This recital was a welcome opportunity to hear songs by a panoply of black composers – many of them women – ranging from Amanda Aldridge (1866-1956) to Ella Jarman-Pinto (b.1989), performed with extrovert glee by Nadine Benjamin, accompanied by Caroline Jaya-Ratnam, with readings by Michael Harper.This programme would make the ideal basis for a recording project, as this repertoire is not only underrepresented in the concert hall, but also on disc. And yet it deserves to be heard, and drew a notably more diverse audience to Milton Court than would perhaps normally be the case for a vocal Read more ...

So it turns out there isn’t a problem with Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), a stroppy mock-epic I thought couldn’t ever love again, when constantly singing phrases from Antonio Pappano and the LSO turn it into an hallucinogenic opera for orchestra.It seems too good to be true that 10 days after a Philharmonia Don Juan to die for from Jakub Hrůša, who will take over from Pappano at the Royal Opera, along came another performance which felt legendary even as we listened. We have to hear way more Strauss from both great conductors.Perhaps not so much from Samuel Coleridge- Read more ...

Eliza Carthy has been busy, as she always has. Recording various albums with various artists during the pandemic, her show with her band, The Restitution (and many others), at the Barbican on Saturday, was well stuffed with music, musicians, laughter, familial connections and celebrations. Arguably the reigning queen of folk in England, Eliza has inspired a generation (including a friend of mine whose imaginary friend she was), simultaneously reinventing the form and honouring her roots, the melodies and lyrics brought once more to life. This concert was an excellent way of showing this Read more ...

There’s life in the old overture-concerto-symphony format yet – especially if the conductor not only shapes every phrase but takes care over the number of string players needed for each work, the soloist lives every bar of a concerto you thought you knew inside out, and the symphony is a relatively rare neighbour to another regularly on concert programmes.It would be foolhardy to claim that Prokofiev’s Sixth, his symphony of suffering, is better than the ever-fascinating Fifth, no straightforward warhorse, but it’s certainly more consistently dark and deep. The London Symphony Orchestra has Read more ...

Ryan Wigglesworth is a man of many talents. He has recently been appointed Chief Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony, but he is also a versatile opera conductor, and an operatic sensibility is clear in the musical personality he projects.Last night, that came in two forms, as the first work was by Wigglesworth himself. The song cycle, Till Dawning, was written for the conductor’s wife, Sophie Bevan, who gave the premiere in Austria in 2018. Serious illness has since interrupted her performing activities (not permanently, we hope), and so this UK premiere was given by soprano Elizabeth Read more ...

Amanda Majeski pushed the boundaries as Janáček's tormented heroine for director Richard Jones at the Royal Opera. Here there were confines – no “concert staging” this, but a laissez-faire affair with scores and music stands, occasionally obscuring the stage directions – but she still conveyed the essence in front of Simon Rattle’s throbbing, luminous London Symphony Orchestra and flanked by other cast members of uniform excellence.Not for Majeski the composer’s definition of Russian playwright Ostrovsky’s Katya – the opera is performed in Czech, of course, but the LSO gives the Russian Read more ...

In precarious times, musical wonders never seem to cease – for now, at least. Who would have thought during lockdown that we’d be back so soon and so frequently to the kind of massive orchestra needed to play a cosmic blockbuster like Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra? Of the three live performances I’ve heard since September 2021, last night’s, the biggest and youngest (160 players aged 14 to 19), was also the freshest and most exciting.To hear young people in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain playing a supremely challenging work which used to be second nature to hardened Read more ...

What do you do when your high-achieving ensemble has just been dealt a brutal, capricious blow, but you have the most joyfully festive work in the repertoire on your seasonal agenda? To say that the Britten Sinfonia came out with all trumpets (and timpani, and oboes d’amore) blazing would be the feeblest of understatements.Along with the singers of Polyphony, their performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at the Barbican flung an exultant riposte back at the self-contradictory bureaucrats of Arts Council England. Last month, ACE stripped the Sinfonia of 100 per cent of its funding as a reward Read more ...

In a Renaissance artist’s studio, a wannabe master proved his skill by drawing a perfect circle. Perhaps playing Beethoven’s A minor Bagatelle (aka “Für Elise”) as an encore should count as the pianist’s equivalent. At the Barbican last night, Alice Sara Ott did just that with the ubiquitous ring-tone earworm.It came after an assured performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. And Ott traced its shape perfectly: feathery, supple, light, but not insipid. If the LSO’s rubric for this concert invoked “wild and stormy Read more ...

We enter the Barbican Pit as if visiting an apothecary. On the walls of the passage approaching it there are scientific diagrams and documents, while the stage itself is set up with glass cases filled with different potions and experiments.A figure lies prostrate on the floor lit by diagonal slants of light; next to the figure a lutenist regards the audience with a meditative gaze. In the background recorded voices deliver snippets of observation on the state of melancholy. To be ill at ease, according to Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, was quite literally to be in a state of Read more ...

If there’s a dud or a dullard among Sibelius’s 116 official opus numbers, I haven’t heard it. Yet catching even many of the outright masterpieces live in concert isn’t easy; the brevity that can show us a world in under 10 minutes makes some difficult to programme.All hail, then, to the BBC and scholar/biographer Daniel Grimley for mapping the Finn’s legendary universe in three concerts of wall-to-wall Sibelius and another placing his two main pupils’ choral music alongside his own.Missing Grimley’s morning introduction was excusable: at exactly that time I was submitting to the pneumatic- Read more ...

Life is messy and so is Carolee Schneeman’s work. She wanted it that way. Breaking down the barriers between art and life, between inhabiting a woman’s body and using it as primal material, was a key objective.And if this meant appearing naked in performances or filming herself having sex, so be it. “Can I be an image and an image-maker?” was a question she sought to answer over and over again in her work. And in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the male-dominated art world of New York responded with a vehement “No!”.In 1954, for instance, she was kicked off the undergraduate course at Bard College Read more ...