Mendelssohn
Boyd Tonkin
Alina Ibragimova’s solo journey (in 2015) through the peaks and abysses of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas gave me vivid Proms memories to treasure for a lifetime. The Russian-born violinist’s Bach abounds in both majesty and tenderness, as well as a consuming fire of intensity when the music so demands. She brought something of the same quality to her performance last night of Mendelssohn’s E minor concerto at the Barbican. Nathalie Stutzmann conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a menu of well-seasoned 19th-century favourites that began with generous chunks of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Read more ...
David Nice
There it gleamed, the pearl in the massive oyster of Albert's colosseum: the gilded, decorated piano supplied to his Queen by Érard in 1856. Pearly in sound it was not, though often harp-like; the programme was of mostly silver works, with a gold scherzo and some wooden songs. It was the task of Proms favourite Stephen Hough, the very glowing sound of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and a febrile grand master, Ádám Fischer, to bring them all to life in this lavish concert marking 200 years since Victoria's birth.Which they did with bags of character, though not much could be done Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
July in Tuscany and the heat is intense. Oak-forested hills offer tempting shade; pale dust flies from the roads; in the houses curtains are drawn against the ferocious sun and around irrigated gardens the mosquitos are growing plump. If you love Italian sunshine, food, wine and chamber music, this is your ideal festival, as long as you pack some citronella. Its name: Incontri in Terra di Siena. The background to the event is both unusual and inspiring. In the 1920s the writer Iris Origo and her husband Antonio set up home in a sprawling villa, La Foce, overlooking the Val d’Orcia ( Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The festival Summer Music in City Churches is in only its second year, filling a gap left by the demise of the long-running City of London Festival. This year’s festival had the theme of Words and Music and offered an enticing programme of recitals, talks and walks, focusing on English music through the ages, and finding enterprising ways of combining solo performers with resident ensembles the London Mozart Players and the City of London Choir. The closing concert showcased works inspired by Shakespeare plays, presenting them alongside Shakespeare’s words, spoken by actor Tama Matheson.The Read more ...
David Nice
Schumann revitalized by John Eliot Gardiner and the London Symphony Orchestra last year left us wanting more: namely two of the four symphonies (transcendently great, as it turns out from these revelatory performances). But those concerts also guaranteed that the ones a year later would be the most vital tonic imaginable for grey, damp early February. And so it proved with the joybursts of the Third (“Rhenish”) and, finally, the First (“Spring”): if anything could send you dancing away, the latter's lightly tripping vernal finale and the encore played on both evenings, the even more airborne Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mendelssohn: Symphonies 1-5, Overtures, A Midsummer Night’s Dream London Symphony Orchestra/Sir John Eliot Gardiner (LSO Live)That Mendelssohn wrote five symphonies is widely known, though I'd wager that 99% of listeners only know 40% of them. Begin with the rarely-played Symphony No. 1, written when Mendelssohn was 14. Though his precocity is engaging rather than irritating; this is an impressive symphony on its own terms, and not purely because it was written by someone barely out of short trousers. The third movement sounds a little familiar, and then you discover that it's a Read more ...
Calidore String Quartet
Classical musicians spend much of their lives inhabiting the realms of the past. To effectively practise and perform the music of Bach, Brahms, Beethoven and countless others, performers must combine research and personal intuition to time travel into the era of these great composers’ lives. After months of exploration, as one begins to comprehend the social customs, politics and science of the era, a clearer understanding of the composer's individual personality and musical aesthetic begin to emerge.Many performers spend their entire life unravelling issues such as how Beethoven’s Read more ...
graham.rickson
Josquin: Missa Gaudeamus, Missa L’ami Baudichon The Tallis Scholars/Peter Phillips (Gimell)That music composed in the 14th and 15th centuries can be enjoyed and performed today is mind-boggling. As is looking at one of Josquin des Préz’s manuscripts, close enough to conventional modern notation for even a hick like me to get an inkling of what the music might sound like. This latest Tallis Scholars release features two contrasting Masses, the mature Missa Gaudemas’s intensity set against the earlier, breezier Missa L’ami Baudichon. Peter Phillips has his three tenors sing the plainchant Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
When did this weird mix-tape fashion take root at the Proms? Just a couple of days after Antonio Pappano ran Haydn into Bernstein without pausing for breath, Joshua Bell and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields sought to splice the final yearning notes of Frank Bridge’s Lament to the spooky short adagio that opens Beethoven’s Fourth. Some alert applauders broke the thread, which meant that we never quite heard if the join would hold firm.Yes, smart programming draws attention to the hidden kinship that binds seemingly disparate pieces across periods and styles. Still (literally, in this Read more ...
David Nice
When you have 21 women to present in song, but only a couple among the 14 poets and none to represent them out of the 15 composers idolising or giving them a voice, you need two strong defenders of their sex at the helm. Lucy Crowe and Anna Tilbrook are no shrinking violets – the soprano no longer a light lyric, the pianist supportive only in the best sense, full of flexible power and forceful middle-to-lower-range sonorities for the voice to coast above.Certainly there were colour and variety enough from both to create worlds in miniature throughout a well-proportioned programme with quite a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Frederic Rzewski marked his 80th birthday with a visit to the Wigmore Hall, for the premiere of his aptly titled Ages. The pianist Igor Levit is an ardent champion of Rzewski’s music and was the prime mover behind the commission (though it was financed by the Wigmore Hall with the support of Annette Scawen Morreau), and the piece was clearly written to showcase his many strengths. Levit is a master of atmosphere, and has a keen sense of musical drama, both of which were much in evidence, and much needed, in this sprawling, hour-long work.Rzewski (pictured below) has always been an eclectic Read more ...
David Nice
Punching well above their weights, population-wise, on the international music scene, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are celebrating, and being celebrated, in style over the year of their 100th birthdays. Berlin has just finished a 10-day "Festival Baltikum" at the fabulously recreated, Schinkel-designed Konzerthaus in the old city centre, in which championship of a massive Estonian oratorio finally reached Germany's current capital of musical culture. Leipzig, its second in terms of size, if not ambition - where the composer Rudolf Tobias first conducted the disastrous 1909 premiere of the Read more ...