Visits from the pick of Europe’s Baroque orchestras – Concerto Köln, Europa Galante, Le Concert d’Astree, Les Musiciens du Louvre – are a blissfully frequent occurrence in London, an alternative and supplement to our own ever-growing roster of period talent. A tour by a North American ensemble is, by contrast, something of a rarity, and I can’t have been alone last night in hearing the much-lauded Apollo's Fire (otherwise known as the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra) live for the first time. “Hearing”, however, rather fails to encompass the visually charged, minutely stage-managed musical theatrics on display from Jeannette Sorrell and her irrepressible team of musicians.
classical music reviews
David Nice
An entire evening of Schumann for two would usually cue singer and piano. Not that the majority of Lieder specialists, blessed as naughty Anna Russell once saw it "with tremendous artistry but no voice", could hold the spell for that long. Julia Fischer is one of the half-dozen violinists in the world with the greatest artistry, a golden "voice" and a habit of choosing partners like Martin Helmchen, very much on her level. The only trouble is that Schumann songs can capture a world in 90 minutes, while the three lateish sonatas run a more limited if quirky gamut.
igor.toronyilalic
A hell of a lot of talent was on display last night at the Wigmore Hall, where pianist Leif Ove Andsnes's home festival of Risør was stationed for the weekend. The big draw was a performance of The Rite of Spring for two pianos. The work is violent enough in orchestral form but when jammed onto two keyboards it has the potential to degenerate into the most unimaginably demented hand-to-hand combat you'll ever see. Last night's performance - Andsnes facing off against a man that gets pianophiles like me pant-wettingly excited, Marc-André Hamelin - was little short of psychopathic.
igor.toronyilalic
Before Mozart, there was Pergolesi. The 18th century couldn't get enough of the Neapolitan prodigy. He was the first great tragic musical wünderkind of the Enlightenment, prefiguring what Mozart would become for the 19th century. Like Mozart, Pergolesi died prematurely aged just 26. Like Mozart, Pergolesi was a musical simplifier and distiller, a divine and revolutionary sieve. Like Mozart, Pergolesi's popularity spawned an industry dedicated to mythologising his life and misattributing the music of contemporaries to him. Yet we celebrate Pergolesi's 300th anniversary this year, quite unlike we would Mozart's, with just one piece: the Stabat mater.
alexandra.coghlan
Perhaps I’m being too literal-minded, but demanding South American music from a concert programme advertised as “South American Baroque” doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable. When you add Colombian-born soprano Juanita Lascarro as soloist and Brazilian Rodolfo Richter as leader it seems actively desirable – a chance to encounter an underexposed seam of music in the hands of expert guides. Turns out that all musical roads lead back to Europe, to the ubiquitous Scarlattis, Handel and Hasse, and despite a few exotic excursions to the New World it was in the familiar Old that we spent the bulk of our evening.
David Nice
Is Shostakovich’s Eleventh a great, grim epic symphony worthy both of its toughest predecessors – 4, 8 and 10 – and of the 1905 massacre it avowedly commemorates, or long-winded film music too subservient to its revolutionary-song material? I used to think the latter, but three conductors have made me change my mind: Rostropovich, taking infinite care over the conjuring of icy Palace Square wastes, Semyon Bychkov winning over the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms and now Vasily Petrenko, pulling off the most profound and surprising coup in what I once found the weakest movement, the finale.
Is Shostakovich’s Eleventh a great, grim epic symphony worthy both of its toughest predecessors – 4, 8 and 10 – and of the 1905 massacre it avowedly commemorates, or long-winded film music too subservient to its revolutionary-song material? I used to think the latter, but three conductors have made me change my mind: Rostropovich, taking infinite care over the conjuring of icy Palace Square wastes, Semyon Bychkov winning over the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms and now Vasily Petrenko, pulling off the most profound and surprising coup in what I once found the weakest movement, the finale.
alexandra.coghlan
In 1932 English pianist Harriet Cohen commissioned the best of Britain’s composers – Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Walton, Howells – to produce transcriptions of Bach for piano. The result, A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen, is a true document of its time, no less fascinating for its rather conservative contents. Conservative is not an adjective that could be directed at Angela Hewitt’s 20th-century reinvention of the project however. With composers including Brett Dean and Robin Holloway, and works inspired by Bach alongside straight transcriptions, it makes for a joyously diverse programme; last night it proved that it works every bit as well in performance as on the page.
igor.toronyilalic
There's no denying Gergiev's genius. At the right time, in the right repertoire, with the right orchestra, it flashes up with the clarity and energy of an H-bomb. When hawking the Russian tradition he's able to conjure up more colour and fantasy than you'd find in a playschool. But there's no denying something else, too. His Mahler stinks. And I don't know how many damning write-ups he needs to receive for him to stop putting us through it all. I mean, if he doesn't care about us, can't he at least think of poor Mahler? It is his anniversary. Anyway, all one can say about last night's Barbican concert is, thank Christ for Olli Mustonen.
There's no denying Gergiev's genius. At the right time, in the right repertoire, with the right orchestra, it flashes up with the clarity and energy of an H-bomb. When hawking the Russian tradition he's able to conjure up more colour and fantasy than you'd find in a playschool. But there's no denying something else, too. His Mahler stinks. And I don't know how many damning write-ups he needs to receive for him to stop putting us through it all. I mean, if he doesn't care about us, can't he at least think of poor Mahler? It is his anniversary. Anyway, all one can say about last night's Barbican concert is, thank Christ for Olli Mustonen.
stephen.walsh
Hard to believe that Mark-Anthony Turnage, the bovver-booted, tank-topped composer of Night Dances and Greek in the 1980s, has reached his half-century. The Essex-boy image is still intact, somewhat mellowed perhaps; the boots have gone, the tank top remains, and the music has lost not one iota of its original brilliance and pizzazz.
David Nice
It's always tough sharing a programme with Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Could a promising 21st-century composer and a dream-dance concerto of the early 1930s begin to make the kind of sounds the visionary Frenchman conjured in 1830? Not a chance, especially since Stéphane Denève, who had taken his now fizzing Scots orchestra through Berlioz's explosive masterpiece twice already during their first six seasons together, seemed this weekend to have stripped it down to the classical foundations, worked on every jolt and buffet in the symphony's electrifying string writing and managed to make it sound fresher, if not necessarily more shocking, than ever.