Classical music
Rachel Halliburton
How do you celebrate one of epic poetry’s richest female characters, a queen renowned across the Middle East and North Africa for being as politically powerful as she was magnetic? For Nahum Tate, the librettist for Dido and Aeneas, the curious answer is to push aside Dido’s achievements as a ruler and city builder and replace Virgil’s stirring metaphor for her plight with something, well, a little tamer.It’s no small part of the great achievement of Purcell’s score that it takes Tate’s frankly mediocre poetry and through harmonic and rhythmic innovation transforms the base metal of his words Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The ferocity of Tuesday's heat wasn’t reflected in the pleasantly air-conditioned Royal Albert Hall – the coolest I had felt all day – but was in the intense playing of the BBC Philharmonic, in a pair of knotty and urgent British symphonies.The programming had a neat simplicity: the fourth symphonies of Vaughan Williams and Tippett. It was also slightly thin – just over an hour of music which, even allowing for having to give way for a late-night Dido and Aeneas, could have squeezed in something else.Neither symphony is easy listening – and this, combined with the heat and travel chaos, meant Read more ...
Robert Beale
It’s an ill heatwave that brings nobody any good, and Buxton International Festival’s decision to move its highlight concert, by Manchester Camerata with Jess Gillam and the Brodsky Quartet as their guests, from the Buxton Octagon to St John’s Church meant not only that it was heard in probably the only coolish venue in town yesterday afternoon, but also that it benefitted from an acoustic that’s excellent for instrumental music.The Camerata is celebrating its 50th anniversary in different places this year, and while the personnel seen yesterday may not overlap entirely with the band we are Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
I had anticipated a sweltering evening at the Albert Hall. Sadly, though, the heatwave prevented me from even getting there – buckled rails or some similar problem led to the cancellation of my train. So this review is of the Radio 3 broadcast, heard on headphones in the comfort and relative cool of my back garden.The BBC is making an excellent job of transmitting from the Albert Hall. The sound is bright and lifelike, much closer and clearer than you’d ever hear in the audience. What’s missing is the atmosphere. Presenter Hannah French gave a good sense of what it was like, but it is not the Read more ...
David Nice
Had Claudio Abbado conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a major Elgar orchestral work – and to my knowledge he never saw the light about the composer’s due place among the European greats – it might have sounded something like last night’s “Enigma” Variations. Yes, John Wilson and his superband Sinfonia of London really are in that league. Elgar’s cavalcade of character-studies, both inward and extrovert, is the ultimate test, the most varied of masterpieces in a various programme.Perhaps it was a slightly over-long one. I’d have jettisoned Bax’s Tintagel in favour of a pleasing symmetry in Read more ...
David Nice
Any sensitive festival planner knows to begin the return to a new normal with something soft and elegiac – reflecting on all we’ve lost and mourned these past two years, as well as what we’re facing in the world now. Just over a fortnight ago, at the East Neuk Festival, the Elias Quartet led us gently by the hand with James MacMillan’s Memento. The 2022 BBC Proms began pianissimo, massed forces at the ready for the intermittent blazes of Verdi’s Requiem.It should have been a moving start to a Proms season which is rightly celebrating the big and the awe-inspiring. But those two years have Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Perhaps 2021 was not the most propitious time to launch a new festival, but composer and conductor Josh Ballance did it anyway, and the High Barnet Chamber Music Festival has returned in 2022 – as it will, I hope, in 2023 and beyond. Still modestly proportioned, the programming doesn’t lack ambition, and I was particularly drawn to last night’s programme by the ensemble Mad Song, featuring a wealth of new and newish music.“Chamber music” is a term that conjures up polite string quartets and piano trios, and while the festival includes Mendelssohn and Beethoven, it also embraces Elizabeth Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gail Kubik: Symphony Concertante, Gerald McBoing Boing Boston Modern Orchestra Project/Gil Rose (BMOP Sound)Gail Kubik (1914-1984) should really be remembered for writing the score to William Wyler’s 1955 noir The Desperate Hours, but Paramount decided that Kubik’s score was too modern and scrapped most of it. An intriguing, under-appreciated 20th century American composer and teacher, Kubik’s influences are brazenly displayed in the pieces collected here. His 1959 Divertimento No. 1 is heavily indebted to Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, even down to the prominent use of a Bach quote. Read more ...
theartsdesk
Remember how, back in the summer of 2020, we all wondered if large-scale symphonies would be back in the repertoire any time soon? I pessimistically predicted a decade of slow orchestral reconstruction.Yet right at the beginning of the 2021-2 season, the Philharmonia kicked off with two Strauss blockbusters. The Proms, having made last-minute readjustments to the 2021 programme, had inserted Sibelius’s Second Symphony into a magnificent first night from the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Dalia Stasevska. But only this year are the great visiting orchestras back - and how.You may question Read more ...
David Nice
For once, a festival theme has meaning. “Tra la carne e il cielo”, “Between flesh and heaven”, is how Pier Paolo Pasolini, the centenary of whose birth we mark this year, defined his early experience of hearing the Siciliana movement of Bach’s First Violin Sonata (adding that he inclined to the fleshly). It provided the perfect epigraph to the four Ravenna Festival performances I attended this year, three of them as stunning as any hybrid event I’ve ever witnessed.The choice of return dates – regretfully missing out on Riccardo Muti's "Roads of Friendship" this year, though I did by chance Read more ...
Angela Slater
When I applied to the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Young Composers programme and found out that I had been accepted, I was expecting to be working on a new orchestral work as in previous years. However, this year, we were invited to explore the concerto form instead.I was delighted by this news, as it combines my two favourite modes of composing: writing for a soloist and writing for orchestra. Writing for a solo instrument allows you to delve deeply into the sonic potential of a single instrument. The apparent limitation offers a fascinating opportunity to seek an orchestral palette of Read more ...
David Nice
Last year’s relatively slimline East Neuk Festival felt like a feast in time of plague. This July everything was back to full strength in numerous venues, with the most remarkable line-up, and the greatest single day of concerts, I feel certain, ENF has ever seen. But that was in spite of the apocalyptic signs all around.Covid is, of course, rampant again, and casualties included guitarist Sean Shibe as well as the festival’s director Svend McEwan-Brown, who had to head home at the midway point with a stricken husband. Avian flu had hit the seabird community; more than half the gannet Read more ...