Classical music
Bernard Hughes
After a week of illness, heading out into the Sunday afternoon cold and rain was not something I was overjoyed to undertake. But in the event this short Wigmore Hall recital by three young singers and their fellow student pianists was thoroughly cheering, sending me back into the mizzle with a spring in my step. Both in their repertoire choices and their delivery of those choices there was so much to like and I am glad to have been there.The Song Circle of the Royal Academy of Music pairs up auditioned singers and pianists and offers them a number of performing opportunities through their Read more ...
Robert Beale
There was excellent music making in the Hallé concert in Manchester last night, and there was self-admitted “noise”. Briefly, the two coincided in one work.The outstanding music making of the evening came from pianist Giorgi Gigashvili, winner of the 2024-25 Terence Judd-Hallé Award, now fulfilling the opportunities that success gave him. Together with the orchestra and conductor Roderick Cox, he gave a beautiful and stylish performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 (in C major – the one they used to bill as “the Elvira Madigan concerto”, if your memory goes back that far).His playing was Read more ...
David Nice
Serious realisation of the seven often thorny Martinů string quartets is a major undertaking. When I spoke to Veronika Jarůšková and Peter Jarůšek after an East Neuk Festival concert, they said they intended to do it slowly, with absolute commitment. Tuesday night’s performance of the stupendous Fifth sealed the pledge. It held central place in a concert which only brought relief from Czech grittiness with the great cathartic melodies in Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet.Every performance by "the Pavel Haases" blends searing energy with supreme refinement, and this was no exception; with regular Read more ...
David Nice
When Vladimir Jurowski planned this typically unorthodox programme, he could not have known that a disaster even greater, long-term, than 9/11 was going to befall the USA two days after the concert. There is no bad time for a tricky commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks, but close to a presidential inauguration would have been right whatever the outcome. As for an 18th century “Mass in Time of War”, clearly Ukraine and Gaza would still be on the agenda.Come the event, and neither of the main works on the programme quite stirred the soul: absolutely no fault of Jurowski’s meticulous Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Once again, Glasgow’s annual winter festival of traditional music from all parts of the world is formed of an astonishingly packed programme of music, dance, trails and poetry in venues throughout the city. This year’s opening weekend saw two distinctly different orchestral concerts, each pushing the boundaries of what an orchestra can be.Returning to the Celtic Connections stage on Friday evening was Orchestral Qawwali Project with their signature blend of Sufi, Indian classical and western classical music. The two soloists – and the driving forces behind the ensemble – were magnetic Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
What better way to start a season about the Earth than by looking back on it from an astronaut’s perspective? At a time when the activities of assorted billionaires and emerging superpowers are making the space race topical again, it feels more than appropriate for Kings Place to begin its Earth Unwrapped programme with Terry Riley’s Sun Rings.As one of the deities of minimalism and experimental music, Riley was an obvious choice when NASA was looking for a composer to celebrate 25 years since the launch of the Voyager space programme. His ten-part composition – liberally punctuated with high Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela took the Barbican by storm last night with a thrilling account of Mahler’s Third Symphony, his great exploration of the cosmic order, ascending from raw paganism to sublime transcendence. It's technically the longest symphony ever composed, and here it swept the audience through an epic journey that tilted between passages of gossamer-like intimacy and outbursts of apocalyptic rage.The orchestra is renowned for its full-blooded performances, yet yesterday evening it felt that the stakes were higher than usual for the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This concert was an effusion of pure joy. Billed as the German National Orchestra, the Bundesjugendorchester (Federal Youth Orchestra), all of whose players are aged from 14 to 19, make a glorious, powerful sound. Just over 100 teenage musicians packed the extended stage at Cadogan Hall last night, and played to a nearly full house.It was the orchestral players' smiles and their occasional unrestrained giggles which caught the attention, and told the story of quite how much they were all enjoying this concert and the whole experience of being on stage in London to make music. Their Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Forthright and upright, powerful and lucid, the frank and bold pianism of Leif Ove Andsnes took his Wigmore Hall audience from Norway to Poland (or rather, Paris and Majorca) with a final stop in France. A recital that began with two large-scale Norwegian sonatas – one a remarkable discovery – culminated in the ostensibly remote sound-world of Chopin’s 24 Preludes, part-written on the Balearic island.Yet Andsnes’s sturdy, direct, immaculately even-tempered, playing united these disparate territories, and even stamped his Debussy encore with the same robust character. Fans of a more nebulous, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Top Brownie points for the BBC Philharmonic for being one of the first (maybe the first?) to celebrate the birth centenary of Pierre Boulez this year. His Rituel – in memoriam Bruno Maderna was paired somewhat uneasily with a second half of bonbons by Ravel (it’s his 150th anniversary year, too).Mark Wigglesworth was the maestro who piloted both parts of the programme, however, showing equally calm assurance and sympathy with their differing idioms.Boulez’ tribute to another 20th century modernist was the longest piece on the list, and made a suitably solemn tribute as well as providing early Read more ...
graham.rickson
Paavo Järvi: The Complete Erato Recordings (Erato)Big box sets celebrating great conductors are piling up thick and fast, and this one, unusually, features an artist who’s very much alive. Paavo Järvi is just 62 (still young for a conductor). These 31 discs contain the albums he released for Virgin Classics, EMI and Erato between 1996 and 2015: classical CDs were still a big thing back in the late 1990s, and it’s remarkable to see how much quirky repertoire Virgin Classics allowed Järvi to record, including Stenhammar, Arvo Pärt, Eduard Tubin and Erkki-Sven Tüür. One of the earliest Read more ...
David Nice
There’s nothing like an anodyne new(ish) work to give a masterpiece an even higher profile. Rachel Portman‘s Tipping Points, promising to address climate change issues, was so bland and featureless it could have been composed by AI. Any one bar of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, on the other hand, shows originality of throught within a tradition, and unlike the Portman near-vacuum it challenged the musicians of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland to the limits.That they pulled it off was obviously due in no small measure to the guidance of Jessica Cottis. I’d like to have seen more urging Read more ...