cello
David Nice
Anyone who missed the opening Southbank concerts of the Chinike! Orchestra, figurehead of a foundation which aims to give much-needed help to young Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) classical musicians, could and now can (on YouTube) catch snippets of the players in action on the splendid documentary about young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. There's no doubt at all that Kanneh-Mason, BBC Young Musician 2016, who reprised his already celebrated interpretation of Haydn's C major Cello Concerto in All Saints Hove on Saturday night to launch the Brighton Festival, is the real deal, and so are the Read more ...
David Nice
Many other top Estonian musicians, performing among other works 30 premieres of music by their compatriots in just over a week, might have been equally deserving candidates for the lead image. But perhaps an even more appropriate image might have been a black rectangle. For the life-changing event of the 38th Estonian Music Days, in my experience, was the nearly two-hour darkness behind a blindfold - the experimental heart of this year's festival theme, "Through the Dimness" ("Dusk" might be a more effective translation).For "Obscure Avenues" curated by Taavi Kerikmäe, 40 or so of us were put Read more ...
graham.rickson
Telemann Fantasias for solo violin Aisha Orazbayeva (violin) (Prah Recordings)Telemann, too readily dismissed as a plodding hack, gets a radical makeover here; the tracklisting makes it seem as if Aisha Orazbayeva is giving us six of the composer’s solo violin fantasias. Almost; the music’s all there in essence, though sometimes “in versions marked by the distortion and fragmentation of the material through the use of contemporary violin techniques.” The acoustic of a rural Suffolk church also plays a key role, the album’s opening track being a three-minute slice of soothing background Read more ...
William Green
Apocalyptica are a band that became famous for playing Metallica on cellos. And tonight they’re playing only Metallica covers because it's 20 years since they released Plays Metallica by Four Cellos, their debut album. The quartet formed at Finland’s Sibelius Academy in 1993 and the man responsible for bringing together classical cellists to play metal is Eicca Toppinen. Tonight, referring to their debut album, he admits that they were “expecting to sell 1,000 CDs”. Six million albums later and constantly on tour they return to their roots: without Metallica there would be no Apocalyptica. Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Wherever you are in the world, opportunities to see Cecilia Bartoli perform are hard to come by. A one-off chance to see her sing Mozart in Rome was not to be missed. This was a rare homecoming for Bartoli. Born in Rome, she studied at the city’s Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia where many members of the orchestra teach. A quarter-century and more ago, she made her name in Mozart: as in irrepressibly cheeky Cherubino; a Zerlina more than capable of standing up to the Don’s predations; a Dorabella who always seemed to know better than her sister. She does not do doormats.These days, with due Read more ...
David Nice
What's not to like, or love, would have to be the sensible response to both the opening programme of Kings Place's year-long Cello Unwrapped festival at Kings Place and its life-enhancing execution. Symmetries abounded – between Alban Gerhardt's double-stopping summons with the "Canto Primo" of Britten's First Cello Suite at the start and his late-night farewell symphony, Kodály's towering Sonata for solo cello; also between two glistening suites for which the label "neo-Baroque" is too narrow, Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin and Stravinsky's Pulcinella. Nicholas Collon and his Aurora players Read more ...
Natalie Clein
The cello is so deeply engrained in my fingers, my imagination, it’s part of my being – my life would feel amputated without it. You fall in love with the instrument, the music, and then you embark on the life-long task of trying to get closer to that beguiling musical ideal. That’s the drug, the contract you sign with the devil. Every day I think how lucky I am that I can dive into a score and work at it physically.In Cello Unwrapped, a year-long festival of the instrument at Kings Place which opens on Saturday 7 January with two performances by Alban Gerhardt, I’m performing in three Read more ...
David Nice
Sheku Kanneh-Mason isn't just BBC Young Musician 2016 - he's the year's top player in my books, a master at any level. Despite a contract with Decca, starting with the Shostakovich First Cello Concerto he played in the competition finale, he looks likely to remain loyal to family and friends, including the Fantasia Orchestra, founded this year, in which he's already played as part of the cello section.You have to pinch yourself to realise the ages delivering this quality. Kanneh-Mason is 17, as was Mendelssohn when he composed the work of total genius which launched last night's concert; Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This is a documentary about a minority in a minority, a riff on young, gifted and black. And how better to attract both practitioners and audiences to classical music than by encouraging diversity? The totally startling statistic was that in the UK, only five per cent of classical musicians are black or from ethnic minorities.The programme focussed on the Kanneh-Mason family, the parents Stuart and Kadiatu and their seven children (two boys, five girls), from the 20-year-old pianist Isata, now the holder of the Elton John scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, on down. Their Nottingham Read more ...
David Nice
For a BBC Radio 3 lunchtime's hour of music, cellist Steven Isserlis's latest collaboration with that most individual of pianists Olli Mustonen went astonishingly deep. The surprises were equal in its two halves - the first a through-conceived programme of shortish late Schumann pieces plus a Schumann homage composed by Mustonen the composer for Isserlis and poetically embedded in the sequence; the second an interpretation of Prokofiev's late Sonata for Cello and Piano which scotched with high, focused drama the usual claims that this is a light and simple work.Mustonen has a penchant for Read more ...
Steven Isserlis
All musicians have particular musical passions, composers, styles or genres to which they are irresistibly drawn. I have many – almost too many at times; but among the most enduring is my love for the music, writing and personality of Robert Schumann. Another important aspect of my musical life – another passion, in fact - is the work I get to do with young musicians.Writing (co-writing) this book has given me an opportunity to combine these passions/pleasures, by taking Schumann’s own invaluable advice for the young musicians of his day, and updating it in order to render it more accessible Read more ...
David Nice
Istanbul six weeks before the failed coup, the south-west coast of Turkey six weeks after: what's the difference? None that I could see; once past the Turkish Airlines flights, with literature and screen full of the "People's Victory", there was no sign of it at the D-Marin Classical Music Festival on the Bodrum peninsula, centred around the marina in Turgutreis, a 45-minute drive along a very built-up coastline from once-quiet Bodrum. One of the Turkish musicians studying abroad whom I heard at both the Istanbul and Bodrum festivals told me that, having postponed a home visit at the time of Read more ...