Classical music
Rachel Halliburton
Even before the Just Stop Oil protesters hit the stage after the interval, this was destined to be one of the most politically charged Proms the Royal Albert Hall has witnessed for a while. The rousing cheer that greeted the BBC Singers was hopefully all the beleaguered BBC bosses needed to realise – after the ill-advised attempt to abolish them in March – what a key part of our music culture they remain today.On top of this there was the programme, featuring two nationalist Nordic composers – one especially famed for his anti-Russian stance – and a contemporary Ukrainian, presided over by a Read more ...
Elgan Llŷr Thomas
“No one makes money from CDs anymore”; “Remember, once it’s out there it’s out there forever”; “Everyone’s making recordings these days, it’s a very cluttered market”; “You’ll struggle to make a mark…”These are just some of the things uttered to me when I first told people I was thinking of recording a new album. Are these statements untrue? Not entirely, but neither were they reasons enough to stop me from embarking on what has been an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery.The last few years have been a difficult time for musicians, but they also gave me a lot of space to ruminate. I Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michael Blake: Afrikosmos Antony Gray (piano) (Divine Art)It’s all in the name; the six volumes of Bartók’s Mikrokosmos were indeed the model for Afrikosmos, a sequence of 75 short pieces by South African composer Michael Blake (b.1951). As with the Bartók, Blake’s epic work is a six-volume compendium of studies, dances and character pieces in ascending order of technical difficulty, Blake seeking to explore “the range of traditional music in sub-Saharan Africa”. Each of the three discs in this set can be listened to as a discrete hour-long programme, Blake further categorising the Read more ...
David Nice
To give the first performance of a dazzling fantasia in the context of a rangy sunny-evening-to-night concert, as pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy did in glorious Blythburgh Church, merits a gold medal in piano-duo enterprise. To premiere 15 new works in a single programme and adapt perfectly to the various styles, the Ligeti Quartet’s crowning glory of three events celebrating their namesake’s centenary, is simply superhuman."That must have been very atmospheric." commented a fellow audience member at the Ligeti experience who'd not been able to get to the Kolesnikov/Tsoy special (I Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1, Florence Price: Violin Concertos 1 and 2, Adoration Randall Goosby (violin), Philadelphia Orchestra/Yannick Nézet-Séguin (Decca)There’s much to enjoy here, but how frustrating that this disc’s sleeve notes reveal next to nothing about the main reason for listening to it. Thank goodness for Wikipedia, which tells us that Florence Price’s two violin concertos date from 1939 and 1952 and were rediscovered in 2009 as part of a stash of papers and manuscripts found in her abandoned Illinois summerhouse. In Alex Ross’s words, “a large quantity of Price’s music Read more ...
Lukas Ligeti
The music of various African regions and cultures has played a significant role in shaping my own music. My exposure to African traditional music, which started not long after I began my own composition studies, helped me develop my unique artistic voice as a composer, and I owe this influence in part to my father and, indirectly, to his composition class in Hamburg.After graduating high school in 1983, I discovered a passion for music that I had never explored before. Despite never studying with my father, I did attend his composition class a few times over the years, including a final visit Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Artist-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall Hilary Hahn brought her residency to an end with a collaboration with the exciting Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, a notably youthful and ethnically diverse group, who brought with them a notably more youthful and ethnically diverse crowd than the hall usually entertains.The programme was American music, combining a couple of mid-20th century masterpieces with newer works by living composers. The older music largely came out ahead.Although I have known and loved the Samuel Barber String Quartet for 30 years I had never previously heard it live. I don’t Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You don’t expect to visit the Britten-Pears shrine in Suffolk and come back raving about Edward Elgar. Yes, Elgar. On Sunday evening, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London brought the composer’s Second Symphony to Snape Maltings: that marshland temple to every anti-Elgarian current in post-war British music.With transformative daring and dash, they made it sound like a work that even the Aldeburgh Festival's founder-saint himself might have appreciated. (Benjamin Britten once confessed himself “absolutely incapable of enjoying Elgar for more than two minutes”.) Indeed, the middle weekend of Read more ...
Robert Beale
The BBC Philharmonic ended its 2022-23 season in Manchester with a programme that might have been chosen as a showpiece for virtuosity.There was orchestral virtuosity in the form of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, pianistic virtuosity in the shape of Steven Osborne playing Britten’s Piano Concerto, and a kind of compositional virtuosity in an eight-minute burst of Ethel Smyth – “On the Cliffs of Cornwall” from her opera, The Wreckers.All this was delivered by conductor Ben Glassberg with an up-and-at-’em energy and determination that defied the heat and humidity of a summer evening in Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Simon Rattle’s farewell season as music director of the London Symphony Orchestra has inscribed a sort of artistic memoir as he moves from one of his beloved blockbusters to another. Last night, he closed his account at the Barbican (though he will regularly return as “Conductor Emeritus”) with Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-Symphonie.Under the baton of Sir Charles Groves, it thrilled him as a kid in Liverpool. It thrilled us, too, as the composer’s ecstatic, unbuttoned post-Second World War shout of love and joy drew from the LSO the most ferociously uplifting performance anyone could wish to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Rachmaninov had his doubts about his Variations on a Theme of Corelli. He confided to Medtner that when he performed them, “I was guided by the coughing of the audience. Whenever the coughing increased, I would skip the next variation. Whenever there was no coughing, I would play them in proper order.”There was no coughing during Bocheng Wang’s technically fluid delivery of the variations at the Wigmore Hall. Each shift in mood was clearly delineated – from the sombre to the mischievous, from the gossamer light to the thunderous. Creatively the work may not have attained the heights that Read more ...
Isata Kanneh-Mason
My entire childhood was punctuated with music. I just can’t remember a time without it being present and I think it’s shaped me enormously. I have varying pieces of music for the different times in my life and they all evoke very powerful memories for me.As a child I used music as an escape: I had a very vivid imagination and listening to music was like entering a new world. When I perform music now, I want to bring the audience into the world of that music. to feel and view the music in the same way that I do. This affected the choice of repertoire on the album because it was Read more ...