Classical music
Miranda Heggie
In the final concert marking the Wigmore Hall’s 120-year anniversary, soprano Gweneth Ann Rand and pianist Simon Lepper gave a programme of songs curated by Rand, titled "An Imperfect Tapestry". Described by Rand as "a personal reflection of black voices and muses, stretching back in time to the Black Venus, who inspired the poetry of Baudelaire", the programme features traditional works made famous by singers such as Nina Simone and Billie Holliday, as well as newer songs by contemporary composers Errolyn Wallen, Adolphus Hailstork and Harry Server. Opening with the traditional spiritual “ Read more ...
David Nice
Two regrets and a tentative hope before full praise for what has to be the best complete Swan Lake in concert ever. Not everyone will be sorry, as I am, that Jurowski chose for his grand leavetaking as music director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra Tchaikovsky’s first ballet over his second, The Sleeping Beauty, with its far more elaborate and experimental orchestral palette (have any of the three been conducted in full until now at the Royal Festival Hall since I heard Rozhdestvensky and the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Beauty as part of a very sparse audience in 1978?). This film was made Read more ...
David Nice
Sometimes the big musical institutions follow off-piste trailblazers. John Gilhooly of the Wigmore Hall has been a hero in lockdown year, keeping musicians paid up and performing to audiences live or via livestream (or both); but it was clarinettist Anthony Friend who pointed another way forward in the new environment late last summer with his series of chamber music concerts in Battersea Park Bandstand. He’s been duly awarded by the Royal Philharmonic Society, and now the Wigmore has taken its first steps outside with three Sunday concerts in nearby Portman Square. It’s safe to say they’ve Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
As András Schiff remarked from the stage early in this fairly remarkable evening, his usual audience knows he’s not about to play Rachmaninov. The idea for this concert last night and his return visit today, is that we turn up not knowing exactly what we will hear, beyond the name of a composer or two. He has a point. Why should pianists have to decide on every detail of their programmes two years in advance, sometimes more? It’s not an orchestra that needs to hire music and book a conductor. Given a sterling reputation, a devoted public following and a very good memory, a top pianist Read more ...
theartsdesk
Bergen International Festival, the largest curated festival for music and performing arts in the Nordic region, launches on 26 May at 11:30 GMT+1 with an opening ceremony – with free digital access – hosted by trumpet player Tine Thing Helseth.The opening programme, The American Moth, anchors this year’s theme “This is America?” The international co-production by Alan Lucien Øyen and his company winter guests is a hybrid, multi-medial performance combining dance, theatre in multiple languages, and cinematic live video.Other highlights of American culture include the 2021 Festival Read more ...
David Nice
Seven months might just about be enough time to have digested the deep and intense offerings of the Second Ragged Music Festival before moving on to more soul-shattering and transcendence in the third. That there hasn’t been a year between the two weekends - the October one came top of my "Best of 2020" choice - is due to the fact that renovation work has already started on the hugely atmospheric and treasurable Ragged School Museum in Mile End, and the next stage will entail a long lockdown. Ever brilliant in acting on every opportunity, master pianists and partners Pavel Kolesnikov and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Dennis Brain: Homage (Warner Classics)Eleven CDs, assembled to mark the centenary of the legendary hornist’s birth. Whoop whoop. Start at the beginning, with a 1938 recording of Mozart’s K334 Divertimento. The horn writing isn’t spectacular but the two players are perfectly blended, phrasing as one. This was the 16-year-old Dennis Brain’s recording debut, sat alongside his father Aubrey in Abbey Road Studios. Dennis’s clean, pure tone was a constant throughout his short but spectacular career, the move from a narrow-bore piston instrument to a modern Alexander horn managed without any Read more ...
David Nice
Last time I was in a Wigmore audience for a Sean Shibe recital, his electric-guitar second half had many regulars fleeing the hall (he later said that the amplification had been meddled with – it was too loud, though the work in question, Georges Lentz’s Ingwe, was always going to be a stunner). No softLOUD this time, only mostly soft, a meditative journey from the relative simplicity of 16th century lute music to the mid-20th century, every modest harmonic twist in the later stages striking fresh on the ear.You wanted to be out in the country on a summer night listening to this programmeThis Read more ...
David Nice
It began with a sense of wonder, not just from the Barbican's socially distanced audience but also from the stage, at “that sound you make with your hands”, as Simon Rattle put it in what he said was a novelty speech before a performance. What followed was a celebration – reacquaintance with the instruments of the orchestra in Britten’s brilliant set of variations and a fugue on a Purcell theme, wistful beauty from Fauré, rumbustiousness with a dash of poignancy from Dvořák.Perhaps The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra should be renamed Everyone’s Guide to Orchestral Delights, which come Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Royal Northern Sinfonia handed its players artistic control of the programme for this livestream from the Sage, Gateshead and if the result lacked coherence it certainly had the variety and diversity missing from the Wigmore Hall Nash Ensemble recital I reviewed last month. Centred around Piazzolla’s popular Estaciones Porteñas, in the composer’s centenary year, it also featured music by Germaine Tailleferre, Daniel Kidane, Dobrinka Tabakova and – incongruously – Haydn. But if the latter’s Sinfonia Concertante felt like an interloper from another programme, a breezy and generous-spirited Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The drunkard in spring; the lonely man in autumn; the long goodbye. Mahler’s last song-cycle often seems to embody solitude; a resigned, earthly counterpart to the transcendent rapture of his previous work, the Eighth Symphony, as a superstitious talisman to ward off the finality of a Ninth. Last night at the Barbican, however, in their first performance back at their much-maligned home, the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle showed a different side to the piece – or rather sides, because this was a performance lit from within by a remarkably full realisation of its place in Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Marking its 40th anniversary, this year’s Ryedale Festival kicked off with an online-only spring series ahead of the main festival later this summer. With any luck, by then, the festival’s rural Yorkshire venues will be filled with people once more, but for now audiences can experience beautiful music made in beautiful places wherever they are at home. The series of mini concerts is tied together by the central theme of springtime, with each performer invited to reflect on the season in their respective programmes. Clarinettist Michael Collins and pianist Michael McHale gave a charming Read more ...