cello
Jenny Gilbert
The cello is the stringed instrument most closely aligned to the human voice. It has a human shape, too, so in theory it was a short step for choreographer Cathy Marston to give it a living, breathing presence in her ballet about the legendary cellist Jacqueline du Pré. But what a giant leap of imagination that turned out to be.Marston’s first work for the main stage of the Royal Opera House, The Cellist is no straightforward biography, still less does it touch on the torrid accusations that fuelled the film Hilary and Jackie, which was based on a book by her siblings and vehemently disputed Read more ...
David Nice
Why go to hear a cello-and-piano recital in a large hall, and a rather unsatisfying programme (delayed without explanation for 15 minutes, incidentally) spotlighting a transcription of a work which was created for the violin? Two good answers would be Gautier Capuçon and Yuja Wang, sophisticated artists right at the top their respective leagues, communicative in a way that can reach out, tone-wise, into big spaces or pull you in to another, magical world.Capuçon the cellist didn't solve all problems in Jules Delsart's arrangement of Franck's A major Violin Sonata - a work ideally played by Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The soap-opera saga of the House of Windsor may not have been what the executive director of the London Mozart Players had in mind when she announced from the stage that Sheku Kanneh-Mason “is completely relevant for us”. Four years on from winning BBC Young Musician and two years since playing at the wedding of the wantaway Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the 20-year-old cellist bears an impossibly heavy burden summed up in another dread phrase, “the future of classical music”. Yet he wore it lightly and with some style last night, playing the First Cello Concerto by Saint-Saëns to a full house Read more ...
Robert Beale
Everyone’s doing Weinberg now, or so it seems. The Polish-born composer who became a close friend of Shostakovich was born 100 years ago, and there’s plenty of his music to go round. Raphael Wallfisch gave the UK premiere of his Cello Concertino (Opus 43B), with the Northern Chamber Orchestra in Manchester last night. The “B” is not insignificant – it’s a reworked and shortened version of his Cello Concerto of 1948, scored for string orchestra accompaniment only, and wasn’t published until two years ago.At 16 minutes in length but still with four movements, the piece is certainly an Read more ...
Mitten wir im Leben sind, De Keersmaeker, Queyras, Rosas, Sadler's Wells review - Bach-worthy genius
David Nice
All Bach is dance, a teacher once told me. The justifiable exaggeration switched on a light; leaping to the Brandenburg Concertos followed. This great work of kinetic art is of a different order. Choreographer and performer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker represents the pure but vibrant mastery of the Cello Suites in the way that the soul moves with them, responsive to every hyper-dance form, key and modulation. Using only five dancers including herself from her Rosas company on the bare Sadler's Wells stage in equal partnership with the magisterial playing of Jean-Guihen Queyras, she balances the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: The Cello Sonatas The Fischer Duo: Norman Fischer (cello), Jeanne Kierman (piano), with Abigail Fischer (mezzo-soprano) (Centaur Records)Comparing Brahms’s pair of cello sonatas is like looking at the two piano concertos. There’s the youthful, three-movement grumpy one. Then a long gap before a major key work in four parts, with a last movement frothy and exuberant. Veteran cellist Norman Fischer describes listening to both works as giving “a full Brahmsian yin-yang experience”. As with the piano concertos, I’m more yin than yang, and the earlier work’s craggy magnificence is Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Mozart in E flat (the Overture to The Marriage of Figaro) and in G (the K.453 Piano Concerto), and Schubert in C – the “Great” C major Symphony, no less – ushered spring into the Festival Hall on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon.Slimmed down to a pocket Philharmonia during the first half, the orchestra sounded a touch scrappy and a size too small for the hall during the overture. Having fluffed the concerto’s opening line, they also took a while to settle and attune themselves to the supple and urbane manner of soloist Jonathan Biss.Not yet 40, Biss (main picture) plays with the relaxed and Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder’s first concert in the Hallé Thursday series for 2018-19 was on clearly mapped Hallé territory – Richard Strauss and Elgar. They have a reputation, and a tradition, of playing these composers’ music very well. They’ve already recorded Elgar's Second Symphony and, judging by the microphones around the platform, they’re doing the same right now with Strauss’s Don Quixote.The soloists were their own principals, cellist Nicholas Trygstad (pictured below) and viola player Timothy Pooley. Though it won’t be discernible in any purely audio document of the occasion, they and their Read more ...
David Nice
Brits are the folk you expect to encounter the most in the rural-England-on-steroids of the beautiful Dordogne. In my experience they outnumber the French, at least in high summer, not just as visitors and retired homeowners but also as artisans selling their wares in Riberac's big Friday market. The Dutch are here, too, in force, and one of the long-term settlers, big Baroque name Ton Koopman, makes his own major contribution in August along with music-loving local Robert-Nicolas Huet. Their base is the atmospheric tiny settlement of Cercles, a place that feels as much end-of-the-road in a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
One of the banes of music culture is over-categorisation. It always has been. The statement that there are only two types of music, good and bad, has been apocryphally attributed to a wide range of figureheads – most especially Louis Armstrong – but whoever said it first, the reason it keeps popping back up is there’s a truth to it. The music nominees for this year’s Hospital Club h 100 Awards reflect a satisfying public swerve away from niche listening, away from those who would isolate via genre and background, a move towards opening all out to all, which can only be a healthy development. Read more ...
David Nice
There is a tide in the best-planned festivals that comes in and out almost imperceptibly, bringing with it changes as the days move on. Put it down to the kind of perfect planning that discards any one rigid theme, and to forging long-term links with performers who don't just pop in for one concert. That in this case has been the work of East Neuk Festival mastermind Svend-Einar McEwan-Brown, who not only ensures artists of a uniquely high quality over the years, but also introduces themes and mini-residencies with impressive subtlety.In the two and a half days I was there this year, Bach, Read more ...
David Nice
Former Royal Philharmonic Orchestra principal conductor Charles Dutoit has been exposed, to little surprise from musicians, as something of a roué whose apparent refusal to take "no" for an answer has rubbed up against the new #MeToo world. So his place in last night's concert was taken by Venezuelan Rafael Payare, not yet 40. Unfortunately it seems certain Dutoit would have captured the élan vital of Richard Strauss's Don Juan better than Payare - an accomplished soundsmith, on this evidence, but fatally uninterested in the operatic drama of Strauss's tone poems, or for that matter the Read more ...