young Estonian Theodor Sink at the Pärnu Music Festival in July. But Alban Gerhardt, exactly the sort of enquiring musical mind likely to take up that masterpiece, brought tears to the eyes with the lower resonances and upper sweetness of what I presume to be his 1710 Goffriller instrument in the Wigmore Hall. It offers a superlative acoustic for stringed instruments, if less kind to pianists, though Read more ...
David Nice
Music going back to nature, or rather the managed nature of a London park, can make you think and feel quite differently about great composers’ responses to the world around them. To hear Dvořák’s blissful “American” Quartet the Friday before last in the tender hands of the Maggini Quartet was to realise something of the circumstances around its swift (16-day) composition on a summer holiday in the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa, and to go back to the essence of rustic music-making as well, of course, as the essence of folk music which links the composer’s native Bohemia with Afro- Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“It’s SO good to be back,” said Catherine Bott, and it would be impossible to disagree with her. She was presenting the livestream of the first concert to be performed in front of an audience at Wigmore Hall since March. The rules as originally in place (presumably from Westminster council) were going to limit that audience to a meagre maximum of 56 people, or just 10% of the seats, but the ruling was suddenly overturned, and the capacity last night was expanded to accommodate 112 of us fortunate souls.It felt not just like an imperative, but also a duty and a pleasure, to be able to produce Read more ...
John Gilhooly
It is hard to believe that it’s really happening! Despite a few bumps along the way, Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, one of the greatest Lieder duos of our time, will open the 20/21 Wigmore Hall Season tomorrow night in a programme of Schubert and Berg. This is the first of 100 concerts between now and Christmas.It has taken a huge amount of work to get to this point and undoubtedly there will be many more challenges ahead as we navigate our way through the winter months. We have reached this point because of our generous audiences and their support over so many years. The only way that Read more ...