Classical music
Shumaila Hemani
In early 2020, the year that soon saw COVID-19 lockdown, I served on the music faculty for Semester at Sea, Spring 2020 voyage, where I taught self-designed courses on global music cultures as well as a course called Soundscapes. This course discussed how western art music influenced the musical cultures of the non-European world, particularly the ports that we visited as part of the SAS voyage.The study of ethnomusicology focuses on music in its cultural context. Typically, an ethnomusicological approach departs from and resists scholarly approaches in studying western art music Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Single-composer programmes can be a bit dicey and there was a bit of trepidation approaching this one as Steve Reich is not a composer of massive range: he has been diligently tilling the same patch of soil since the 1970s. But alongside some Reich-being-Reich was a fascinating UK premiere that visits new territory and the revival of an often-overlooked masterpiece from his imperial phase.The Colin Currie Group has had a long association with Reich (pictured below), including commissioning two of Tuesday night’s four pieces. It is at heart a percussion ensemble, expanded here by the addition Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Conway Hall in London has hosted chamber music concerts since it was built in 1929, and for 40 years this included a composition prize, in abeyance since the late 1970s. This has now been revived by the hall’s enterprising director of music, pianist Simon Callaghan, to help young composers post-pandemic. Sunday night saw the final concert in which the shortlisted pieces were played and the winner announced.The competition rubric called for new string trios by composers under the age of 35 – the finalists ranged from 19-31 – and they gave a snapshot of the music younger composers are Read more ...
graham.rickson
Leo Sowerby: Paul Whiteman Commissions & other early works Andy Baker Orchestra, Avalon String Quartet (Cedille)Chicago’s Leo Sowerby (1895-1968) is remembered chiefly as a prolific composer of sacred scores, a Pullitzer-Prize winning composer famous for church cantatas, organ solos and songs. A self-taught prodigy, Sowerby had been including populist elements in his scores for a decade before he was contacted by bandleader Paul Whiteman (who famously commissioned Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue) in 1924, asking him for a piece of symphonic jazz to perform in one of his “Revolutionary Read more ...
David Nice
Returning to LSO St Luke’s, formerly a beacon in the darkness of semi-lockdown for the lucky few allowed to feast upon the London Symphony Orchestra from the gallery, felt the same, yet different, like so much since most of the rules were relaxed. Players were now closer together, sharing stands; the sound felt denser too (it’s bound to be loud in such a space, however handsome). A decided plus was that one of the great communicators among soloists, LSO featured artist and viola champion extraordinaire Antoine Tamestit, faced the players – and most of us upstairs – as he stood alongside Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I’ve always loved the sound of two-piano music: the amazing range of available textures, the interplay of parts and the sense of collaboration between soloists. All were on display in Saturday’s Two-Piano Gala, part of the London Piano Festival at Kings Place, which boasted a wealth of top-notch pianists in a superabundance of piano duos (and one duet) but was something of an overstuffed sofa: inviting but bursting at the seams. As Basil Fawlty once said: “Too much of a good thing always leaves one wanting less.” Admittedly he was talking about a veal cutlet, but the principle applies to Read more ...
Gabriela Montero, Kings Place review - improvising to a Chaplin classic is the icing on a zesty cake
David Nice
As the Statue of Liberty appears in Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant, our improvising pianist proclaims “The Star-Spangled Banner”, only for it to slide dangerously. The passengers on the ship taking them to a new life are brutally cordoned by the crew; enter the same fierce bass-register tritones which made us jump out of our seats as Gabriela Montero began her recital with Prokofiev’s Sarcasms, then a whiff of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata, and later, as our hero finds himself dollarless in a New York restaurant, echoes of the other Second Sonata in the programme. Prokofiev and Read more ...
Robert Beale
The joint enterprise of soloist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy, with Manchester Camerata, in recording publicly all Mozart’s piano concertos alongside his opera overtures – with the project theme “Mozart, made in Manchester” – was rudely interrupted after 2019 by you-know-what. Last night they were all back together at Chetham’s School of Music, and it was just like they’d never been gone. The concertos on the order paper were Nos. 22 and 23: the latter in A major a great favourite for its sunny, optimistic beginning and end, the former, in C minor, possibly a Read more ...
David Nice
First came the difficult decision: whether to experience performances by great musicians whose work I already knew in the second, Exmoor-based weekend of the Two Moors Festival, or to go for enticing programmes by others whom I’d never experienced live around Dartmoor. What was for me the more adventurous choice paid off: I heard six unforgettable concerts in four memorable Devon churches, as well as two inspiring talks on the wildlife of this tor-capped upland, and fell in love with a territory only fitfully encountered in childhood.Three cheers for the festival’s artistic director, top Read more ...
Simon Thompson
This concert almost had me in tears before a single note was played because it marked (joy!) the first classical concert to take place in the Usher Hall since it was shut in March 2020. She has been closed for eighteen long months, but she hasn’t aged a day.The final piece of music I heard in the Usher Hall before lockdown was Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, so there’s a pleasing symmetry to the fact that it’s also the first I heard when it reopened. And it’s played here by a crack musical team, one that is still glowing from its magnificent Mozart at this summer’s Proms. That concert, Read more ...
David Nice
Two suns, two moons, two Philharmonia leaders sharing a front desk, two aspirational giants among Richard Strauss's symphonic poems bringing the number of players, in the second half, to 134. Who’d have thought we’d be witnessing such phenomena when, contrary to what the orchestra’s CEO claimed at the start and the unmasked half of a packed audience seemed to think, we haven’t even reached the “post-Covid era”.Never mind the long-term implications; by the time we reached the huge arc of Strauss’s one-movement Alpine Symphony, everyone in the audience must surely have been feeling the physical Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Whatever the upsets and uncertainties of this musical season, the return of choral works at full scale and full power has been an unalloyed joy. And sheer, exhilarated, heaven-storming joy branded the Academy of Ancient Music’s reading of Haydn’s The Creation in the Barbican Hall on Tuesday night. The AAM’s incoming music director Laurence Cummings commanded his substantial orchestra, a 26-strong chorus, five soloists and even Alastair Ross’s striking, historically-informed continuo – an 1801 Broadwood fortepiano. They endowed Haydn’s Enlightenment-era vision of a sin-free universe with Read more ...