Classical music
graham.rickson
Gidon Kremer: The Warner Collection (Warner Classics)The words of dedication in Gidon Kremer’s autobiography, Between Worlds (2003) are chosen with care. The book is, he wrote, for “all those who are seeking their way”. The Latvian-born violinist’s own path through music has been as wide-ranging as it has been radical. With his 75th birthday (27 February) imminent, this new 21-CD box from Warner shows his presence and influence through the scope and the breadth of an extensive anthology of recordings for three labels, EMI, Erato and Teldec.Kremer has never limited himself to standard Read more ...
David Nice
After a too-much-too-soon debut disc, Lisa Davidsen has just rolled out the gold on CD with her great fellow Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes in songs by their compatriot Grieg. The visuals last night, in the first concert of a Barbican mini-residency, made the Grieg first half better still: Davidsen lives each world, communicates so well with her audience – as she moves so beautifully on and off stage, too, she looks around as if to engage – and has the benefit of a well-lit stage, the auditorium duly darkened, with translations projected on a screen above (why doesn’t the Wigmore do that?) Read more ...
David Nice
As the catastrophe unfolded in 2020, it seemed reasonable to speculate that the biggest orchestral works – Mahler and Shostakovich symphonies, Strauss tone poems among them – probably wouldn’t be heard live in our concert halls for years.Yet see how adaptable and uncrushable our great performing artists are. Following four and a half months of mostly scaled-down or middle-range opuses streamed online, the London orchestras adapted with alacrity. Simon Rattle welcomed an audience back into the Barbican, wondering at “that sound you make with your hands” for a nicely-tailored London Symphony Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Voces8 online festivals – which were born of a need to keep the show on the road during at the beginning of the pandemic – have rapidly become a fixture of the musical landscape, setting the bar for online presentation of choral music and broadening the reach of all the groups involved. And if in this fifth festival some features have become familiar – Apollo5, I Fagiolini and the King’s Singers – there are also some American novelties this time round. Award-winning group The Crossing offered a reflection on moving on from Covid and the St Olaf Christmas concert was a first taste in Read more ...
graham.rickson
There’s still so much good music being recorded and released; classical CD shops may be thin on the ground but the CDs themselves are still very much available. I’ll stream or download if forced to, but the appearance and feel of the physical product is part of the pleasure of listening, and listening through a pair of decent speakers will always trump a FLAC or an mp3. So these are all physical artefacts, things you can handle, read and pass on. My initial shortlist was voluminous but I’ve managed to whittle it down.An offbeat contemporary highlight was Liederkreis II by Judith Berkson, Read more ...
First Person: young composer Nicola Perikhanyan on a new immersive reality experience at London Wall
Nicola Perikhanyan
There's something really moving about standing in the centre of London Wall's Roman ruins and looking up at the city that has grown around it. Thinking about our past, present and future simultaneously. More than 2000 years have passed since the Romans created our city, and while much has changed there's still so much consistency in how our society exists, both the beauty and the flaws. As a civilisation, how far have things really shifted?London is a city of contrasts, it's a city you can never tire of because it's constantly evolving and every layer of its history contributes to its Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It had been a tense week, explained Jonathan Sells, the artistic director and bass-baritone of Solomon’s Knot, from the stage of the Wigmore Hall: unsure if the concert would go ahead, unsure who exactly would be able to perform, unsure if there would be anyone in the audience.In the event it did go ahead, there was an audience present (although I was watching the livestream) and the hastily revised cast cramming the stage gave a joyful and uplifting account of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio that was a triumph in the circumstances.Solomon’s Knot’s credo is “to blow the dust off early music” and “ Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This time last year, the moment I knew things were really bad was when the Dunedin Consort cancelled Messiah. All performances since the summer of 2020 had been online films, but Dunedin cancelled even their online Messiah because it would involve performers travelling from all corners of the UK to do it. Sure enough, a couple of days later, what we then called the “Kent variant” appeared, and the grim winter lockdown began.Fast forward to December 2021 and another Covid shadow is hanging over us, though now we’re enlightened enough to name it after a Greek letter. Jo Buckley, the Dunedin Read more ...
graham.rickson
Charpentier: Un Oratorio De Noël Les Arts Florissants/William Christie (Harmonia Mundi)Just four minutes should be enough to convince anyone of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s genius. Try the central movement, “La Nuit” from Un Oratorio De Noël, composed in the 1690s, an exquisite, veiled nocturne, a brilliant curtain raiser for the joyous “Reveil des Bergers” than concludes the work. I’ve no idea whether the distant tolling bell heard in William Christie’s pioneering 1982 recording is authentic, but it’s a magical effect. Charpentier’s Pastorale sur la Naissance de Notre Seigneur Jesus Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Sixteen are one of the jewels of the choral world. For over 40 years they have led the way in singing excellence and programming that brings together old and new. This Christmas concert combined some traditional favourites with Renaissance and contemporary carols, all bound together by Bob Chilcott’s Advent Antiphons sequence, offering “a message of hope in renewal, in life itself” – something we can all get on board with.It arrived at London’s Cadogan Hall – one of my favourite venues – the day after the radio broadcast of the same programme from Symphony Hall, Birmingham. It was sung Read more ...
David Nice
Time, place and performers gave this performance of Berlioz’s typically original “Sacred Trilogy” a special significance. Nothing in it is more striking, in choice of text and the music to illustrate it, than the scene where Hebrew refugees Mary, Joseph and their child arrive in Egyptian Sais and are rejected by two heartless households before a kind Ishmaelite receives them. St Martin-in-the-Fields supports people “away from homelessness”, while Saturday evening marked the start of a new partnership between John Eliot Gardiner, his Monteverdi Choir and Orchestras and the church. Its Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michael Praetorius: Es is ein Ros Dresdner Kammerchor/Hans-Christoph Rademann (Accentus)Oliver Geisler’s witty booklet note makes the case for Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) as “one of the best unknowns in the history of music.” Reading the composer’s biography makes one wonder how he found the time to compose at all, and the seasonal choral pieces collected here are notable for their emotional immediacy and technical flair. The title track, “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen”, the closest thing to a Praetorious greatest hit, is beautifully sung here by Hans-Christoph Rademann’s ten-piece Read more ...