Classical music
David Nice
Jean-Guihen Queyras and five dancers of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company in the Bach Cello Suites was a thing of constantly evolving wonder. So too is Pavel Kolesnikov’s ongoing dialogue with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, different every time he plays them. Would De Keersmaeker alone be able to hold her own dancing to this inventory of technical rigour and human emotions?For the first, muted-silver hour, it was hard to say, given the difficulty of interpreting much in the dancer’s vocabulary and tallying it with what we were hearing in Kolesnikov’s myriad worlds. The sensation was Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In more ways than one, Beethoven’s last piano sonatas can make the listener lose track of time. It’s not just the delirious freedom with rhythm, accents, signatures and note-values that the ageing, afflicted composer of Op. 109, 110 and 111 unleashes in these epoch-shifting works. Played with as much consummate, fuss-free art as Sir András Schiff brings to them, the unfolding drama of this revolutionary trio can truly seem to stop the clock.I wondered, at the close of Schiff’s Sunday-morning solo recital at the Proms, why it had been so short. But it hadn’t: our pre-lunch banquet had Read more ...
David Nice
Match the most multi-timbred, flexible orchestra in the world with the iridescent peak of symphonic mastery, and you have an assured winner of a Prom. Yet not even Kirill Petrenko’s previous London performance of Mahler’s Seventh with the Bavarian State Orchestra, nor the brilliance of his two previous Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic, had prepared me for the miracle he achieved last night with players who will clearly do anything for him.Unlike his predecessor in Berlin, Simon Rattle, Petrenko makes Mahler fly, much more air and fire though not without earthiness when it’s needed (update: Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Last night’s riveting, meticulous account of Beethoven’s Ninth from the Chineke! Orchestra was as daring in its restraint as it was thrillingly revelatory. Right from the subtle shimmer of the first movement’s opening cascades it was clear that this interpretation had put each bar under the microscope and found it teeming with new life.This is, of course, not just one of Beethoven’s most famous works, it is one of his most famously difficult; Donald Tovey called it “a law unto itself”, while musicologist Nicholas Cook has written eloquently on its “diametrically opposed interpretations”. Read more ...
David Nice
When I worked in the Music Discount Centre decades ago, and non-stop CDs in the background were ordained, a customer remarked wryly of eight Bayreuth Festival horns playing Wagner “very crepuscular”. Five cellists playing Bach and Villa-Lobos as darkness fell beneath the roof of Peckham’s Multi-Storey Car Park could also be so described, but as a compliment: this was a grave and beautiful way to start the perfect entertainment.What a team the already-great Sheku Kanneh-Mason had assembled from among his many colleagues – they all deserve a credit. The others were Hedwych van Gent, currently a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlin Philharmonic Horn player Sarah Willis’s Mozart y Mambo caused a stir in 2020, its mixture of Mozart and traditional Cuban music making it a bestselling crossover disc.Two years on and the second volume has just been released, the sessions held in Havana in January and April this year. As with the first album, a percentage of the proceeds will go towards raising money for new instruments for the Havana Lyceum Orchestra. We discussed the project over Zoom in August.What prompted you to record a second CD?Second albums are notoriously difficult! The mixture of Mozart and mambo proved Read more ...
Geoffrey Paterson
By my count, tomorrow’s Proms première of Marius Neset’s jazz epic Geyser will be my 51st performance conducting the London Sinfonietta. It’s a tally that has crept up over the last decade, and is something I could hardly have dreamed of more than twenty years ago when I started to make regular trips into London to see Oliver Knussen conduct Sinfonietta concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. At that time it felt like a group with an almost mythic status, a name on the cover of Simon Rattle’s Jazz Album I had grown up listening to, and also frequently printed after the words “commissioned Read more ...
David Nice
Asked which work suits capricious Albert Hall acoustics best, I’d say Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, partly due to the choral billows – this year there’s been an extra thrill about massed choirs – but also because the Kensington colosseum haloes this spiritual journey of a soul. Best singer in the space? Based on years of Proms experience, surely the palm should go to tenor Allan Clayton, ringing of tone and so clear in diction that you can hear every word.So the work and the protagonist were assured before a note had been played. What really allowed everything to take flight, though, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A strong team of musical chefs can blend and spice Bach’s mighty Mass in B Minor in a variety of different ways, and still prepare a feast to savour. We don’t know exactly why Bach felt compelled to bundle his decades of genius into this late portmanteau showcase, only that he did – and that its credible interpretations can span contrasting views.With the Dunedin Ensemble, John Butt has brought both historical rigour and searching musicality to a reading of the work that strips its forces down to a vocal minimum while never stinting on its impact as a whole. However, when Butt directed (from Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Voces8 Live from London, now in its seventh iteration, has progressed from streaming choral chamber music from an empty studio to an 80-strong visiting choir in a packed Christ Church, Spitalfields. In doing this the festival has retained its best features – a variety of repertoire, collaboration with a range of ensembles – while adding scale and the warmth of a live audience.The final concert of the current series of ten saw TUKS Camerata (pictured below), a student choir from the University of Pretoria, singing both alone and alongside Voces8 themselves, in a programme called “Hope” Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the penultimate concert in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s residency at the Edinburgh Festival, the chosen repertoire was evidently considered so obscure that the box office managers didn’t even try to sell any tickets in the Usher Hall’s cavernous upper circle. To shut off nearly half the concert hall for a world class orchestra that has crossed the Atlantic shows either a healthy disregard for the fickleness of audience taste, or a near suicidal disinterest in box office revenue.That, you could say, is what festivals are all about, an approach that might have found some justification in a Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Schoolteachers know – even if only the very best can put it into practice – that faced with a noisy classroom you shouldn’t raise your voice, but rather speak quietly. Over recent Proms seasons audience coughing has reached extreme levels, so the charismatic Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto took the bold course in playing Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending as softly as it is possible to do – and the hall responded with the most silent, rapt attention I can remember there.It's been fashionable to mock The Lark as long as it has been topping the Classic FM hall-of-fame, but hearing it last Read more ...