Classical music
Bob Riley
In May, it was announced that Greater Manchester was to become the UK’s first Centre of Excellence for Music and Dementia, hosted by Manchester Camerata.The Centre is an incredible opportunity and the result of the vision and energy of many people, a place – Greater Manchester – which supports ambition and the belief that great art and social impact go hand in hand and that we should scale up, and an example of the power of music and our amazing musicians. Along the way two people in particular fired me up – Elsie, a figure from my childhood, and Graham Vick. Both sadly gone, but who’d both Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Every lover of folk-tales knows that the seeker has to endure dangers and setbacks before they finally win the prize. Last night, the ever-enterprising Aurora Orchestra played The Firebird – Stravinsky’s own musical vision of the intrepid hero who outwits the forces of darkness – on a unique site that presents an audience with its own kind of ordeals. Once the Tottenham IKEA, Drumsheds has undergone a metamorphosis from super-store to super-club.Set in a wilderness of concrete lots and wire fences, across a roaring highway, the big blue terminal-sized shed now offers 608,000 square feet of Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last Monday my colleague Boyd Tonkin was delighted by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective’s playing at Hatfield House – and on Thursday it was my turn to be impressed by their colourful Wigmore Hall recital, which featured the marvellous clarinettist Carlos Ferreira in Bartók and Brahms.In Bartók’s Contrasts, Ferreira (pictured below) was following in the footsteps of Benny Goodman, who co-commissioned the piece in 1938. There are distinctively Goodmanesque moments in which Bartók channels the recently deceased George Gershwin, and Ferreira found a rich and resonant American accent for Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Christian Gerhaher, the most compelling and complete interpreter of German Lieder of our time, makes no secret of the fact that – unlike his devotion to, say, Schumann – his relationship with the songs of Brahms has never been comfortable.In a memoir published in 2015, he explained a “certain antipathy” towards the composer: the singer demurs from being cast in the role of a mere conduit for melody “like a viola”, He says he sometimes feels “under attack” from the words, and he is also very mistrustful of Brahms’s motives in espousing the German folk song idiom.And yet the result of all this Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A programme of less-loved siblings – Shostakovich’s gnarly Second Cello Concerto and Rachmaninov’s “not-the-Second” Symphony No. 1 – gave John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London the chance to do what they do best: force an audience to take a second look.The Shostakovich has benefitted over the past few years from the advocacy of Sheku Kanneh-Mason – an unexpected choice for a young cellist who stormed to victory at the BBC Young Musician competition in 2016 with the more obviously ingratiating Concerto No. 1, whose signature is singing warmth of tone and breadth of melodic line.There’s Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s not often that a classical music concert offers to take you beyond the stratosphere and back, but this intriguing evening from the City of London Sinfonia did precisely that with considerable élan. All too frequently there’s a considerable gap between a fantastic idea and its satisfying execution, yet this musical trip from the Antarctic to the Arctic via different cloud formations proved to be as stimulating as it was passionately engaging.That was due in no small part to the contribution of Dr Simon Clark (pictured below, far right), an atmospheric scientist who’s the author of a book Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Sero sed serio”: so runs the Salisbury family motto on the carved coat-of-arms in the lavishly panelled and painted Marble Hall of Hatfield House. “Late, but in earnest”. The first adjective certainly doesn’t apply to any member of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, five of whom performed in the Hall for one of the centrepiece events of the 13th Hatfield House Music Festival.The Collective, founded by violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster in 2017, hosts a flexible roster of instrumental partners equipped to deliver small-ensemble pieces across a spectrum of different Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
In 2022, Spritualized’s Jason Pierce described his musical goal as "trying to find somewhere between Arvo Pärt and The Stooges.” Amongst the most arresting and explicitly Pärt-styled results of this quest to link the minimalist composer with Iggy Pop‘s pre-punk confrontationists was the affecting "Broken Heart," from his band’s 1997 third album Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.Pierce hasn’t been alone in declaring a fidelity to Pärt. In 2009, former Public Image Ltd bassist Jah Wobble cited Pärt as his choice of Sunday morning music. He was moved to tears while listening. In 2005 Read more ...
graham.rickson
Georges Prêtre plays Francis Poulenc (Erato)Georges Prêtre and Francis Poulenc’s working relationship began in 1959 when Prêtre conducted the first staging of La Voix humaine with soprano Denise Duval. Already an experienced opera conductor, Prêtre’s performance moved Poulenc to tears, and he was soon entrusted with the French premiere of the Gloria. It’s a little frustrating that Prêtre’s first recording of this work, taped with Rosanna Carteri as soloist, isn’t included in this 7-disc box set. Nor is his pioneering account of the Stabat Mater. Instead, we get the 1980s remakes with Read more ...
Robert Beale
Of all the inventive and enterprising things Manchester Collective do, it’s most often been the playing of a string ensemble led from first desk by Rakhi Singh that’s been the most fundamentally rewarding.Last night’s concert was further confirmation of that. The formula for other outfits to introduce new music has often been three (or four) standards, with one novelty sandwiched in, on the spoonful-of-sugar principle. The Collective do it differently: they give you three or four novelties, with one standard inserted for recognizability. And in this case the standard (Tchaikovsky’s Serenade Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two splendid pieces of orchestral virtuosity began and finished the second Saturday concert by the BBC Philharmonic under John Storgårds at the Bridgewater Hall. It was given the title of “Mischief and Magic”, an apt summary.For mischief we had Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, perhaps the most perfect of his orchestral tone poems in that it not only tells a story but is beautifully shaped and balanced as an extended classical rondo.The episodes were given their folklore-based descriptions by Strauss (“Through the market he rides”, “Dressed as a priest he oozes unction”, “ Read more ...
Robert Hollingworth
I’m sitting in a café in Kraców, Poland, rehearsals finished for the resurrection of a mass setting written nearly 400 years ago in Rome. Nothing particularly odd about this except that the virtually unknown composer – Orazio Benevoli, master of the Colossal Baroque – split his choir into four separate groups and wrote them a kind of sonic doubles match, the music jumping from choir to choir around the heads of the listener until it comes together in life-affirming surround-sound cadences that allow you to experience something brilliant but ephemeral - and quite indescribable: in 17th century Read more ...