Classical music
Robert Beale
Maybe he thought it was a relaxing way to celebrate his recent 75th birthday – maybe he just fancied a trip to Manchester to play with the BBC Philharmonic – either way there was something very special to hear in Garrick Ohlsson’s Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto on Saturday.It's often considered one of the greatest challenges for any virtuoso pianist, not least because it’s a 40-minute score in which the soloist is hardly ever silent. There are constant torrents, cascades and armfuls of notes, so that it’s simply a marathon before any question of interpretation or approach arises. But Read more ...
stephen.walsh
We hear a lot about political and economic crises in the 1970s and 1980s, winters of discontent and all the rest of it, the predictable if not predicted remote outcome of what Jacques Maritain called the “immense intellectual disarray inherited from the 19th century.”Music suffered its own version of this protracted trauma, as composers began to fall out of love with the disagreeable but seemingly inevitable impenetrability of modern music, including their own, since the turn of the century and Arnold Schoenberg. A sort of half-baked neo-romanticism was born in the Seventies, but it threw up Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
French-Danish soprano Elsa Dreisig’s operatic schedule is so busy and so successful, it is perhaps not surprising that she – and Texas-born pianist Jonathan Ware – treat the song recital platform as a place of freedom, where, rather than delivering the predictable or the comforting, they can test out ideas and set themselves challenges. As she has told one interviewer, it is a place where "I can push my artistic practice to its ultimate limit."In the early stages of their recital a deep dive into French fin-de-siecle aestheticism, they occasionally drew that particular kind of slightly Read more ...
David Nice
What a manifesto against those in power who seem determined to knock the UK off its hard-won classical music pedestal: hundreds of young choristers and instrumentalists of two fabulous orchestras in a week-long celebration of innovative programming and presentation. Any politician attending – I’d like to think there were a few, but I doubt it - would have been fired up to devote every effort in support of British youth and musicSorry not to have got to Wednesday night’s Albert Hall celebration of the National Youth Choir’s 40th anniversary, or Friday’s Edinburgh spectacular from the National Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In today’s Britain, too many concert reviews have to begin with the vandalistic threats of damage or extinction that hang over their performers. Last week, it emerged that the BBC’s bosses may be open to negotiate an alternative future for its Symphony Orchestra that does not involve 20 per cuts in the personnel.We shall see: what’s beyond doubt is that Saturday’s programme at the Barbican saw a full-strength BBCSO, under their stalwart champion Sakari Oramo, display an exhilarating level of prowess and flair in every department. Others can, and will, ask why Britain’s national institutions Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
One can only admire the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland for its steadfast indifference to the laws of box office gravity. A little known contemporary guitar concerto allied to a relatively unpopular Mahler symphony would be a hard sell even in an Edinburgh Festival context. On a distinctly chilly April evening in Edinburgh, it fell to a small but vocal audience of camp followers to make up for the disappointing rows of empty seats in the admittedly cavernous Usher Hall. The evening had a slightly unusual format. At 80 minutes, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is long enough to stand alone Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In the kerfuffle over the proposed decimation of English National Opera, the BBC Singers and the BBC orchestras, the removal of all Arts Council England’s funding for the Britten Sinfonia has slipped a bit under the radar, but is no less egregious. This 30-year-old ensemble seems to be doing everything to tick ACE boxes: regionally based in the East of England (an area not oversupplied with music), a full programme of community and educational work, a young composers development scheme – all alongside the main ensemble giving thoughtfully-programmed concerts at the highest standard.The last Read more ...
graham.rickson
Nadia & Lili Boulanger: Les Heures Claires - The Complete Songs Lucile Richardot (mezzo), Stéphane Degout (baritone), Raquel Camarinha (soprano), Anne de Fornel (piano), Sarah Nemtanu (violin), Emmanuelle Bertrand (cello) (Harmonia Mundi)This 3-CD set of 63 songs and instrumental pieces by the Boulanger sisters, Nadia (1887-1979) and Lili (1893-1918) really is a treasure-trove. It is claimed that it is the first “intégrale” of the songs by both sisters; these are occasionally interwoven with instrumental pieces. To over-generalize, the first two CDs give an insight into the level of Read more ...
David Nice
In search of relatively rare fabulous beasts like César Franck’s Piano Quintet – given a fantastical performance last night – you often have to take in the ubiquitous Shostakovich specimen, the modest work of a master using simple means to his own creative ends that doesn’t bear too much repeated listening over a short space of time.That won’t have been the case for most of the audience last night, who would have been rightly satisfied by the fire and poetry in the partnership of the Belcea Quartet – with a rare visitor as second violinist, the compelling Paweł Zalejski of the equally fine Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
London concert life is infinitely varied, especially if you dig below the surface. So after spending Tuesday evening in the lofty Royal Albert Hall, on Wednesday I was 16 metres below ground, in the tunnel shaft of the Brunel Museum in Rotherhithe for a multi-media event celebrating Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space, 62 years ago to the day.The Brunel Museum and the Royal Albert Hall represent two sides of Victorian London: the celebration of high culture and of engineering and “progress”. And although it has none of the elaborate decoration and fine boxes, the Thames Tunnel is an Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The recently re-branded National Youth Choir was founded in 1983 as a single choir of about 100 voices, and in those 40 years has grown to be a family of four, ranging from the nine-year-olds at the bottom of the boys’ and girls’ choirs to the 25-year-olds at the top of the NYC proper.Several hundred young singers in total, further augmented at the Royal Albert Hall last night by an alumni choir and even, in the last number, by the entire audience. In a time of unremitting bad news in the classical music world it was a much-needed tonic, a truly heart-warming celebration of singing and its Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The turbulence and agitation of betrayal could be felt from the word go in this galvanising performance of the St John Passion, which administered a jolting urgency to Bach’s radical portrayal of the Easter story. The work will be 300 years old next year, yet this Polyphony Good Friday performance – a fixture at St John’s Smith Square for slightly fewer years – delivered a version as fresh and discomfiting as if the crucifixion had taken place yesterday.That was in no small part due to Nick Pritchard (pictured below), who as the Evangelist narrated the story with a vibrancy that suggested he Read more ...