Classical music
David Nice
Nearly two weeks into the latest lockdown, and already I feel nostalgic about the last day of freedom. You should too, just watching the film released last night of the CLS’s most recent happening in Southwark Cathedral. It’s of the evening performance; I was there in the golden afternoon, sunlight flooding the nave, we spectators free to wander albeit in one direction and masked and head for one of the points of the Charles Ives-like soundscape that suffused the place to hear what a musician had to say, and play, about his or her part in Haydn’s Symphony No. 104.Haydn had more forces at his Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
We don’t often see sultry come-to-bed moves in the Wigmore Hall, that chaste Parthenon of refined musical taste. But when Jess Dandy stretched out languidly on stage while offering to show Nicky Spence “how the gypsies sleep”, the temperature shot up even in an empty auditorium. In Janáček’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared, wildness and passion war with inhibition and conformity. The piece channels the mingled fascination for, and fear of, an untamed Roma culture that runs through so much Central European art, its music not least. What kind of work is this vocal narrative, premiered a Read more ...
David Nice
It must have felt very strange to Mark Wigglesworth that he returned to the London Coliseum under such unanticipated circumstances. ENO’s shortest-lived but also (many of us think) best Music Director campaigned from the start for direct communication with the audience, in that magic triangle between composer, performers and spectators, and lived it to the full in all the productions he conducted (“we underestimate the public as performers at our peril,” he told me in 2015 before taking up the post). Now, replacing a self-quarantining Martyn Brabbins, his successor, he had his back to an Read more ...
Alec Frank-Gemmill
The UK’s music industry is in dire straits and my heart goes out to friends and colleagues in financial need. For a proper discussion of the current situation, I refer you to Sophia Rahman’s excellent article for theartsdesk. What I have written here is comparatively superficial. But I hope that it might provide some light relief.During my time as a professional musician it has been a privilege being invited to various orchestras and festivals abroad. Indeed, as somebody who is half-German and half-English, and having also studied in Switzerland, lived in Austria and now in Sweden, travel has Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Chamber Music Alec Frank-Gemmill (horn), Daniel Grimwood (piano), Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin) (BIS)An hour’s worth of Brahms’s chamber music for horn? Almost; we get the familiar Opus 40 Trio here, plus arrangements of the Op 38 Cello Sonata and the Scherzo in C minor. Horn player Alec Frank-Gemmill makes the point that substituting different instruments in chamber music was common practice in the mid-19th century. Simon Smith’s transcription of the C Minor Scherzo is a giddy romp, taking its cue from the music’s 6/8 hunting rhythms, the horn part’s huge leaps made more Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
There have been quite enough Beethoven tribute-acts and remixes during the 2020 anniversary year. We, and he, deserve better than composers riding pillion on that reckless, purring beast of a 700hp compositional engine. True to form, Magnus Lindberg offers something quite different with Absence, given its UK premiere last night in an Covid-conditioned Lighthouse Hall by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, belatedly welcoming back their Ukrainian maestro Kirill Karabits after a pandemic-protracted absence of his own.Sure, you can pick the Beethovenian bones out of Absence – a proto-Wagnerian Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The identity of Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved” is one of the biggest cans of worms in musical history. I hadn’t the slightest intention of writing a novel about it. At first I thought I’d create a narrated concert for the anniversary year... but that was then. Here we are and Immortal is now out.It all began when I was asked to speak about “Beethoven and Women” in a string quartet festival a number of years ago. I started reading and couldn’t stop. The love story I found hidden amid the many thousands of pages was bigger, more complex and more devastating than I’d anticipated, Read more ...
Peter Phillips
I have never been a fan of recording “Complete Works”. These projects almost inevitably include music that one would not normally spend time and money on, just to claim that one has done it all. For this reason the Gimell catalogue, from the earliest days, will be found to have marked out the Renaissance territory, one disc per composer, each disc a distillation of the best of the writer in question. By going about it this way I was able to show how broad the polyphonic achievement was, and supply us with masterpieces for concert use for the next 40 years and counting.It was through this Read more ...
graham.rickson
Beethoven Transformed, Volumes 1 and 2 Boxwood & Brass (Resonus Classics)The Harmonie, a small instrumental group made up of pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns and bassoons, hit its stride in late 18th century Vienna. Early repertoire mostly consisted of operatic arrangements, though the best ensembles were far more than cover bands. Mozart’s sublime wind serenades were composed for Harmonien, and these two discs feature period arrangements of Beethoven, the technical and expressive demands demonstrating how good the players would have needed to be. The one original piece on the first Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a bold first strike – straight to the gut, surely, for many in the audience – the Wigmore Hall’s “Proust Night” began with an old recording of the Berceuse from Fauré’s Dolly Suite. Clever. How apt that the signature tune from Listen With Mother (a beloved old BBC radio show of stories for younger children) should have been composed by a friend – and idol – of the writer whose own rapt entanglement in the mother-child bond threads through his life and work. Memory, elegy, nostalgia, lost bliss, solace beyond pain, the quest to recapture in art whatever time has snatched from Read more ...
David Nice
Beethoven anniversary year would not have been complete without witnessing a masterly live interpretation of his 33 ever more questing piano variations on a jolly waltz. This one was revelatory. Could I have afforded it, had there been more performances and not sold out, I’d have returned to be helped as never before in further understanding some of the mysteries, weirdnesses and journeys to the strangest of other worlds. I couldn’t and there weren’t. But the one evening (actually the second) just before a second lockdown, and stomach-churning anxiety about the American election left at the Read more ...
Alban Gerhardt
With horror I heard on Wednesday that the proud cultural nation of Germany, which invests probably more money per capita in its concert, opera and theatre life than any other country in the world, had decided to close down what I as a German citizen am particularly proud of - precisely this rich cultural life.For months now venues have successfully complied with the tough but necessary rules of social distancing; orchestral musicians have managed amazingly well to perform with two metres distance between them and masks on their faces, and when musical life started again in mid-June, there was Read more ...