Classical music
Jessica Duchen
What do you want to do on your 80th birthday? Well, playing two of your favourite pieces of music at the Wigmore Hall is not a bad option. To celebrate his big day, Stephen Kovacevich returned to the scene of many of his triumphs since 1961, chose the Bach Partita No. 4 and Schubert’s final piano sonata, D960 in B flat major, and enjoyed a rapturous welcome from a distanced audience overjoyed to be sharing the occasion with him.Kovacevich has always been a one-off: a free spirit with attitude yet no aggression, and a giant heart without a vestige of sentimentality. He builds music in Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Rarely have I seen so many smiles on stage as at Kings Place on Saturday. The combination of the delight of the performers being back in their natural environment with the genial and generous-spirited music they were playing brought out the best in everyone. From Mozart to Schubert via the up-and-coming Perivolaris this programme offered a bit of everything and I walked away with a smile on my face too.Aurora Orchestra’s five year long project to programme all the Mozart piano concertos was to have reached its final stages with the final three concertos, big boned and magisterial. These have Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jess Gillam: Time (Decca)Cellists, violinists and pianists have it easy. They’re spoilt for choice when it comes to solo repertoire, a point made when theartsdesk reviewed the BBC Young Musician 2016 final, the year when cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason triumphed, and saxophonist Jess Gillam was the woodwind finalist. Can you name a famous saxophone concerto? Me neither. Understandably, most of Time, Gillam’s second album, is made up of arrangements and transcriptions, one exception being the work she performed back in 2016, Michael Nyman’s Where the Bee Dances. This single movement concerto Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Though live performances are, thankfully, starting to reappear throughout the country, and socially distanced seating, mask-donning and constant hand sanitising becomes the norm for audiences south of the border, those in Scotland are still eagerly anticipating the opportunity to once again be in a concert hall experiencing live music first hand. Thankfully that hasn’t deterred the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from returning to Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall for a series of live streamed chamber concerts. Thursday evening’s focused on French repertoire, with Francis Poulenc’s Sextet, paired with Read more ...
Chad Kelly
As musicians took tentative steps into the unfamiliar world of PPE, socially-distanced rehearsals and audiences watching from home on a computer screen, a common water-cooler question was, “What did you do during lockdown?”. I am grateful to the Baroque violinist Rachel Podger that part of my lockdown involved rediscovering and reimagining a piece of music that I thought I knew well: the Goldberg Variations, the popular name we ascribe to Bach’s fourth Clavierübung (“Keyboard Practice”).The work has a unique aura surrounding it, partly due to its immortalisation on screen, in books, and Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
“O wise young judge”, says Shylock to Portia in The Merchant of Venice.It seemed just such a figure who made her way to the piano at the Wigmore Hall last night. Besuited, bespectacled, with a poised upright posture that frees her arms, plus the serious demeanour that I sometimes term “Heifetz face”, the youthful Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili eschews any fashionable emoting, arm-flinging or face-pulling. Instead, her energy is entirely focused upon the instrument and the music. (The significance of “Heifetz face” is the calm, even severe visual frontage of that legendary violinist’ Read more ...
David Nice
How many musicians can you fit in the main space of the Fidelio Orchestra Café? The answer is 23 string players in masks, for the recording of Strauss’s Metamorphosen of which I was a solitary witness in the summer. With diners accommodated, probably four is the limit. It's being tested this week with the first emergence of a piano quartet I’ve witnessed since March, violinist Benjamin Baker, viola player Timothy Ridout, cellist Bartholomew LaFollette and pianist Louis Schwizgebel sparing nothing in the storm and stress of teenage Mahler’s solitary movement and the much more chameleonic Read more ...
Brian Elias
It is my very good fortune to be offered by Music@Malling what is, in effect, a retrospective of my work. The music that will be performed was written between 1969 and 2019, exactly half a century. Inevitably, such a survey makes me think about the path I have followed, and although it is not for me to judge my own work, it does make me think about what it is that I have attempted to achieve, and what I need to turn to in the future.I realise that although my music and its style has developed over the years, many features of my work and my own values have remained remarkably constant. For Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We may have started out among the wholesome pleasures of nature, but we ended up in the bedroom – once, that is, we had recovered from the flying breasts… Soprano Louise Alder’s recital – the last in the Wigmore Hall’s month-long lunchtime series – had a twinkle in its eye and the weekend firmly in its sights. A luscious blend of German Romanticism and French eroticism took us from Fanny Mendelssohn and early Berg to Bizet, Poulenc and Satie. Heady stuff for daylight hours, and a delicious send-off for this superb series.Alder’s piquant, text-driven delivery is married to an increasing depth Read more ...
graham.rickson
Ole Bull: Stages of Life Annar Follesø (violin), Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Eun Sun Kim, with Wolfgang Plagge (piano) (2L)Schumann thought that the Norwegian violinist and composer Ole Bull (1810-1880) was as accomplished a player as Paganini, A child prodigy, Bull achieved global fame, one of those 19th century musicians who seemingly knew everybody. Berlioz, Grieg and Rossini were fans, and Bull’s ownership of Bergen’s leading theatre gave Ibsen the chance to start his theatrical career. Bull’s belief that Norwegian folk melodies were as worthy as any in mainstream European art music, Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
You could imagine that normality had returned watching the live webcasts from the Wigmore Hall. The Hall has bucked the trend, and managed to present a full autumn season, to a carefully separated but still substantial audience. Yesterday evening’s concert was to be given by Quatuor Ébène, but they pulled out at the last minute—problems with travelling from France perhaps the reason. But the Wigmore Hall had another ensemble, the Elias Quartet, lined up and ready to give a similar programme. Given the unpredictable situation, the management has presumably organised last-minute stand-ins for Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How loud can the applause from a scanty, socially-distanced audience sound? Thunderous enough, as the response to Sir András Schiff’s back-to-back recitals at the Wigmore Hall proved. On both Sunday and Monday evenings, the happy few of 112 – the venue’s Covid-era maximum – did their depleted best to raise the roof in answer to Schiff’s unstintingly, and typically, lavish commitment. He gave us 100 uninterrupted minutes of Janáček and Schumann on the first night, capped the next day by the epic trio of Beethoven’s final piano sonatas, op.109, 110 and 111 (with some Bach thrown in for good Read more ...