Classical music
Simon Thompson
Two women featured prominently in this programme; the one a composer and the other a conductor.To the composer first. Long before she hit New York big time, Anna Clyne was at Edinburgh University, so there’s a strong link with Scotland that the Scottish orchestras aren’t afraid to exploit. Her 2015 piece This Midnight Hour might have been inspired by two delicate poems, but its mood and tone have the sweep of a film score, and a dashed exciting one at that.The opening is a turbulent eruption from the cellos and basses, leading into jagged shards of music that seem to flicker in the light like Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
On paper, the formula shouldn’t be that special. Really good music played by really good people is hardly a groundbreaking concept; but in actuality it’s seldom found with such honesty and diversity as in Pekka Kuusisto’s recent residency with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The first two of the triptych of concerts were with Americana/Folk singer and multi-instrumentalist Sam Amidon, and began with a set centred around Janáček’s First String Quartet "The Kreutzer Sonata". The quartet takes its name from a novella by Leo Tolstoy whose protagonist is an abusive and jealous husband Read more ...
theartsdesk
Sent by a surely reluctant BBC PR, an ardent choral singer and supporter of new music, last Tuesday’s email had a title to make one groan: “New Strategy for Classical Music Prioritises Quality, Agility and Impact”. Very W1A. But this was no laughing matter – ker-pow-ing out of the thicket of corporatespeak were two devastating punches to the solar plexus.The first, under “Future-Proofing BBC Ensembles”, told us that “a voluntary redundancy programme will open across salaried posts in the English Orchestras (BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra and BBC Philharmonic Orchestra), aiming Read more ...
David Nice
This longest, wackiest and most riskily diverse of Third Symphonies became Esa-Pekka Salonen’s personal property during his years as the Philharmonia's Principal Conductor. His successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, has (in)famously said he’s not interested in Mahler. Two of the orchestra’s most distinguished visitors, Jakub Hrůša and Paavo Järvi, certainly are, so after Hrůša’s blazing Second, hopes were high for Järvi’s Third.It delivered in terms of masterful conducting, effortless in every gear change, and in all those sonorities which must have seemed outrageously novel in 1896; when the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Leonard Bernstein’s Mass has something of the nature of what might have been called a “happening” at the time he wrote it. It was 1971, and it was created for and premiered at the opening of the Kennedy Center in Washington.It’s set for very large forces: three choruses, two orchestras including a rock band and a blues band, a virtuosic baritone soloist (the “Celebrant”) around whom the whole drama of the piece is built, and at least 20 other soloists from a group designated “Street Musicians”.So it’s a happening that doesn’t happen very often – at least so far as 100 per cent professional Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It would seem unfitting to report on Nonclassical’s event – happening? – in the Barbican Conservatory on Sunday with anything resembling a conventional review. So instead I shall treat this free-form “experience” to a non-sequential response, in the form of 19 observations: things I saw, heard or noticed.1. Carola Bauckholt’s Doppelbelichtung required Linda Jankowska to produce a range of unlikely sounds from her violin, viz.: creaks, squeaks, whistles, swirls, swoops, wails, whines and rasps. They hung in the air, being broadcast in loops via speakers hidden in suspended violins. 2. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Eleanor Alberga: Wild Blue Yonder (Navona Records)This is a belated review for an album that came out in 2021, but one well worth a retrospective appraisal. Eleanor Alberga (b.1949) is a British-Jamaican composer, perhaps best known for her 1998 setting of Roald Dahl’s version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She has also had a successful career as a pianist as well as composer, and is an important figure in the British musical landscape. The opening and closing tracks are duets for violin and piano, featuring the composer as performer alongside her husband, Thomas Bowes. The opener Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
This evening brought to mind those marathon 19th century concerts when Beethoven would unleash a handful of new symphonies and a couple of piano concertos on an unsuspecting public.The programme in Edinburgh's Usher Hall began at 6pm with a smorgasbord of delightful show pieces by the pupils of St Mary’s Music School, celebrating its 50th anniversary, and continued with a full programme from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, effortlessly squeezing in two diminutive saxophone concertos before the interval and Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition after – the latter embellished by a real Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Stefan Zweig once wrote that the difference between Busoni and every other pianist he had ever heard was the way the influential Tuscan-born Germanophile performer, composer and intellectual would always appear to be listening so intently to his own playing, “his uplifted face full of blissful rapture, which turns to stone in sweet awe at the Medusa-like beauty of the music.”Kirill Gerstein, who last night at Wigmore Hall gave the second of three concerts in a themed series “Busoni and his world”, is a superb pianist, and is similarly mesmerising to watch. He rocks gently back and forth and Read more ...
Harry Bicket
Of the many questions we asked ourselves during lockdown, I suspect that many of us looked at our lives and professions and asked, “Why?”.Perhaps a period of forced introspection is a positive thing if it helps clarify what is truly important and what isn’t. For musicians, whose work is by definition a communal event, it was a strange period; endless time to practise and study, but with apparently nothing to practise and study for. Many groups understandably decided to hunker down and reduce their activities and ambitions. The English Concert had a different concept: if our world was about to Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
After full orchestral performances of Brahms’s Violin Concerto and First Symphony, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra shone a more intimate light on the composer’s oeuvre with a recital of chamber works in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall on Sunday.Having made his SCO debut as the soloist in the Violin Concerto on Thursday and Friday, Russian violinist Aylen Pritchin joined a few members of the orchestra, as well as Principal Conductor Maxim Emelyanychev (pictured below by Christine Kernohan) at the keyboard, for some smaller scale works. Pritchin gave a calm sensitivity to Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 2, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Paavo Järvi (Alpha)Parsifal Suite London Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Gourlay (Orchid Classics)There are many things to like about this sleek performance of Bruckner 7. The playing of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich under Paavo Järvi is polished, and the speeds are well-chosen, Järvi especially good at managing the transitions between the different blocks of music. He’s blessed with a fabulous brass section, and it’s a joy to hear the tuba quintet at the start of the “Adagio” singing so clearly, the individual voices so well delineated Read more ...