Classical music
David Nice
You could plan an entire concert season around the theme of “late style”, its paradoxes and variations. For this one-off, many of us expected a concentrated mesh of Edward Said’s only-connect observations with a well-balanced musical programme, something along the lines of the recent 90-minute cloud tapestry the City of London Sinfonia wove with atmospheric scientist Simon Clark (Rachel Halliburton, whom I accompanied, loved it, as did I).That was to underestimate the latest collaboration with the London Review of Books, involving four very fine actors voicing not just Said’s chosen literary Read more ...
Robert Beale
Anja Bihlmaier returned to the BBC Philharmonic – for the first time in the Bridgewater Hall as principal guest conductor – with a programme to mark International Women’s Day, and consisting entirely of music by women composers, past and present.Surviving symphonies written by 19th century women are not exactly thick on the ground, but Emilie Mayer’s No. 5 (one of eight) is evidence of what determination and originality could achieve even in a social context where expectations were of conformity and subservience. More of it below. The whole programme was of unfamiliar music: not a single Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Exactly half a century ago, Semyon Bychkov fled the USSR for the United States as he sought to swap tyranny for liberty. Last night, in a world that feels utterly different yet even more terrifying, the great conductor turned the stellar talents of his Czech Philharmonic Orchestra to the music of Dmitri Shostakovich: both a victim, and a troubled celebrant, of the searing Soviet history he endured. At the Barbican (a date on the Czechs’ current European tour), we inevitably felt the weight of the past that conductor and orchestra carry, in a programme that paired Shostakovich’s First Read more ...
graham.rickson
Quartets Through a Time of Change: music by Ravel, Durey, Tailleferre and Milhaud Brother Tree Sound (First Hand Records)There are plenty – and I mean plenty – of recordings of the Ravel String Quartet, the majority, I would guess, paired with the Debussy Quartet, in what has become something of a programming cliché. The Brother Tree Sound quartet take the rather more enterprising approach of putting it alongside three other French quartets written between 1917 and 1919, none of which are very well-known if they are known at all. It works really well, both as exposure for the lesser Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Mahan Esfahani play the harpsichord is to watch a philosopher at work. While there’s often playfulness and shimmering levity you can feel the thought behind each note. The Iranian-American’s passion for the harpsichord began when he was nine – the moment he heard it on a cassette his uncle gave to him when he was visiting Iran, he knew he wanted to spend his life devoted to the instrument. In a Guardian interview he once described it as the “posh, pretty boy in prison. He’s gonna get beaten on” – a witty yet defensive quote that accounts for an approach that’s as radical as it’s Read more ...
Robert Beale
A cello concerto received its UK premiere in Manchester last night – almost 100 years after it was written. It’s by Maria Herz, a German-Jewish composer who had to leave her native land in the 1930s and whose work has remained almost unknown until quite recently.Raphaela Gromes has championed this concerto, giving its German premiere last year, and she brought it to Britain with the Hallé and Alpesh Chauhan (main picture).It’s a one-movement work in three sections, with modest orchestral forces required, and harmonic analysts might say it’s of its time – displaying a mastery of chromatic Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston just gets better and better, both as singer and as actor. Last night’s recital at Temple Church had an unusual and wide-ranging programme – consisting of a first half hopping through the centuries, followed by a complete performance of Schumann’s “Kerner-Lieder” cycle.Charlston and Sholto Kynoch had originally devised this programme for last autumn’s Oxford International Song Festival. It certainly looked very appealing on paper, with all kinds of music to discover. And so it proved.The first half worked brilliantly as a sequence, with all kinds of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night was the first time I had heard the 12 Ensemble, a string group currently Artist-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall, and I was very impressed, both by the standard of the playing and the enterprising programming. This gave regular audience-members a little of what they’re used to (a chunk of Brahms) and a decent portion of what they’re not.The first half featured a sequence of pieces which in some way dealt with music of the past, starting with an arrangement of Bach by cellist Max Ruisi (one of the co-founders of 12 Ensemble). Komm, süsser Tod was played with poise and warmth by the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
At the age of 83, Martha Argerich contains more personality in her little finger than many people do in their entire bodies.Her vigorous, technically dazzling delivery of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto began before she even touched the piano. As the orchestra played the opening passage she wasn’t just swaying in time to the music, she was hunching forward for the diminuendos and mouthing “ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum” along to the dotted rhythms. She couldn’t wait to be part of the performance, and right from the crisp ornamentation of her first entry she was its life and soul.Argerich has Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Myra Hess was one of the most important figures in British cultural life in the mid-20th century: the pre-eminent pianist of her generation and accorded “national treasure” status as a result of the wartime lunchtime concert series at London’s National Gallery, which she singlehandedly masterminded through 1,698 concerts between 1939 and 1946.This new biography, the first for nearly 50 years, is meticulously researched and richly illustrated: Jessica Duchen brings to her task not just the biographer’s curious eye but a music critic’s ear and discernment.Hess had to battle prejudices Read more ...
Robert Beale
The second of the Philharmonic’s Boulez-Ravel celebrations (birth centenary of the former, 150th of the latter) brought Bertrand Chamayou back: after his performance of the G major piano concerto in January, this time it was as soloist in the Concerto for the Left Hand, with Ludovic Morlot on the podium.It’s a different piece of stuff from the two-hands concerto (though contemporary). Whereas the G major varies the role of the soloist, sometimes offering a balance of power between orchestral and keyboard resources, in the left-hand one Ravel was at pains to see that the solo should never seem Read more ...
graham.rickson
Snow Dance for the Dead: Choral Music by Seán Doherty New Dublin Voices/Bernie Sherlock (Voces8 Recordings)I have come across the choral music of Seán Doherty more and more recently and always liked what I have heard. His music is imaginative, wide-ranging and original, and all these things are evident in his debut disc with New Dublin Voices, under their enterprising conductor Bernie Sherlock. Doherty has been a member of the choir since 2015, and Sherlock describes him as “a tap that pours out great choral music”. There is certainly more than enough variety to sustain a full album – Read more ...