choral music
Gavin Dixon
James Dillon calls this major work, premered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival last November, a “Cubist Stabat Mater”. He sets the hymn, but adds in more recent words, texts on related themes by Picasso, Kristeva and Rilke, among others. The music, too, acknowledges the passage of historical time, with subtle references to musical styles from down the centuries. If this all sounds like a recipe for Postmodern intellectualism and detachment, the results are surprisingly direct – a heartfelt and emphatic response to the image of the grieving mother. Dillon is too much the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Latvia likes to be different. At least that’s the message they sent out with the cultural programme marking the start of the country’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. Pomp and circumstance were out, and instead we got a Cage-inspired happening, an audio/visual presentation that was many things: part video installation, part performance art. The only thing you couldn’t describe it as was a choral concert.Production values were high, reflecting perhaps the diplomatic motivations. Above the stage was positioned a frame incorporating four huge screens in a rectangular formation, Read more ...
David Nice
While the embers of the concert year are dying out around the country, you can be sure of a great blaze-up at St John’s Smith Square. The annual Christmas Festival of quality early-music groups and top choirs – this is the 29th – now traditionally culminates in two great works for chorus and orchestra. Over the past three years I’ve reeled at the best of Messiahs, four cantatas out of the six making up Bach’s Christmas Oratorio – and now that God of music’s ultimate demonstration of his omnipotent range.The B minor Mass may seem even less seasonal than two-thirds of Messiah, but it has its Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This feelgood programme hit all the buttons with almost unerring precision, as we followed Gareth Malone's project to prepare a military wives choir for a special prom, commemorating the World War One centenary on 3 August 2014. On the way we witnessed the joys of singing, the therapeutic value of music, and the virtues of hard work, mutual support and bonding.However, most of us might harbour a natural suspicion and even an uneasy cynicism about everybody’s wonderful niceness, generosity, kindness and supportiveness. Not a meow was to be heard from any of the women, and conductor Gareth of Read more ...
David Nice
How disorienting it is to find century-old works in the concert repertoire of which you can still say “I’ve never heard anything like it”. That must have been the reaction of most audience members last night to Tuscan-German composer Ferruccio Busoni’s 85-minute symphony-concerto for piano, orchestra and male voice choir, since only a few will have caught what classical anoraks tell me was its only other London performance in recent years, at the 1988 Proms.This misleadingly named Piano Concerto crowned a magnificent triptych of a concert programme centred around the Janus-headed year 1902, Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Attracting over one million visitors each year, Canterbury Cathedral is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country. With its picturesque location and very nice, very white staff, the cathedral offers an easy metaphor for the version of England that Ukip supporters apparently hanker after, the narrator Saskia Reeves describing it as “England in stone”. With traditions and routines that haven’t changed much in 1000 years – although one imagines the Reformation shook things up a little – the very idea of Canterbury must be balm to the soul for anyone given to bouts of flag- Read more ...
geoff brown
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Greed Tuesday: they all vanished from memory once the first notes of Siglo de Oro’s Christmas-themed concert started. This young British choir, now six years old, began with what’s already become a modern classic, Jan Sandström’s magical setting of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, where the first staggered entries open like a fan and we drift thereafter in slow-motion bliss. Not for the first time, not for the last, I gave thanks to Spitalfields Music’s Winter Festival for offering balm in a whirling world. In terms of packaging, Patrick Allies’ choir, formed when Read more ...
peter.quinn
Imaginatively constructed and endlessly surprising, this world premiere of the complete version of pianist Robert Mitchell's choral work Invocation elicited one of the most moving performances I had the pleasure of hearing at this year's EFG London Jazz Festival. Written as “a personal and universal thank you to life-changing teachers”, the vast, six-movement work skilfully interweaved the improvised with the composed, resulting in a score of quite astonishing richness and variety.The cast included the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and its chorusmaster (and powerful baritone singer) Gavin Carr Read more ...
David Nice
Had the BBC Symphony Orchestra been at full stretch, rather than in the neoclassical and otherwise selective formations of last night’s concert, it might have outnumbered the live audience. Perhaps I exaggerate, but not much; this was never going to be a box-office hit. A big-name soloist might have made a difference. But just about every orchestral principal last night was a star, thanks to the cornucopia of solos in Respighi’s Trittico botticelliano and Strauss’s Suite from Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Besides, the programming was clever and satisfying, no doubt about it, with the blue skies Read more ...
graham.rickson
Colin Matthews: No Man's Land, Crossing the Alps, Aftertones Hallé Orchestra, Hallé Choir, Hallé Youth Choir/Nicholas Collon and Richard Wilberforce, with Ian Bostridge (tenor) and Roderick Williams (baritone) (Hallé)Colin Matthews is still best-known for his links with other composers. He worked with Deryck Cooke on an effective realisation of Mahler's 10th Symphony, and assisted an ailing Britten in the 1970s. His idiomatic orchestrations of Debussy Preludes have been recorded by Rattle and Elder. Mahler and Britten are the most obvious influences on the works collected here, the most Read more ...
David Nice
It has to be the ultimate cornucopia of choral and early-instrumental invention. So long as the musicians immerse themselves in the beauty of a strange adventure, it doesn’t matter where you hear Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610: however selective the acoustic, you’ll always get something out of one rare combination of sounds or another. The challenge of The Sixteen on their latest tour was never going to be one of communication, only of adapting in the move between cathedrals and concert halls.If the Winchester experience began in the aural equivalent of a dimly-lit room, it ended in total Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Hector Berlioz knew from early on in life which aspects of death he would want to avoid. He had seen quite enough of the medical textbooks that his father had tried to foist upon him. He had even got as far as smelling the dissecting table as a medical student in Paris, desperately counting the days before he could make his escape into music. The composition commission he received just a few years later in 1837 from the Minister of the Interior was exactly what he wanted and needed him to free himself from those memories, to write a requiem full of grandeur, glory and the sound and the sheen Read more ...