Classical music
graham.rickson
Ives: Universe, Incomplete (Accentus DVD)Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony, conceived for 4,000 musicians positioned on different mountain tops, never saw the light of day. Sketches for the work span his creative life, some made as late as 1948, and several composers have created speculative performing editions. Ives did leave a note, explaining that “in case I don’t get to finishing this, somebody might like to work out the idea.” You suspect that he had no intention of completing it. This DVD set contains Christoph Marthaler’s Universe, Incomplete, performed during the 2018 Read more ...
David Nice
It seems a shame that large-scale organisations can’t be more flexible when government guidelines shift. True, the arts couldn’t jump at two days’ notice when outdoor events were licensed by our ever-vacillating government. The BBC Proms could have adjusted, but it seems the programme is now carved in stone – mostly archive material until the end of August.No need, either, for the drive-in set up English National Opera is promising at Alexandra Palace in September. I can’t say that the idea of Puccini’s La bohème, the most perfectly proportioned opera in the repertoire, being filleted to 90 Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Presenting online concerts has been a Matterhorn-steep learning curve for the music sector. Now, after a few months in which imaginations have been tested to the limit, it’s becoming clear what works and what doesn’t. All the more power, then, to the Philharmonia’s many elbows: in yesterday’s webcast, the first of three for their Summer Sessions series, they showed exactly what is possible once one dives into the chilly water. In a programme slightly under one hour long, conducted by John Wilson (who has grown a lockdown beard), Sheku Kanneh-Mason, justifiably British music’s man-of-the- Read more ...
David Nice
The Fidelio Orchestra Café is where you go for electric-shock and deep immersion therapy from the greatest of musicians. It happened last week with Steven Isserlis in Bach, and last night Alina Ibragimova sent high voltage shooting through the body with the very first gesture of Janáček’s Violin Sonata, joined in supernatural high wire acts by Samson Tsoy on the Bechstein now filling more than the space occupied last week only by the cellist. The two advertised sonatas are febrile masterpieces, but we hadn’t bargained for the deep-meditation extras by Arvo Pärt and Olivier Messiaen, the Read more ...
Diana Salazar
I wasn’t the only one who felt emotional when I left our beautiful building in South Kensington for the last time before lockdown. By that stage in mid-March the corridors had become quiet. The sense of loss was palpable: no concerts, no playing together, no conversation, no sound. The silencing of the College felt all the more crushing with our new £40m building development so tantalisingly close to completion.In the weeks that followed it was tempting to dwell on what we couldn’t do. Our student performers, composers, conductors, music educators and performance scientists thrive in a Read more ...
David Nice
No happy family, surely, was ever quite like this one. Love and mutual respect bound up with music-making at the highest level make the Kanneh-Masons of Nottingham a role-model for this country in times of trouble, with their reiterated message that music is for everyone, something to be shared at every level. Tellingly, it isn’t “Sheku and his siblings” – that's been done brilliantly in a previous documentary – but a whole roster of successful and potentially successful performers among whom it happens to be the cellist who’s made it big. And it doesn’t look as if his modesty and intense Read more ...
graham.rickson
Horn player Sarah Willis joined the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001. She juggles her position with spells of teaching, interviewing soloists and conductors for the Berlin Philharmonic's Digital Concert Hall and hosting an online series of Horn Hangouts, interviews with musicians streamed live on her website and archived on YouTube. Willis's new album, Mozart y Mambo, is an exuberant blend of solo horn pieces by Mozart with traditional Cuban music. Recorded in Havana in January 2020, a percentage of the album’s proceeds will go towards buying instruments for the musicians of the Havana Lyceum Read more ...
David Nice
So, arts people, you’ve had precisely two days to get your outdoor events ready, so where are they? Well, it seems that Glyndebourne had advance notice and will be holding its garden concerts soon, though they sold out almost immediately. Opera Holland Park will be doing something later this month; these and others are adaptable and inventive, given half a chance.Meanwhile, onscreen you can feast on the gorgeous nature, cultivated and otherwise, at Garsington between Pavilion performances and enjoy Sheku Kanneh-Mason alongside Philharmonia players in the striking surroundings of the recently- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Coriún Aharonián: Una carta Ensemble Aventure, SWF-Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden/Zoltán Peskó (Wergo)Uruguayan composer Coriún Aharonián (1940-2017) was born in Montevideo to Armenian parents. His output is described here as “a complex melange of influences” – namely European modernism and indigenous music. Aharonián himself talked about mastering “the models created in the centres of cultural power… without losing connection to one’s own community” as the route to creating a distinct, independent style. Though stylistically very different, the pieces on this disc occasionally suggest Read more ...
David Nice
What music would you choose to hear for your first live event after nearly four months of lockdown? For me, it would be Bach, and probably any one of the Cello Suites. Interpreter? Ideally, one of four living cellists – so the dream came true last night when Steven Isserlis played the First and Third Suites with the fascinating Walton Passacaglia in between to an audience of 25 in the spacious, light-filled surroundings of the Fidelio Orchestra Café in Farringdon.The very limited numbers include affordable places for under-30s, and each programme is played over three or four consecutive Read more ...
Steven Isserlis
So Ida has left us – a legend has departed. What a violinist! What a woman! Magnificent, unique, incorrigible – she was a law unto herself.First, the playing: a film about her was aptly entitled: “I AM the Violin.” And she was! The violin was her life; she mastered it, devoted so much of her existence to it, cared so much about it. Every performance was an event, which she took absolutely seriously, giving each concert her all. She spoke through her violin, proved herself through it, lived within the music she made. She was a marvel, an icon; each note she played was the result of total Read more ...
graham.rickson
Holst: The Planets; Nielsen: Helios Overture Mythos (Bjarke Mogensen and Rasmus Schjaerff Kjøller, accordions) (Mythos)Pairing Nielsen’s Helios Overture with Holst’s The Planets makes total sense, and one’s surprised that it’s not been done before. Nielsen’s musical depiction of the sun, which “wanders its golden way” before sinking slowly back in the sea, never quite lives up to its magical opening and close, the central faster section wandering just a bit too much for comfort. It’s still good to hear though, Bjarke Mogensen and Rasmus Schjaerff Kjøller’s ingenious transcription for Read more ...