cello
Gary Naylor
There’s an old-fashioned feel to the story at its outset: Young woman, guitar in hand, Northern accent announcing as much as it always did, who makes a new life in London, all the money going on a room in Camden. One recalls Georgy Girl or Darling, films that were very much of their time. But it's safe to say that, even if you missed the extensive trigger warnings on the way into the Southwark Playhouse auditorium, a volume of swear words to give a Tory backbencher pause is enough to tell you that this show is very much 2023. Maimuna Memon’s song cycle is a deeply personal story of Read more ...
David Nice
You go to a concert, three-quarters of it popular classics – also great masterpieces – having been told you have to hear a brilliant young cellist, and into the bargain you also discover a remarkable conductor and an orchestra on top form shedding transcendental light on the familiar. So everybody’s happy.The finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet tends to produce communal ecstasy, but like the recent London Philharmonic performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony under its principal conductor Edward Gardner, which brought an entire audience to its feet within seconds, the interpretation, in this Read more ...
Robert Beale
Ben Gernon’s calm and clear way of conducting an orchestra (something he once told me he’d observed in the work of his mentor, Colin Davis) is good to watch and, I would guess, welcomed by those he directs. Since his time with the BBC Philharmonic as principal guest conductor (2017-2020) he’s been a welcome visitor to them in Manchester and Salford, and this programme pulled a good crowd and was indeed very rewarding.That doesn’t mean that everything they did together was perfect, but when it worked, it worked beautifully. Beginning a programme with something that needs instant Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The elation in the queue was palpable as people stood laughing and chatting in the November cold waiting for the doors of the Jazz Café to open for the latest crowd-funded event organised by Through the Noise. This 13th Noisenight – which brings major classical soloists to nightclubs – was a chance to see Sheku Kanneh-Mason and pianist Harry Baker at a key moment in Through the Noise’s history, the start of its first national tour. While much of the buzz was around Kanneh-Mason, from the moment the two musicians started playing it was clear that what was special was their Read more ...
David Nice
When I worked in the Music Discount Centre decades ago, and non-stop CDs in the background were ordained, a customer remarked wryly of eight Bayreuth Festival horns playing Wagner “very crepuscular”. Five cellists playing Bach and Villa-Lobos as darkness fell beneath the roof of Peckham’s Multi-Storey Car Park could also be so described, but as a compliment: this was a grave and beautiful way to start the perfect entertainment.What a team the already-great Sheku Kanneh-Mason had assembled from among his many colleagues – they all deserve a credit. The others were Hedwych van Gent, currently a Read more ...
David Nice
London’s musical life began its halting road to recovery when in July 2020 a great cellist, Steven Isserlis, stepped out with obvious delight to play Bach to a live audience at the Fidelio Café. Another, Leonard Elschenbroich, joined by the full-on spirit of delight that is Alexei Grynyuk, hit more than one high note last night, proving that this special space will never lose its magic.Part of the charm and the privilege, of course, is to hear the resonance of strings and piano at such electrifyingly close quarters; a nod here, though it was more of a private event, to the stunning sound made Read more ...
Ian Julier
With a predictable Sheku sell-out in the hall, the context of post-Eunice clean-up and current teetering on the brink with Russia lent a strangely unsettling and salutary resonance to the programme of Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto framed by Mussorgsky and Borodin.A palpable sense of coded autobiographical artistic angst, Nature, and festive celebration reflecting both truth and beauty from two different Russian centuries onto the much changed homeland and world view of present times seemed inescapable.In Mussorgsky’s unfinished opera of political and religious intrigue Khovanshchina, Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Malian kora master Ballake Sissoko is a griot steeped in the musical and cultural traditions of West Africa, whose duets with his cousin Toumani Diabate on the world music classic, 1999’s New Ancient Strings, are rightly celebrated.His duets with French cellist Vincent Segal first appeared in 2009, on the French No Format label; Chamber Music was hailed as a classic of world fusion, and their follow-up, 2015’s Musique de Nuit, extended and expanded that spirit of improvisation, recorded live in a studio in Bamako in Mali – and, more poetically, on Sissoko’s rooftop.That intimate sense of Read more ...
David Nice
It wouldn’t be true to say I’d forgotten what a solo cello in a fine concert hall sounds like; revelation of an admittedly sparse year will undoubtedly remain Sumera’s Cello Concerto played by young Estonian Theodor Sink at the Pärnu Music Festival in July. But Alban Gerhardt, exactly the sort of enquiring musical mind likely to take up that masterpiece, brought tears to the eyes with the lower resonances and upper sweetness of what I presume to be his 1710 Goffriller instrument in the Wigmore Hall. It offers a superlative acoustic for stringed instruments, if less kind to pianists, though Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Birmingham emerged from musical lockdown with Stockhausen. It couldn’t have been anyone else, really. There’s something about Stockhausen’s fusion of modernity and goofy intergalactic romanticism that clearly strikes a chord in the Second City, where the last three decades of music have been measured out in landmark Stockhausen performances: Rattle’s CBSO performances of Gruppen, Birmingham Opera Company’s astonishing 2012 world premiere of Mittwoch aus Licht, and, in 1992, a massive open-air performance of Sternklang in Cannon Hill Park, under the direction of Stockhausen himself.In Read more ...
David Nice
What music would you choose to hear for your first live event after nearly four months of lockdown? For me, it would be Bach, and probably any one of the Cello Suites. Interpreter? Ideally, one of four living cellists – so the dream came true last night when Steven Isserlis played the First and Third Suites with the fascinating Walton Passacaglia in between to an audience of 25 in the spacious, light-filled surroundings of the Fidelio Orchestra Café in Farringdon.The very limited numbers include affordable places for under-30s, and each programme is played over three or four consecutive Read more ...
David Nice
Inventiveness waxes ever stronger, it seems, in quarantine, as do the number of faces and instrumental sounds gathered together at any one time. As the branches diversify, embracing pre-filmed concert and opera, solo and multiple livestreams from home, it made sense not to try and yoke all this together, and to give individual slots to each happening, from two innovative opera productions to a fabulous young cellist playing in his back garden. Opera North's Orchestra plays '2001' plusOrchestral get-togethers online have yielded some fascinating results, including the Lahti Symphony Read more ...