Classical music
graham.rickson
A New Century The Cleveland Orchestra/Franz Welser-Möst (Cleveland Orchestra)Have we reached peak box set? This debut release from the Cleveland Orchestra’s own label ups the stakes considerably, an exquisitely designed and engineered construction involving ribbons, silver card and a 150 page booklet. You approach it nervously, with gloves on. Musically, it’s astonishing, the three discs containing six works spread across three centuries, all in recent live performances under long-serving Music Director Franz Welser-Möst. His string orchestra performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No Read more ...
David Nice
Nobody would wish it this way, but orchestras playing on a stage specially built-up for distancing to a handful of invitees have never sounded better in the Royal Festival Hall. The Philharmonia’s outgoing principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is a master of exquisite textures, and Ravel, arguably the greatest orchestrator ever, has come under his sympathetic microscope on many occasions. It says much for Britten that his writing for strings and human voice stood the comparison with the French master last night in an enchanted hour of music.Britten’s haunting response to Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
To plan a programme around The Tempest, its symbolism and the idea of evanescence, the fragility of the human condition, is one thing. To pull it off convincingly is quite another. The young Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov not only did so in his Wigmore Hall recital on Monday night, but offered an evening so profoundly touching that it seemed at times to inhabit Prospero’s magic island, plus some. Music, as many have commented over the centuries, lives in the spaces between the notes; and here, however many (Liszt) or few (Schubert) were available to play, Kolesnikov carried its Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s an old rule in the theatre that you don’t have to go on if there are more people on stage than in the audience. Last night I counted less than 15 people listening in the cavernous auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall pitted against a fairly full-sized Philharmonia (with the now familiar onstage social distancing) but the show went on anyway, for the benefit of an unknown number of people watching the livestream. It made for a somewhat dispiriting experience in the hall. I enjoyed the Philharmonia’s virtual Prom last month and I’m prepared to concede that this concert may have come Read more ...
Northern Chords Festival, Church of St James and St Basil, Newcastle review - high, lucid and bright
David Nice
Whatever happens next – and even in Tier 3 the Royal Liverpool Phlharmonic goes on playing to carefully distanced audiences – this will be remembered by all participants as a day of dazzling brilliance, its bright autumn light matched by so much of the music in a morning service and four concerts ending nine hours later.In the best (and shortest) of sermons flanked by the mostly buoyant settings of Haydn’s Nicolaimesse, the vicar of the light, airy church of St James and St Basil in the leafy Newcastle suburb of Fenham, James McGowan, made everyone beam by investing Jacinda Ardern as the very Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Bach’s Goldberg Variations, written for harpsichord in about 1741 supposedly (or perhaps not) for a certain Johann Goldberg to play to the insomniac Count Keyserlingk, have enjoyed – or suffered – countless arrangements for other instruments, including jazz trio (Jacques Loussier), string trio with electronics, and viol consort. Busoni did a version for piano that, like many of his transcriptions, takes off into a world of its own and leaves poor old Bach standing. Chad Kelly’s new version for a chamber group of nine instruments, written for Rachel Podger’s Brecon Baroque and streamed by them Read more ...
David Nice
“Live music is back,” runs the Barbican's latest slogan, so treasure it and get out there while you can. Thursday evening in London offered an embarrassment of riches. I chose the City of London Sinfonia live in Southwark Cathedral over the Kanneh-Masons on the other side of the Thames in the Barbican only because I knew I could catch up with the family live on screen later. My colleague Jessica Duchen was one of the lucky few in the Royal Festival Hall for violinist Tasmin Little’s farewell recital.You could also have taken your pick, if you could get a ticket, between two pianists – Read more ...
graham.rickson
Henrique Oswald: Piano Concerto, Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 5 Clélia Iruzun (piano), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Jac van Steen (Somm)You can never have enough of Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 5, a piece tailor-made to soothe and delight during stressful times. It gets better and better with repeated listenings. Where to start? With the opening bars – a few seconds of perfumed incense, before the piano’s innocent, unadorned entry. We’re a long way from the Brahms D minor. Clélia Iruzun gets the work’s playfulness and charm, knowing exactly when to inject some adrenalin or pull Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Bidding farewell to the Royal Festival Hall, Tasmin Little was at the very peak of her powers. It’s almost unthinkable that we will never see her play here again. Many have hoped that she’d be one of those musicians who announce their retirement only to be back for one last time…and another… but Little is a genuine soul who has always said what she means and meant what she says. And she says that that really is that. This unique evening featured one violinist, two gowns, four pianists, four piano stools and plenty of disinfectant. Since its first planned date was cancelled during Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last seen gurning and camping his way across the Royal Opera House stage in absurdist musical fantasy Frankenstein!!, it was a very different Allan Clayton who held the Wigmore Hall in stillness just a few nights later.We’ve seen a lot of the tenor at operatic extremes recently, walking a tense tightrope of drama and music in Brett Dean’s Hamlet, gamely flinging himself into the challenges of Gerald Barry, HK Gruber or Offenbach, and it’s good to hear that, when all else is stripped away, the voice is still as lovely as ever – and perhaps even more interesting, bringing back something of Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
During the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in London earlier this year, a black man named Patrick Hutchinson hoisted over his shoulder an injured white man from the counter-protest of the English Defence League and carried him to safety. The photographs made headlines. The incident took place just outside the artists’ entrance of the Royal Festival Hall. As part of the Black Legacies series for Black History Month, the Chineke! Orchestra - inside the hall, if without an audience beyond a select few - paid tribute to Hutchinson’s selflessness with the world premiere of a new work, Read more ...
David Nice
Big orchestras to serve the late romantic masterpieces and contemporary blockbusters still aren’t the order of the Covid-era day, even in streamed events, at least not in the UK. The London Symphony Orchestra is so far unique in bigging up the strings as well as bringing on the full brass and percussion thanks to the unique nature of what was previously its rehearsal space and venue for chamber concerts, LSO St Luke’s.Both for Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle the other month under chief conductor Rattle – due to be streamed, but not for free – and for his Dance Suite alongside Hannah Kendall’s The Read more ...