Classical music
David Nice
After last year’s small-scale, big-impact Messiah in the Wigmore Hall, superlatives are again in order for the IBO’s performance of the greatest musical offering known to humankind. With the fluency established by that most supple of directors Peter Whelan at the start of Bach's opening chorus leading to the astonishing heft of nine singers and gleaming instrumentalists at its culmination, we knew we were in for something approaching perfection.And that was to reckon without three soloists who, while they may not be big names outside the inner circle of musicians, simply couldn’t be surpassed Read more ...
Tom Greed
For musicians, the period from early 2020 to mid-2021 was one of great reflection, with so many questions to puzzle over. Could we satisfy the basic need to interact with others and express ourselves? What on earth was Zoom, and how, as performers, could we learn to use technology to provide live experiences? Would things ever go back to the way they were? And should they?Avenue Ensemble was a concept that I began to sketch out during the pandemic. It was partly inspired by the longing to perform chamber music with friends once again when restrictions were finally over, but predominantly due Read more ...
graham.rickson
William Steinberg: Complete Command Classics Recordings (DG)It’s hard to find a bad word said against conductor William Steinberg, cited by one critic as combining the best attributes of Toscanini and Klemperer. Born in Cologne in 1899, Steinberg served briefly as Klemperer’s assistant, his burgeoning operatic career halted when the Nazis took power in 1933; one anecdote describes brownshirts marching into a Steinberg rehearsal and snatching the baton from his hands before evicting him. Emigration in 1936 took Steinberg to Palestine to help establish the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Sir Mark Elder conducted Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 for his first time in last night’s Hallé series concert, a reflection of his untiring exploration of new territory even as he nears the end of his time as the orchestra’s music director.So this was quite a ground-breaking event. And for the audience it was like seeing an old master in vivid colours after restoration.The concert began with the Hallé Youth Choir singing Bruckner’s Os Justi motet, conducted by their own director Stuart Overington – an astonishingly good bit of unaccompanied singing which stayed dead in tune and reached its own Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I have never seen the Wigmore Hall stage more crammed with instruments than for this Colin Currie Quartet concert. Sadly the auditorium was not similarly packed, the hall’s admirable initiative of broadening its repertoire away from mainly dead Germans being disappointingly shunned by the regular patrons.This amazing group deserved better – and the younger than usual audience were treated to a scintillating display of virtuosity. The programme was bookended by the music of Andy Akiho, who is himself a percussionist as well as composer, something that was clear from his deft handling of the Read more ...
David Nice
It was chance that the National Concert Hall’s weekend of quartet events featuring responses to war and refugees should coincide with the second anniversary of Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine. By late Saturday morning thousands of Ukrainians and friends had processed beneath our windows on Merrion Square with the usual array of flags and heartfelt banners; at 2.30pm we were listening to a Syrian poet’s words about devastation and displacement as set to music by Jonathan Dove.So many musical attempts to reflect the horrors of war and its human cost fall embarrassingly short of any powerful Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus has a well-established concert life away from the main orchestra; the Royal Scottish National Orchestra Chorus less so. So it was refreshing to get to hear them going it (almost) alone in Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk, and the Bruckner anniversary gave them a good excuse, building their programme around a motet and the E minor Mass.Distinctive choral concerts like this are good for any choir because it encourages them to push out on their own a bit and gives them more exposure, as well as more repertoire. This concert showcased a lot of their strengths, Read more ...
Sánchez, National Symphony Orchestra, Martín, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - Spanish panache
David Nice
Ravel’s Boléro, however well you think you know it, usually wows in concert with its disconcerting mix of sensuality, fun and violence. Context can make it even more powerful: in this case as the culmination of NSO Chief Conductor Jaime Martín’s brilliantly programmed Spanish fiesta, a cool and even customer at first after chameleonic Chabrier and fidgety-brilliant, fluid Falla.The special guest was well known to many Dubliners. During lockdown, the orchestra’s programming of Falla’s El amor brujo (Love the Magician) came up against the 14-day quarantine rule for visiting musicians. Seville- Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s not often one comes out of a concert of mainly new works with a spring in one’s step. A sigh of relief is rather more usual. But this concert on Thursday by the Welsh new music ensemble Uproar was an exception, partly but by no means exclusively because of the brilliant performance of John Adams’s invigorating, even appropriately uproarious Son of Chamber Symphony with which it ended.Michael Rafferty, Uproar’s founder and conductor, had keyed the programme backwards from the 17-year-old Adams piece, naming the concert after it and commissioning three new works for roughly the same 17- Read more ...
Robert Beale
Placing the UK premiere of Katherine Balch’s whisper concerto (for cello and orchestra) after Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 was probably an inspired idea from the BBC Philharmonic and conductor Joshua Weilerstein.In its day, the so-called “Military” Symphony was not only striking on account of its use of novel instrumental effects – the “Turkish music” sound of triangle, cymbals and big drum for one, and clarinets (heard, military-band style, alongside oboes and flute) for another – but the clever and comical way they were brought into a context that was otherwise seemingly orthodox and almost Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This was a muesli programme: nutty, crunchy, just sweet enough, its success lying in the balance of the various ingredients. At times, such was the explosiveness of the playing, it felt like popping candy had been added to the muesli, but in a good way. The fireworks came in the brilliant John Adams finale, but also from the young Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, whose playing blazed in the first half.Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, written for the composer himself to play and begun when he was little older than Malofeev is now, is certainly young man’s music. Malofeev responded to its Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
To judge by the post-interval empty seats near me, some of the Cadogan Hall audience had turned up last night solely to hear Nikolai Lugansky play Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. Well, the more fool them. For sure they would have enjoyed their not so-brief encounter with a truly distinguished Russian pianist – noble standard-bearer for a grand tradition – who gave a finely-polished, well-shaped rendition of this beloved old story (on the eve of Valentine’s Day, too). However, any early quitters would have missed the generous panoply of French orchestral showpieces gift-wrapped for us by Read more ...