Classical music
graham.rickson
The Way of Light – The Music of Nigel Hess (Orchid Classics)You’ve probably heard Nigel Hess’s music without realising it. He’s scored multiple RSC productions and has provided incidental music for dozens of films and television programmes. Here we’ve a selection of what Hess calls his ‘stand-alone music’, in energetic, lively performances. Hess’s tonal language is fluent and readily accessible. There’s more than a hint of Malcolm Arnold in A Celebration Overture, composed for the 175th anniversary of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. It’s anachronistic but fun; you can imagine it Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Returning to the Wigmore Hall for another socially distanced concert, Edinburgh-born guitarist Sean Shibe brought a programme of moving, often melancholy music, apt for these still locked-down times. He opened with a trio of works by John Dowland written originally for lute. "Preludium" was delightfully intimate, Shibe expertly teasing out the subtleties of its emotion, while the descending chromaticism of "Forlorn Hope Fancy" was played with an almost jazzy sense; here Shibe toyed with the rhythm as he exposed the music’s crunchy discords. "Fantasia" began with a simply played melody which Read more ...
Robert Beale
There’s an atmosphere of tender restraint through most of the programme created by Ruby Hughes and Manchester Collective for Lakeside Arts at the University of Nottingham. It was streamed live yesterday afternoon, and, as is the way with most performances just now, was in an empty hall, with its slightly strange "empty" acoustic affecting the spoken word as the artists introduced their music.Talking to an audience is very much the style of Manchester Collective, though, and artistic director Rakhi Singh does it with natural ease even when she can’t see who she’s talking to. She and the other Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Why, in Lieder singing above all, should an outpouring of deep feeling so frighten critics? Alice Coote’s unabashed emotionalism as a recitalist can sometimes bring out the worst in the stiff-upper-lip brigade, as reactions to her high-impact Winterreise (last given at the Wigmore prior to the current lockdown) revealed. At least with Tchaikovsky’s song output, no one can plausibly claim that they really ought to be delivered with strait-laced placidity. Yet what struck me about this ambitious programme of his songs, interspersed with Russian poems spoken by Ralph Fiennes, was Coote’s ability Read more ...
David Nice
In verses from the folk anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn) set by Mahler as a song, later adapted for the scherzo of his Second Symphony, St Anthony of Padua sermonizes on repentance to the fish, who all listen politely and then carry on behaving as they did before. It’s a parable destined to apply to the human world after lockdown, but not to the wonderful Iván Fischer, who turned 70 in January, telling an aquarium what to make of four movements of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony before and between conducting his Budapest Festival Orchestra. The results will surely charge up Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Aside from the happy accident of longevity, something that set Bach and Handel and Telemann apart from their contemporaries was fluency. I’m speaking here of musical rather than verbal tongues: the least polyglot of them was Bach, with his command of four languages, German, Latin, French and Italian, in decreasing degrees of facility. While Handel criss-crossed Europe, Bach and Telemann anchored themselves in small areas of central and northern Germany respectively.Yet the world came to them. Bach especially composed in French and Italian with mother-tongue fluency, albeit a strong German Read more ...
graham.rickson
Anna Clyne: Mythologies BBC Symphony Orchestra/Marin Alsop, Sakari Oramo, Andrew Litton, André de Ridder (Avie Records)The musical content is impressive enough, but this disc is almost an unofficial tribute to the BBC as a supporter of new music. These are pin-sharp performances of works which require a virtuoso response, the BBC Symphony under four different conductors playing as if their lives were at stake. The five Anna Clyne works collected here were written between 2012 and 2014, neatly sequenced in an order that makes musical sense. 2013’s Masquerade, written as an opener for the Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Seated at the harpsichord, Maxim Emelyanychev introduces this concert in charmingly fractured English. “Hello from Queen’s Hall in Edimbourg, today with chamber group of musicians from Scottish Chamber Orchestra…” But he falters, the camera cuts away, and there follows a mumbled digression on whether the first piece is actually by Hasse, or maybe Richter. Poised with their instruments, the assembled string quintet looks puzzled, and then the music begins, and it’s clear that whatever skill Emelyanychev (pictured below) may lack as an orator is more than outweighed by his skill as a Read more ...
Sara Deborah Struntz-Timossi
Sara Deborah Struntz-Timossi is an international award-winning violinist who has toured with early music ensembles like the European Union Baroque Orchestra, Dunedin Consort and The English Concert, as well as performing across Europe as a soloist and chamber musician. She is also Artistic Director of the Spirit of Music Festival that brings music right into her east Hampshire community.Everything in my life as a musician and private person was facilitated by the mutual agreements within the EU. My studies in the UK as a German citizen were funded by reciprocal EU study regulations. Within Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The bleak isolation and lonely angst felt in Schubert’s Winterreise is only too appropriate for a lockdown January. However, one positive to shine from this gloom is tenor David Webb’s own "Winter Journey". Cycling around his home in London every day since "Blue Monday" – 18 January, supposedly the most depressing day of the year – Webb has clocked up 500 miles and is raising money for both MINDS and Music Minds Matters, to help pay for at least two people to have counselling and therapy for a year. This concert – streamed live from the Wigmore Hall on Friday – celebrates the culmination of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Sonatas for recorder, harpsichord and viola da gamba Michala Petri (recorder), Hille Perl (viola da gamba), Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord) (OUR Recordings)That these sonatas were originally composed by Bach for flute is surely of no consequence; Michala Petri’s affectionate, idiomatic performances on alto and tenor recorders convince from the outset. Importantly, she doesn’t attempt to impersonate a baroque flute, playing these sonatas as if they were written for her instrument. Petri’s sparing use of vibrato feels just right and she’s marvellous in Bach’s extended slow movements. Read more ...
Victoria Sayles
In March 2020, all my work in Australia and Sweden, where I had won contracts for several months to come, was cancelled on the day I was due to fly. Both organisations who had engaged me promptly honoured their contracts with me financially nevertheless. Thank goodness they did, because as UK tax payers and residents, my partner Roland Palmer and I have, for 10 months now, received zero help from SEISS and UC.Coincidentally, Roland (pictured below by Dan Wiebe) had a seat as the cellist and guitarist in the West End in a show that came from Broadway, New York, meeting with tremendous success Read more ...