chamber music
igor.toronyilalic
The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost materialised yesterday. And I'm not talking about the transcendental appearance of the Holy Trinity of News International. I'm talking Proms. Last night's two saw a geriatric performance of the Brahms double, a brand spanking new way through an old Rite and a transfiguringly spectral invocation of Schubert's Quintet.
In the earlier prom, Myung-Whun Chung's Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France demonstrated what a capricious beast the French orchestra can be: one moment on top of their game, luminous, surprising, virtuosic; the next, heels Read more ...
natalie.wheen
Getting to Mull is an improbably romantic journey to classical music-making. One can easily understand why Mendelssohn was so affected by his experiences in Scotland – and Mull. On the three-hour train journey from Glasgow one sheds the habits of everyday life: the train winds through thickets of Forestry Commission plantations, which suddenly open out into wild panoramas of mountains and lochs, or a dramatic ruined castle against the skyline. Then the ferry from Oban passes the heavily fortified Duart Castle on its crag guarding the Sound of Mull, which later will be the scene of elegant Read more ...
David Nice
For so many days a year, Cheltenham's Regency symmetry and conservative values totter and buckle as they veer dangerously towards relative festive liberalism. As I sliced into one of the four annual beanfeasts, the Cheltenham Music Festival, it struck me how well lopsided, sometimes painful bendings of a classical framework by Schumann and Brahms sat with a battery of volatile percussion celebrating Steve Reich's 75th birthday. Even the adventure served up by trebles over in Norman and medieval Tewkesbury glimpsed a beast in the jungle. And there wasn't an overall dud among any of the seven Read more ...
David Nice
It takes a lot to humanise the hideous late-Victorian glitter of Drapers' Hall, but the City of London Festival's latest cornucopia knew how. Ornithologist-composer David Lumsdaine's soundscape greeted us with Australian birds fluttering invisibly around Corinthian gilt. Then it was down to business with the Nash Ensemble's small band of personable generals. They gave us high-toned Grieg and Dvořák, cheerful homespun songs with sophisticated twists by Grainger, Vaughan Williams and Delius to make the austere central portrait of Victoria inwardly smile, and a jungly new Sextet by Brett Dean, Read more ...
David Nice
Ghosts legendary and personal dog the nostalgic footsteps of Elgar's utterly characteristic late Piano Quintet - though who knew the old man had as much red blood in him as last night's world-class team managed to squeeze out? And circumstantial ghosts have often niggled during the little portion of the Wigmore Hall's century-and-a-decade history I've witnessed, namely the spectre of sweltering at the back behind rows of nodding heads seemingly as old as the hall itself. But there are also the noble spirits of great performances, and heaven knows this sedate old venue has seen a few of those Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Wigmore Hall was full to capacity last night, its crowd gathered to pay homage to a great musician at the end of his career, and to discover the talents of a great musician at the very beginning of his. While Alfred Deller might have been the pioneer, breaking ground and awakening audiences to new possibilities, it was in the hands of James Bowman that the countertenor voice was revealed as more than an oddity or novelty, a thing of uniquely expressive and vulnerable beauty. Sharing his farewell recital with young Iranian harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, Bowman offered us an evening which Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
When OperaUpClose's bar-side production of La bohème beat the ENO and Royal Opera House to the Olivier Awards' Best New Production gong earlier this year, it was hard - even in these award-sceptical parts - not to delight in the David versus Goliath-like nature of the victory. State funds and high-profile support has since beefed up this fragile dinghy of a venture. One new fan, Mark Ravenhill, was invited to direct Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea. Another, Michael Nyman, was asked to write an intervention aria. Could these artistic stars halt a recent spate of post-bohème Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Could you get a more American string quartet than the Emersons? They dress like Yanks. They play like Yanks. They're even shaped like Yanks. There's Steve Martin on viola, Steve Buscemi on cello, Laurel and Hardy on violins. The night started in true Stateside fashion, an announcer indicating the Emersons would be conducting a Q&A session from the stage after the concert. I can't imagine anyone took them up on the offer. Because, for all the trials and tribulations of their recital last night at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (some good, some bad), this wasn't a performance that Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There is always a moment after you've mauled a musician in review when guilt bubbles to the surface. Your inner nursery school teacher (the little voice that thinks potato prints deserve Nobel Prizes) starts tugging at your conscience. This spell of wussiness is invariably broken by the arrival of someone who shows you just what can be done when care and intelligence are applied to a performance. That someone was Mitsuko Uchida, who last night shared the stage with soloists of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.Their quietly sensational performance of Beethoven' Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Earlier this month something happened to me that's never happened before. Brian Ferneyhough's Sixth String Quartet roughed-up my critical faculties and left them for dead. I couldn't tell you what had happened, why, in what order, when. As it finished, small birds circled my head. So I entered Brian Ferneyhough Day yesterday at the Barbican as one would an egg-beater, knees a-knocking.I needn't have. The day was a revelation. As is usual with these BBC Symphony Orchestra composer portraits, many different ways into the composer's oeuvre were proferred. The first reductivist Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Their record label describes them rather laboriously as “a Baroque super-group of four superstar Baroque instrumentalists”, but the Retrospect Trio don’t need any fancy titles to prove their quality. Bringing together violinists Sophie Gent and Matthew Truscott (leader of the OAE) and Jonathan Manson on bass viol (principal cello of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) under the direction of young harpsichordist Matthew Halls, this ensemble is all about unshowy musicianship. Joined last night by soprano Julia Doyle they offered up some of the best Purcell London is likely to see this year – with Read more ...
David Nice
This is the second Sunday in a month that I've sat in the Wigmore Hall and been plunged into an evening of ferocious concentration from the very first bars. Mid-January saw violinist Leonidas Kavakos and his phenomenal pianist Enrico Pace carving out the grim memorial that is Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata, ultimately softened by radiant Schubert. Last night Kavakos's peer Thomas Zehetmair accented the lead in late Beethoven, and since only Shostakovich's last quartet followed, this time there was to be no more human gilding of a very alien lily.It wasn't hard to see why the Zehetmair Read more ...