Bach
Boyd Tonkin
Bach’s St John Passion came into the world just three centuries ago, in Leipzig at Easter 1724. This year’s Proms shower of manna from musical heaven continued with a consummately polished, sensitive and – ultimately – very moving birthday performance by Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan.Their profound familiarity with the work, and proficiency in all its idioms, bred not routine slickness but an inward intimacy that serenely bridged the gap between the liturgical rituals of the German Baroque and the music drama of today. For all his historically-informed scholarship (right Read more ...
Simon Thompson
When I first started attending the Edinburgh International Festival in the 1990s, the Opening Concert (capitals intentional) was a grand Usher Hall affair on a Sunday evening; a central work of the western classical tradition to set the festival running. Not any more. They’ve steadily moved the opening of the festival forwards over the years (the first of 2024’s preview events took place last Thursday) and this year the opening concerts take place over not one but two nights.The theme that director Nicola Benedetti has chosen for this year’s festival is Rituals that unite us, and the opening Read more ...
David Nice
The buildings, 13th-16th century, are earlier than the music (mostly Baroque). And what buildings. Non-Estonians like myself had heard that Haapsalu was a fine seaside town; but tourist publicity neglected the glory of the castle and cathedral, a central festival venue. If Livonians, Germans, Swedes and Russians all passed through, enriching and destroying, this most perfect of small festivals now welcomes international musicians to perform alongside world-class Estonians.Since musicologist, conductor and Artistic Director Toomas Siitan founded the festival in 1994, making it one of the Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There’s a masterful subtlety to Philippe Herreweghe’s interpretation of Bach’s last great choral work – it shuns blazing transcendence for a sense of serene contemplation that reveals every angle of the mass’s geometrical perfection. Listening to the multiple layers of sound is rather like appreciating the shifting colours in the inlaid mother of pearl on a harpsichord – nothing dazzles, but it draws you in with its meticulous polish and understated beauty.Herreweghe has now recorded the Mass in B Minor three times with the Collegium Vocale Gent, and by general consensus it has improved with Read more ...
David Nice
No-one in the musical world could possibly surpass the communicative skills of Abel Selaocoe – pushing the boundaries of cello and vocal technique in a myriad of voices, all cohering in works of staggering breadth, getting the audience to sing at the deepest of levels.Amazingly, though, the next day’s act in the Dublin International Chamber Music Festival actually matched him: accordionists Dermot Dunne and Martin Tourish (pictured below - Tourish left, Dunne right) in the city’s first neoclassical building, the jewel that is the Casino in Merino, playing every note of Bach’s Goldberg Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Waiting, and hoping, may prove just as intense an experience as the fulfilment of a wish – or of a fear. Bach knew that, and infused his Easter Week music with a sense of suspense and anticipation built into vocal and instrumental lines that build and strive and stretch towards a climactic revelation that, until the very end, remains just out of reach. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Peter Whelan – much-garlanded director of the Irish Baroque Orchestra – led the Orchestra (and Choir) of the Age of Enlightenment (along with a quartet of accomplished soloists) in a programme that prefaced the Read more ...
David Nice
Was it worth taking a risk on a more humbly presented St John Passion in Dublin after the best St Matthew I’m ever likely to hear (from Peter Whelan and the Irish Baroque Ensemble in St Patrick’s Cathedral)?The answer, post-performance, is yes: quite apart from the opportunity to hear two of the greatest masterpieces, very different from each other, in the pre-Easter period, the scale of this gave us a larger but not oversize (32-strong) choir, the Dublin Bach Singers, delivering with huge emotional impact, precision and perfect shaping from experienced choral conductor Blánaid Murphy ( Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The annual St Matthew Passion from the Dunedin Consort is one the most reliably beautiful jewels in Edinburgh’s musical year. They do the St John Passion much less frequently; in fact, this is the first time I’ve heard them do it, maybe motivated by its tercentenary this year.Doing both of the passions in the space of a week is pretty much unprecedented, however, both for the performers and for the Edinburgh audience, and experiencing both in seven days not only allowed comparisons but deepened the relationship between these complementary Bach masterpieces.Much of that was down to the work of Read more ...
The Art of Fugue, Schiff, Nosrati, Wigmore Hall review - rarity and quality in music and performance
Ed Vulliamy
At the start of his 75-minute pre-concert lecture on Sunday, the incomparable András Schiff staked quite a claim for the piece he was about to perform: Bach’s The Art of Fugue was, he said: “the greatest work by the greatest composer who ever lived”.And a wise one: this concert was only the second time he would ever play it, the first having been in Berlin last January. Because, he said: “I’ve waited 70 years to play this work… You cannot climb Mount Everest immediately… this is the climax.”He continued with a poetic clarity akin to that of the piece itself. On the fact that it is unfinished Read more ...
David Nice
After last year’s small-scale, big-impact Messiah in the Wigmore Hall, superlatives are again in order for the IBO’s performance of the greatest musical offering known to humankind. With the fluency established by that most supple of directors Peter Whelan at the start of Bach's opening chorus leading to the astonishing heft of nine singers and gleaming instrumentalists at its culmination, we knew we were in for something approaching perfection.And that was to reckon without three soloists who, while they may not be big names outside the inner circle of musicians, simply couldn’t be surpassed Read more ...
graham.rickson
Leif Ove Andsnes: The Warner Classics Edition 1990-2010 (Warner Classics)It’s good to review a compendious box set celebrating a musician who’s very much still around. The 36 discs in this set certainly aren’t what you’d call historical recordings, though the 20-year period during which they were first released feels an age away. Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes signed his first contract with Virgin Classics (remember them?) aged just 20, and, in his words, “the possibilities seemed endless… people craved CDs and the record companies needed to make recordings of all the repertory, Read more ...
graham.rickson
LICHT: 800 Years of German Lieder Anna Lucia Richter (mezzo-soprano), Ammiel Bushakevitz (hurdy gurdy, harpsichord, clavichord, fortepiano, piano) (SWR2/Challenge Classics)LICHT, 800 Years of German Lieder, from Anna Lucia Richter and Ammiel Bushakevitz does exactly what it says on the tin. Chronologically, the album’s eclectic programme takes us all the way from early 11th century Gregorian chant (it’s actually the final track, to make the story “run full circle”) to a song by Wolfgang Rihm published as recently as 2008. And on the way, it stops off to pay visits to (...wait for it Read more ...