Classical music
Raffaello Morales
As this most remarkable year prepares to enter the history books, most of us who are part of the music industry have come to realise that the western world is desperately looking for solutions to an emergency of unprecedented dimensions in post-war times, and that music is not widely perceived to provide any. As unemployment rises and GDPs tumble across most advanced economies, concert halls sparsely populated with socially distanced orchestras and audiences end up being seen at most as a first-world problem of a nostalgic elite.Most governments have consistently demonstrated Read more ...
David Nice
No picture of a musician tells more of a story about 2020 than the above image of cellist Steven Isserlis, stepping out on 8 July to play, what else but Bach, to his first live – albeit small – audience in just under four months. At that point it took a rare missionary to check out government guidelines on concert presentation and dare to bring back live music to London. The missionary in question was Raffaello Morales of the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe in Clerkenwell. His programmes lasted while the rules said they could, adapting to earlier closing times (no spontaneous music-making from the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I gave a rare five stars to the first half of the Voces8 LIVE From London Christmas online festival and the second five concerts matched the first in their vitality, virtuosity and variety. It is astonishing how many different approaches there can be to the basic template of a filmed chamber vocal ensemble concert, which made each episode a treat in its own right, and the festival as a whole a complete triumph. From Bach to Bo Holten, from traditional Irish folk music to newly composed carols, from young choristers to vastly experience professional singers, there was a range and depth that Read more ...
graham.rickson
My first shortlist had 27 discs on it, but, after much soul-searching, I’ve whittled it down to 12. These are all physical releases: I like being able to read sleeve notes in print as opposed to a screen, and CDs do sound better. Here goes:Conductor Sir John Barbirolli made most of his recordings for EMI over a career spanning more than four decades. Warner Classics now owns his back catalogue, releasing a giant box set (109 discs) to mark the 50th anniversary of the conductor’s death. Barbirolli’s charismatic and emotive readings of music by Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Mahler and Sibelius still Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Suitably enough, this year’s musical Christmas arrived at the Wigmore not in a dazzle of joyful light and bedecked with winter greenery, but with a lonely band of singers facing the gloom of an unlit, empty hall as fear and confusion multiplied outside. In both of yesterday’s concerts, the closing events of the venue’s defiant and courageous autumn season, a cappella choral music from the Renaissance ushered in a festival more austere than ecstatic. It proved deeply beautiful in its sombre way, but quite free of tinsel jollity. Black-clad singers on a bare stage, surrounded by cavernous Read more ...
Adam Gatehouse
Dame Fanny Waterman was a true force of nature, in the best sense of the word. Her diminutive height belied a giant intellectual force and a steely determination to achieve the seemingly unachievable through every means she could muster.She certainly had a powerful armoury at her disposal: charm (which she possessed in spades – who has not been totally seduced by that wonderful twinkly smile, or that throaty chuckle?); an energy that continued unabated right until the end and that many of us half her age envied; an uncanny nose for musical talent, particularly among the very young; an Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Christmas Oratorio Stuttgarter Hymnus-Chorknaben, Handel’s Company/Rainer Johannes Homburg (MDG)Another year, another new Bach Christmas Oratorio. Not that I’m complaining; this one is another zinger, up there with excellent contemporary versions from Stephen Layton and John Butt. Rainer Johannes Homberg’s Stuttgart Hymnus Boys’ Choir sing with incisive clarity, high-class support coming from Handel’s Company and a starry trio of trumpets. The first cantata’s opening chorus is all brassy exuberance, Homburg highlighting Bach’s ability to express unbuttoned joy. Try the first Read more ...
David Nice
Adaptability backed up by funding has been the course of the most successful musical organisations since mid-March – but it’s been especially tough from November onwards. One abrupt lockdown meant that anything scheduled to be performed before a carefully limited live audience within or around that month bit the dust, and the London Symphony Orchestra’s series planned to match Beethoven piano concertos with Stravinsky’s smaller-scale orchestral works at the Barbican with Krystian Zimerman as soloist and Simon Rattle conducting was a major casualty. So was the Beethoven concertos marathon Read more ...
Johannes Vogel
Think of the finale at a big fireworks show: the anticipation; the build up. There is nothing bigger than the Ninth Symphony. It is the climax of this year’s Beethoven celebrations. A year ago, no-one would have expected 2020 to be turned upside down in the way that it has, with so few concerts being held in Europe. Optimism is growing and what better way to bring joy into people’s lives than with a colossal event celebrating one of the greatest composers of all time?As conductor of the 123-strong Sychron Stage Orchestra for the performance, I wanted to be able to lead a concert so magical Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just before the doors closed again on live audiences at the Wigmore Hall, Iestyn Davies and members of the Arcangelo ensemble celebrated the private side of a very public composer. The peerless counter-tenor, whose powerfully polished command of phrase and line makes this music feel as natural and necessary as breathing, sang Handel’s nine German-language arias to pious texts by Bartold Heinrich Brockes (who also wrote the words to the “Brockes Passion”). In between clusters of songs, the Arcangelo players – violinist Matthew Truscott, lutenist Thomas Dunford and cellist Jonathan Manson, with Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Voces8 are the Rolls-Royce of British a cappella ensembles and their LIVE From London - Christmas online festival is the Rolls-Royce of online festivals. Amazingly, it is their second such festival of the year: the first, during the summer, which I regret I didn’t catch any of, featured recorded, streamed performances by leading vocal groups from this country (I Fagiolini, Stile Antico) and the US (Chanticleer). The Christmas edition that has followed soon after has mopped up some important groups missing in the summer, with expanded international element and a Young Performers Spotlight.The Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps it’s just the conventional mind which celebrates the pathos, tragedy and triumph in Beethoven’s music at the expense of his humour. And that’s the one aspect of the composer which has been a constant revelation – to me, at any rate – in his anniversary year. Too often the laughs have been solitary, listening to CDs or watching online. On Saturday night, in the warm and friendly atmosphere of the Fidelio Orchestra Café, the pleasure could be audibly shared in two of the composer’s wittiest and most surprising piano sonatas, and amplified by the revelation of another major Beethoven Read more ...