Classical music
graham.rickson
Brahms: The Four Symphonies, Piano Quartet No. 1 (orch. Schoenberg) Luzerner Sinfonieorchester/Michael Sanderling (Warner Classics)Some like their Brahms thick and dark. Others, well, will like what we get here, a more transparent, less granitic take on four of the most-recorded works in the orchestral repertoire. Michael Sanderling’s conductor father Kurt had a reputation for dourness and intensity, but these performances tend towards the light and lyrical. You’ll find more doom-laden accounts of Symphony No. 1’s slow intro, but the fast main section is as exciting as any on disc, and Read more ...
David Nice
Until last night, I’d only heard the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra (ERSO at home, “Riiklik” standing for “National”) live in unfamiliar contemporary epics, with Kristiina Poska and Anu Tali respectively conducting Lepo Sumera’s Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, and Olari Elts just before his 2020 appointment as Music Director championing an Erkki-Sven Tüür triptych. This was a test of how they'd fare in more familiar repertoire. They passed with flying colours.Arvo Pärt's Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten was the first work by the Estonian master I ever heard in concert, when a then Read more ...
David Nice
Any chamber music festival that kicks off with Czech genius Martinů's Parisian jeu d'esprit ballet-sextet La revue de cuisine and ends its first concert with Saint-Saëns's glory of a Septet for trumpet, piano and strings is likely to be a winner.This one was. It transpires that this year's curator Kathryn Stott – Steven Isserlis will follow in 2024 – is not only a remarkable pianist but also an inspired programmer, bringing to the 10 players of Ensemble 360, core of the fabulously enterprising Music in the Round, an unfamiliar repertoire and special guests with whom they made sparks fly.I Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
One of the singers smashes out a jittery pulse on a shaman drum and the 50-strong choir intone a chant, while at the front a tenor who looks like a doorman you wouldn’t mess with spits out what sounds like a threat from between gritted teeth. It is the Estonian National Male Voice Choir performing Veljo Tormis’s Raua needmine (“Curse Upon Iron”) and it is utterly entrancing, invigorating – and just a little bit scary.The Estonian Tormis (1930-2017) wrote almost exclusively for voice, usually engaging in some way with Estonian folk traditions. But if this suggests bucolic Read more ...
Robert Beale
What makes a classical box office draw these days? If there were a simple answer to that question, a lot of concert givers would be laughing all the way to the bank.Is it recognisability – artists whose names are familiar from big-viewing TV events such as The Last Night of the Proms, or composer names that people feel are “safe”, like Beethoven and Sibelius, or even particular works that get a lot of airplay on Classic FM? Is it a sense of value for money, so three soloists for the ticket price of one sounds like a good deal (this could be very persuasive for us Northerners, being careful Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Standing ovations on the less-than-passionate South Bank can have a dutiful, grudging quality. However, I’ve seldom heard more heartfelt ardour at the Royal Festival Hall than the acclaim for Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra last night. Rightly so? Beyond all doubt.We knew, from recordings if not live performances, that their stewardship of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony passes beyond curatorial respect and into a sort of rapturous renewal. We’ll never quite hear Mahler’s Ninth (though Bruno Walter certainly comes close). Still, the great Budapest band arguably embodies the all- Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
From the outset, it was clear that this would be a performance of immaculate sonic architecture. Over a soft, deep, and breathy organ pedal the first utterings of the strings sounded tentative, almost improvised, like an artist making the first daubs on a vast empty canvas.Likewise the chorus entry on "Selig sind", at the same time both hesitant and mysterious, yet perfectly controlled. In keeping with his reputation, there was no doubt that conductor Maxim Emelyanychev knew exactly what he wished to achieve with this performance of Brahms’ A German Requiem with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Read more ...
Bjarte Eike
BBC Four is broadcasting our Alehouse Sessions which filmmaker Dominic Best filmed in Battersea Arts Centre one snowy night in December. I know it feels very unlikely that we, the Barokksolistene, a Scandi group of baroque specialists, have made a programme for British TV singing sea shanties and folk ballads alongside Purcell.In fact, we are recreating the anarchic spirit of Oliver Cromwell’s lockdown London when the theatres and playhouses were shut down by the Puritans and the musicians surreptitiously crept into the backrooms of alehouses and inns in protest. Nothing about the Read more ...
Kozhukhin, BBCSSO, Menezes, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - shimmering Saariaho and moody Mendelssohn
Miranda Heggie
How apt that on her first visit to Scotland, Italian-Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes would lead the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Mendelssohn's Third Symphony, the “Scottish”. Though there may not be many particularly "Scottish" sounding melodies in this piece, its overall sound conjures up the brooding moods of the Scottish landscape.One scene which was particularly evident here was of an angry Atlantic, the body of water Mendelssohn would have crossed to reach the Hebrides, the group of western islands which inspired his famous overture, written at the same time Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Escapees from Eurovision in Westminster on Saturday night might have discovered that a continent-wide enthusiasm for crowd-pleasing international styles arose long before the age of glitzy pop. Two accomplished Spanish groups performed at St John’s Smith Square within this year’s London Festival of Baroque Music. Both came with an attractive, unfamiliar 18th-century repertoire from their homeland. It showed that, across the decades from Handel to Haydn, the hegemonic sounds of Italy could be zestfully customised to suit national tastes. Within the tried-and-tested formulas for a Euro hit, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Shostakovich: Symphonies 8, 9 and 10 Berliner Philharmoniker/Kirill Petrenko (Berlin Phil Media)Potential purchasers worrying that the Berlin sound might be a little too well-upholstered for Shostakovich needn’t worry; one striking aspect of the performances captured in this set is their rawness and bite. Herbert von Karajan made two superb recordings of Symphony No. 10 with the Berlin Philharmonic in the 1960s and 1980s, and Kirill Petrenko’s new one is similarly involving. That he’s got an orchestra capable of playing the second and fourth movements up to tempo is a plus: I’ve rarely Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno is the opposite of a jukebox musical. So fertile, so overflowing was the 22-year-old Handel’s musical imagination, that his very first oratorio, composed during his time in Rome, would become a chest full of music the composer returned to again and again, pilfering and self-plagiarising over the ensuing decades. All those hits from Rodelinda, from Agrippina, Partenope, Rinaldo: he wrote them here first.A poor performance can feel like a game of musical bingo, finger-tapping while waiting to spot the next tune while Tempo (Time), Disinganno (Enlightenment Read more ...