Classical music
graham.rickson
Riccardo Muti – The Complete Warner Symphonic Recordings (Warner Classics)As with Warner Classics’s recent André Previn box set, begin at the end. Jon Tolansky’s audio documentary is on the last disc in this 91-CD box, chronicling Riccardo Muti’s galvanising effect on a moribund New Philharmonia Orchestra in the early 1970s. Muti, aged 31, made his UK debut in December 1972 in Croydon’s Fairfield Hall; Tolansky recalls the rehearsals, and the fact that “within minutes it was vividly evident what he wanted and what he very quickly obtained: colour, nuance, contrast, character – and knife Read more ...
stephen.walsh
King Arthur, as every schoolgirl knows, never actually existed, so it made perfect sense that the Gabrieli Consort’s Worcester Cathedral performance of Purcell’s semi-opera about the mythical British king and his battles with the Saxon incomers made not the slightest mention of Arthur.Nor was much made of his bitter enemy, the Saxon Oswald, nor the fair, blind Emmeline, nor even the great magician, Merlin, who, in Dryden’s original waves his wand in the final scene and summons up "A Vision of Britain, the Queen of Islands."All these personages figure in the play, but none of them ever sing. Read more ...
David Nice
Now that the summer opera-house companies have pulled off staged triumphs under the most difficult of circumstances, it’s time to celebrate semi-al-fresco concerts. Not so many have cropped up as I’d hoped after the success of the Battersea Park Bandstand Chamber Music series last year. The Wigmore Hall made a start in nearby Portman Square and we have a host of impressive August events planned by Bold Tendencies in Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, building on the successes of 2020. Opera Holland Park's dazzling mini-festival of song, dreamed up by enterprising baritone Julien Van Mellaerts Read more ...
graham.rickson
Martha Argerich Edition (EuroArts)Almost eight hours of Martha Argerich on film. What a glorious prospect! This six-DVD set mostly consists of recordings of live concerts. The set was released to celebrate the great Argentinian’s 80th birthday last month. Again and again in performance, she finds depths, colours and transcendence that simply stop you in your tracks. There is a Prokofiev 3rd Concerto with the LSO and Previn recorded in Croydon in 1977, where she switches from the most delicate of dream sequences to playing which is forceful, propulsive, totally commanding. And there are Read more ...
David Nice
The heading may be a bit misleading. There were no vocalists at this year’s ingeniously adapted East Neuk Festival – live events held exclusively in the big space of the Bowhouse, St Monans, to a compulsorily limited audience – and the only rain was that which pelted down on the roof of the venue during the most intimate moments of Beethoven’s D major Quartet, Op.18 No.3, with the Castalian Quartet valiantly persisting. But all the players in the six concerts I heard sang from the heart, as any good instrumentalist should, and the weather was wildly varied, with four seasons in rapid Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This programme was a bit of a calling card from the Carducci Quartet. They have previously recorded all three works, and the three composers, Haydn, Shostakovich, Beethoven, clearly play to their strengths. Add to that a modest running time, the Shostakovich Seventh and Beethoven op. 95 are the two composers’ shortest quartets, and the result is a perfect offering for casual Sunday morning recital.Not that the Carduccis ever rest on their laurels. They have a distinctive tone, rich and darkly burnished with real complexity and depth, and they bring a keen interpretive sensibility to every Read more ...
Clark Rundell
It’s taken me a day to try to find some words to share at the passing of my dear friend, mentor and guardian angel Louis Andriessen and I’m grateful to theartsdesk for giving me the space. It is such a profound loss because of the profound gifts he gave us. His fabulous music is deep, tender, highly personal and achingly beautiful but also funny, ironic, joyful and deliciously vulgar. Generations of composers will attest to the inspiration and encouragement he gave, challenging performers and creators alike to reach new heights. He was unbelievably kind to me and the faith he showed in me Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Edinburgh-based Dunedin Consort are regular visitors to the Wigmore Hall, and their concert on Saturday night was greeting by a full house. In these Covid times, that meant an audience of just 200, but from the applause, they were clearly enthusiastic for John Butt’s programme, centred around two Bach favourites, the D minor Two-Violin Concerto and the cantata Ich habe genug. The ensemble is a period instrument orchestra who play one to a part. That is a controversial choice in Bach, as there is little evidence that he used such small groups himself. However, it suits the generous Read more ...
graham.rickson
Reicha Rediscovered, Volume 3 Ivan Ilić (piano) (Chandos)Antoine Reicha’s L’Arte de varier tantalises before you’ve heard a note; the composer’s Opus 57, its theme followed by 57 variations. Reicha was an exact contemporary of Beethoven and reportedly the two composers discussed their approaches to variation form. Reicha’s Op. 36 set of fugues had ruffled feathers upon their publication in 1804, and this large-scale set of variations on a simple F major theme is similarly intriguing. All but eight of the variations share the theme’s key signature, the theme usually instantly Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
During early lockdown in 2020 Howard Goodall published an article pondering the role of the composer in a pandemic. His answer was that music has throughout history been successful at memorialising people and events, and that it could do so again. On the back of the article, the London Symphony Chorus invited Goodall to create such a piece for the care and health workers who had lost their lives to Covid. The first version of Never to Forget was released online in July 2020, the ‘virtual’ LSC singing the names of the then 122 workers who had died. A year later the piece has been expanded – Read more ...
David Nice
While the big choral societies are asking, with good cause, why they remain silenced when it’s OK for football fans to sing on the terraces, the top voices of smaller ensembles are being heard again by select audiences. Not so small, in the case of the 24-strong young opera choruses of Garsington (times two, the groups divided between operas) and Grange Park Opera. Tenebrae in the wide-spread group its director Nigel Short (pictured below by Sim Canetty-Clarke) offered us in the welcoming space of Saffron Hall came close at 20 singers, and expressively unsurpassable in a typically ambitious Read more ...
Héloïse Werner
It’s not every day that you have the opportunity to perform with musicians like the ones I’ll be sharing the St John’s Smith Square stage with on Saturday 3 July; organist Kit Downes and cellist Colin Alexander are some of the best musicians I know. I say “share the stage”, but that’s not technically correct. We will be spaced out across the hall and play around with that use of space through the music we create. The audience will be surrounded by our sounds in all kinds of ways. Kit will be in the organ loft, Colin on the main stage opposite the organ on the other side of the hall, while I’ Read more ...