Classical music
Miranda Heggie
Fast making a name for themselves in contemporary chamber music, The Hermes Experiment players here give a wonderful debut recital at the Wigmore Hall, With a range of pieces as eclectic as their line up – harp, soprano, double bass and clarinet – the quartet perform a multifarious array of works, from Lili Boulanger’s lilting, soothing "Reflets" to composer and visual artist Oliver Leith’s intriguing and weirdly catchy Uh Huh Yea, written for the quartet in 2019.The recital opens with a new arrangement by soprano Héloïse Werner (pictured below) – who co-directs the group as well as Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
From a distance, the pianist Christian Blackshaw bears an uncanny resemblance to Franz Liszt, silver hair swept back à la 19th century. At the piano, though, you could scarcely find two more different musicians. There seems not to be a flamboyant bone in Blackshaw’s body. His playing of the Mozart piano sonatas at the Wigmore Hall over the past few years has been matchlessly gorgeous, pure as the driven snow, and in yesterday’s short but intense programme of Mozart and Schubert, the solitary pianist’s performance spoke direct to his locked-down listeners, screen to screen, with playing Read more ...
Sophia Rahman
“Fuck business,” Boris Johnson is alleged to have said while Foreign Secretary. (He didn’t deny it). We have seen enough over the past three weeks of the impact of Brexit on fishermen, hauliers, wine merchants and a host of business people to know that he wasn’t joking.What of the impact on musicians?Some politicians and members of the public seem to believe that when we’re touring we’re on a kind of permanent holiday. We’re not. Music is one of the UK’s most successful exports. Yet the (cleaner but offensive in a whole new way) language used by Johnson in this “clarification” implies a kind Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Another year, another lockdown. Though I have little doubt this was not the way most us of hoped to start 2021, we can at least be grateful that we’re not suffering quite the same drought of live music we experienced back in March. Despite the stringent restrictions, many venues and ensembles are able to offer an array of live and recorded streams, something which wasn’t possible in the UK at the start of the first lockdown. Last Saturday saw the Wigmore Hall host not one but three such events, in a day of performances dedicated to the music of pioneering American composer Morton Feldman. Read more ...
graham.rickson
Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen, Sinfonietta Lucy Crowe, Gerald Finley, Sophia Burgos London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/Sir Simon Rattle (LSO Live)You know this is going to be good within seconds of Act 1 awakening, Janáček’s arboreal prelude teeming with life. Making this tricksy score sound so natural and unforced takes rare skill, and it’s to Simon Rattle’s credit that his pliant London Symphony Orchestra play with such care and affection. Orchestrally this is easily a match for Charles Mackerras’s vibrant Vienna version, recorded under studio conditions in the early 1980s. Read more ...
Robert Beale
Jonathan Bloxham makes his debut as conductor with the Hallé Orchestra in the third of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts on film. It’s a poetry-connected programme in several respects and features poet laureate Simon Armitage reading both his the event horizon (to introduce the whole programme) and Evening (immediately before Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite).The event horizon is engraved in steel on the Hallé St Peter’s centre (pictured below right with Simon Armitage), where the concert was filmed, and reminds us in one way of what we’re missing: do you remember when concerts used to begin “ Read more ...
David Nice
Born in exigency at the end of the First World War and soon kiboshed by the Spanish flu, The Soldier’s Tale as originally conceived is a tricky hybrid to bring off. Not so the suite – Stravinsky’s mostly incidental-music numbers are unique and vivid from the off – but the whole story, based on a Russian folk tale about a simple man’s tricky dealings with Old Nick, is awkward, made impossibly complicated and preachy by the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. Huge kudos, then, to a vibrant translation (uncredited, alas) delivered by the Scottish actor Matthew McVarish, spreading himself Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Amid madness, fear and death, there is still an oasis in the music of Bach - and Bach played by András Schiff in the Wigmore Hall is a special type of haven. Normally one can’t get in to those concerts because they are instantly sold out, even though he usually does each one twice. Instead, this performance was beamed live into our own computers wherever we may be, and after the past few days, my goodness, we needed it. Playing into the empty cavern of the Wigmore’s auditorium - the hall that is usually his home from home - Schiff spoke to his invisible audience through the cameras, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After the main portion of the Voces8 Live from London Christmas festival revelled in the variety of its groups and repertoire, the final stretch allowed a single group to explore a single masterpiece by a great composer. And although it offered different pleasures from the multifaceted approach of the main festival, Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort’s pared-down reading of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio was just as joyful and just as invigorating.McCreesh adheres to the theory that Bach’s so-called choral works would actually, in his day, have been performed, not by a choir, but by four Read more ...
David Nice
“Without a care” (Ohne Sorgen, the title of a fast polka by Josef Strauss performed here with deadpan sung laughs from the players) was never going to be the motto of a Vienna Philharmonic concert without an audience. Introspection and even sadness seemed frequent companions in the interesting New Year’s Day bill of fare. Switching on BBC Radio 3 yesterday morning without prior knowledge of works or conductor, what I heard – one of nine unfamiliar items on the programme – were dark-hued, oaky waltz strains, clearly under the sway of a master. This was Johann Strauss the Younger’s Schallwellen Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sibelius: The Seven Symphonies, Kullervo Minnesota Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä (BIS)Osmo Vänskä’s first BIS Sibelius cycle caused a stir in the late 1990s, as much for the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s light, transparent playing as for Vänskä’s inclusion of the original four-movement version of Symphony No. 5. This second cycle was recorded with the Minnesota Orchestra, and while Vänskä’s timings haven’t altered significantly, the orchestra’s weightier sound and BIS’s closer recording offers a real contrast. Vänskä’s penchant for extremes of dynamic is less problematic here, the quieter passages Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The LPO, and its soon-to-depart chief conductor Vladimir Jurowski, began its 2020 Vision season back in February. It set out to mix and match the music of three centuries and show how it echoes in contemporary works. Well, little of that turned out quite as planned: this final concert at the Royal Festival Hall was meant to premiere Sir James MacMillan’s new Christmas Oratorio, now scheduled for the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 16 January. That outsourced event feels like a saddening symbol of Britain’s interlinked catastrophes this year. Still, in spite of 2020’s never-ending series of Read more ...