Classical music
Miranda Heggie
The mood was indeed celebratory at Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday evening for the second of two concerts celebrating the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th birthday. It opened with a suite from Figaro Gets a Divorce, a comic opera written by composer Eleanor Langer to a text from director and librettist David Pountney which was premiered by Welsh National Opera in 2016.As the title suggests, it was written as a sequel to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and is based partly on the play La Mère coupable by Pierre Beaumarchais, the third and least known of his Figaro trilogy. The orchestra Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
After a frozen week, the sensual languor of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été promised warm respite at the Wigmore Hall – especially when delivered by house favourite Christian Gerhaher and his peerless pianist, Gerold Huber.Yet the Bavarian baritone saved that cycle for the end of a rainbow-hued recital that spanned a vast array of modes and moods: four composers, three languages (French, Russian and Czech, but no German), and solo interludes in which Huber played Chopin mazurkas and even the mighty Ballade No. 4 in F minor. The pair delivered more than generous measures, over a spectrum of styles Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This mixed reality concert is simultaneously a dimension juggling conundrum, a philosophical puzzle, and a fascinating insight into what the future might hold. Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto – whose influences included Bach, John Cage and David Bowie – died in March last year, but still lives on in this curiously moving virtual event in which his performance was captured by 48 cameras at 60 frames a second.The audience is warned at the outset that Kagami – which means mirror – was not motivated by technology but was created by Todd Eckert and his company Tin Drum so that we can connect with Read more ...
David Nice
Successful performances, conductor Robin Ticciati once suggested to me, are when “the head has a conversation with the heart”. The same goes, surely, for great music, though from personal experience one has to reach a certain age to find that true of Brahms. Last night Igor Levit seemed to favour the head, occasionally missing, for me, that very elusive something at the heart of Brahms’s late piano pieces.There can be no question of his magisterial oversight, though, or of how well 20 pieces in four consecutive opus numbers work in sequence. It was clear, for instance, how turbulence in one Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There were a lot of horns on display in the BBC NOW’s latest concert in Cardiff’s Hoddinott Hall. Brahms’s Second Symphony has four of them, and so does the Elegy for Brahms that Parry wrote on hearing of Brahms’s death in 1897. Gavin Higgins’s Horn Concerto, whose world premiere formed the programme’s centrepiece, has no less than five.It was a horny concert, in the nicest sense, but even in that other sense that nice people don’t mention, such is Brahms at his most – shall we say – virile.Higgins is himself a horn-player, so his concerto is not just a passing commission but clearly Read more ...
Hilary Summers
Back in the summer of 2020 when the arts industry was largely dormant and many professional singers were either moodily knocking back the gin or uploading poor quality phone videos of themselves bellowing Puccini arias from their doorsteps, I received an email.Entitled “Small Project”, it was from Maarten Ornstein, a Dutch bass clarinettist working in jazz and classical, who wondered if I’d be up for a collaboration with himself and the Dutch lutenist, Mike Fentross. It seemed like an intriguing combination so I consulted my hectic schedule. I felt that amongst dog walks and the next episode Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Violinist Jonas Ilias-Kadesha was placed front and centre of the publicity for this concert. This is his first season concert with the SCO, though back in 2019 he stood in for an indisposed soloist at short notice for one of their European tours. Inviting him back is a vote of confidence, so I was looking forward to hearing him as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Ravel’s Tzigane.His Mozart turned out to be a very mixed bag, however. It began well, with clipped, precise playing from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the opening tutti, and an improvisatory opening flourish from Read more ...
graham.rickson
LICHT: 800 Years of German Lieder Anna Lucia Richter (mezzo-soprano), Ammiel Bushakevitz (hurdy gurdy, harpsichord, clavichord, fortepiano, piano) (SWR2/Challenge Classics)LICHT, 800 Years of German Lieder, from Anna Lucia Richter and Ammiel Bushakevitz does exactly what it says on the tin. Chronologically, the album’s eclectic programme takes us all the way from early 11th century Gregorian chant (it’s actually the final track, to make the story “run full circle”) to a song by Wolfgang Rihm published as recently as 2008. And on the way, it stops off to pay visits to (...wait for it Read more ...
David Nice
With rapid, sleight-of-hand flicks between calm assurance and demonic agitation, Boris Giltburg turned in a coherent and epic recital that won’t be surpassed in 2024. Most pianists would quake simply at the thought of performing the four Chopin Scherzos in sequence; Giltburg set them up with phenomenal insights into Scriabin and Schumann.He went in deep with perfect space around the noble beginnings of Scriabin’s relatively early (1890s) Second Sonata, that side of the composer very much, in Boris Pasternak’s words, “as tranquil and lucent as God resting from his labours on the seventh day”. Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s still a market for classical music, whether you stream, download or get your fix from your local classical CD shop. Universal’s acquisition of the independent Hyperion label worried many listeners early in 2023, but the fact that Hyperion’s entire catalogue will be made available for streaming has to be a good thing. We’re also seeing more and more big boxes of reissued material, and I’ve chosen three of them as particular favourites. Two celebrate conductors: Warner Classics’ breezeblock-sized compendium of Otto Klemperer’s orchestral recordings contains some of the best Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To understand the ambition of baritone James Newby, it helps to look up his video of Handel’s “Cara Pianta” from Apollo e Dafne. It would be remarkable by any standards for the fact that his head becomes gradually submerged by water while he’s delivering it, but Radiohead fans will also recognise it as a stylish parody of No Surprises performed by Thom Yorke.The first time I saw Newby singing live after watching this video, he was playing the male lead in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at the 2022 Proms, a difficult role which gave him little chance to demonstrate his expressive talents. By Read more ...
David Nice
However dark the future may seem for UK arts funding, each year begins with a beacon of light, passed on to shine twice more, in the Easter and summer holidays: the ever more resourceful and generous concertgiving of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, always among the highlights of the classical music scene.Their first programme of 2023, under the fascinating French conductor Alexandre Bloch, brought razor-sharp Britten, melodic Anna Clyne and incandescent Richard Strauss (all technical hurdles supply overcome in Also sprach Zarathustra). Three months later they were pushing the Read more ...