The Royal Northern College of Music was in celebratory mood last night for the opening of its new season, in a joint promotion with Manchester Camerata that marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the RNCM’s Junior Fellowship programme.For Benjamin Huth, it was his final performance as the 2024/25 Mills Williams Junior Fellow in Conducting, and with him were three soloists moving on from their time on the RNCM International Artists Diploma, the highest performance accolade the college offers. What better way for a violinist, cellist and pianist to celebrate together than in Beethoven’s Read more ...

One piece that you’re unlikely to hear at the Lammermuir Festival is Lucia di Lammermoor. As co-director James Waters explained during a drive to the absurdly picturesque church and castle at Crichton (fit setting for a Netflix epic, let alone a blood-soaked bel canto opera), venues and resources do set some limits to works that can be presented to the standards he demands.But not many: this year the festival hosted a double-bill of one-acters from Scottish Opera; it will welcome both the Philharmonia Orchestra at full strength, and Reinaldo Alessandrini’s legendary Concerto Italiano ensemble Read more ...

Performers and public alike always treasure a beautiful and, in this case, remote setting for a music festival. But people matter as much as sense of place. When the players work together in various combinations for the duration, and tell you this is the highlight of their musical year, you know the achievement is utopian. And that was certainly the case with eight dynamic Bulgarian instrumentalists and three visitors new to the magic of Kovachevitsa.The Off the Beaten Path Chamber Music Festival isn’t the first Bulgarian institution to bring culture to this perfectly preserved but not Read more ...

Guitarist Louis Campbell and fiddle player Owen Spafford started playing together as teenagers in the National Youth Folk Ensemble when Sam Sweeney (of Bellowhead and Leveret) was its director. They released their first album, You Golden, three years ago. It featured audacious musical extrapolations from Playford’s English Dance Master – also a key source for Sweeney’s Leveret – and with an emphasis on ensuring an abundance space, rather than notes, in the playing.Since then they’ve mounted multi-media solo shows – Spafford’s music and art installation Welcome Here, Kind Stranger at the Royal Read more ...

If, like me, chamber music isn’t your most frequent home, there are bound to be revelations of what for many are known masterpieces. Mine in recent years have involved Brahms, a composer I love more the older I get: the Second, A major, Piano Quartet, much less often heard than No. 1, at the 2018 Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, and, last Friday, his First String Quartet from the Cuarteto Casals, also new to me, in an airy room looking out on Dublin’s Glasnevin Botanic Gardens.I missed the first two concerts of this year’s DICMF, arriving on the Friday, but both were greeted with Read more ...

It was the sonically adventurous, shiveringly atmospheric cello piece by Latvian composer Preteris Vasks that proved to be the first showstopper of this enjoyably esoteric evening. Dutch cellist Hadewych van Gent began the pianissimo movement of Vasks’ Gramata Cellam by creating a build-up of whistling harmonic effects on the A string, followed by a yearning feather-light improvisation in the cello’s upper registers that suddenly plunged vertiginously bass-wards.The rich, velvety chordal sequence that ensued was accompanied by Gent’s wordless soprano, as clear and piercing as a shaft of light Read more ...

Since their eponymous 2011 debut, Three Cane Whale have kept it small without losing scale. A trio of Spiro’s Alex Vann, Get The Blessing’s Pete Judge, and guitarist Paul Bradley, together they often often recorded plein air, on hillsides, above waterfalls, in ancient churches and old barns. For their sixth set, they chose St George’s Bristol, famed for its acoustic, and turned to Leveret’s Rob Harbron as producer, who was also there for them for Holts & Hovers, and the charming mini-album 303 recorded in 2019 on the slopes of Cadbury Hill, in earshot of the A303, and all the traffic on Read more ...

As Steven Isserlis announced just before the final work, in more senses than one, of a five-day revelation, the 79 year old Fauré’s last letter told his wife that “at the moment I am well, very well, despite the little bout of fatigue which is caused by the end of the Quartet. I am happy with everything, and I should like everyone to be happy all around me, and everywhere”.The world is an unhappier place than ever this morning, yet somehow that incandescent performance of a uniquely beautiful string quartet made things not so hard. Today there’s calm resignation, though that probably won’t, Read more ...

Earlier this year, Steven Isserlis curated a revelatory Sheffield Chamber Music Festival spotlighting Saint-Saëns, with plentiful Fauré towards the end. Now it’s the younger composer’s turn, marking his death 100 years ago on 4 November 1924, but his mentor has more than a look-in over five concerts featuring six bright stars, "Team Fauré".Friday’s launch made us love Fauré even more, but also opened many ears to the early genius of Saint-Saëns. The programme, delivered to an audience dotted with familiar faces among musicians, was not quite as planned. Personable and wry as ever, Isserlis Read more ...

Last Monday my colleague Boyd Tonkin was delighted by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective’s playing at Hatfield House – and on Thursday it was my turn to be impressed by their colourful Wigmore Hall recital, which featured the marvellous clarinettist Carlos Ferreira in Bartók and Brahms.In Bartók’s Contrasts, Ferreira (pictured below) was following in the footsteps of Benny Goodman, who co-commissioned the piece in 1938. There are distinctively Goodmanesque moments in which Bartók channels the recently deceased George Gershwin, and Ferreira found a rich and resonant American accent for Read more ...

“Sero sed serio”: so runs the Salisbury family motto on the carved coat-of-arms in the lavishly panelled and painted Marble Hall of Hatfield House. “Late, but in earnest”. The first adjective certainly doesn’t apply to any member of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, five of whom performed in the Hall for one of the centrepiece events of the 13th Hatfield House Music Festival.The Collective, founded by violinist Elena Urioste and pianist Tom Poster in 2017, hosts a flexible roster of instrumental partners equipped to deliver small-ensemble pieces across a spectrum of different Read more ...

We vividly remember the image of Martin Lovett, the cellist of the legendary Amadeus Quartet, bursting out laughing. He tells his favourite true travel story. After boarding a plane, the Amadeus Quartet has taken its seats and Martin is just about to strap his cello into the seat next to him when a fellow traveller approaches him. Oh no, marvels the inquisitive man, there's a whole string quartet on board. "How many are there in a string quartet?" comes the sudden question. Martin answers spontaneously and with deep conviction: "Five!".What a marvellous story, one we still like to tell Read more ...