composers
graham.rickson
British Piano Concertos: Walton, Britten & Tippett Clare Hammond (piano), BBC Symphony Orchestra/George Vass (BIS Records)I really liked this programme of neglected British piano concertos by the always excellent pianist Clare Hammond, accompanied by conductor George Vass, himself committed to the cause of promoting British music over many years. Britten’s one-handed Diversions, written for Paul Wittgenstein, and Walton’s Sinfonia Concertante are both full of youthful vivacity, although both have troubled histories.Best known by far is Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto, a top-three Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Before we get into it, reader, can you accept that The Last Dinner Party are a band born of privilege and high academic study? Of poshness, classical composition, private education, master’s degrees in music? No? Might as well stop reading then. That’s where they’re from. Let's have a valid debate somewhere else about the arts shutting out those with less money. Right now, though, The Last Dinner Party are fab live, look great, and, in From the Pyre, deliver a worthy follow-up to their vibrant debut.They’re preposterous, of course, but wonderfully so, their music Chantilly-laced through with Read more ...
graham.rickson
Corelli/Handel: Sonatas Michaela Koudelková (recorders), Monika Knoblochová (harpsichord), Libor Mašek (cello), Jan Krejča (theorbo) (Supraphon)This disc’s bright, piquant flavour makes it an irresistible acquisition. I dived into recorder player Michaela Koudelková’s new album after several days spent wallowing in Vaughan Williams orchestral music (see below), and it made for an invigorating palate-cleanser. Try the little “Furioso” from Handel’s Recorder Sonata in D minor, two minutes of exuberant froth, Koudelková’s dancing solo line having the upper hand (just) over a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Kabalevsky: Cello Concerto No. 2, Schumann: Cello Concerto Theodor Lyngstad (cello), Copenhagen Phil/Eva Ollikainen (OUR Recordings)This disc’s sleeve note suggests that Kabalevsky’s Cello Concerto No. 2 “owes an obvious debt to the composer’s colleague and one-time neighbour Dmitri Shostakovich”. It does indeed, several passages sounding like direct pastiche. That doesn’t make the work any less enjoyable and entertaining, the first movement’s “Allegro molto e energico” section very similar in tone to the opening movement of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Though Kabalevsky begins Read more ...
Jon Turney
Composers and musicians explore acoustic space. Generally, they have got by with combinations of readily accessible sounds, with occasional novelties as instruments improved, bit by bit.In the 20th century that changed radically. New technologies offered almost unlimited increase in the sounds that could be conjured up on stage or in the studio. And conceptually, the range of sounds some considered musical expanded just as much, abolishing the boundary between music and noise, and even – thanks to John Cage – permitting the composer to propose no sounds at all.Elizabeth Alker dives into this Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Lieder Christian Gerhaher (baritone), Gerold Huber (piano) (Sony)The concert I attended of Brahms Lieder in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford in October 2024, with Christian Gerhaher in fabulous voice and Gerold Huber at the peak of his craft was fabulous – five star review of that very special evening here. I was therefore overjoyed to discover only recently that they had made this recording of a very similar programme just one week before. The whole disc is a wonderful outpouring from a gloriously intelligent singer; maybe that’s all it’s necessary to know.The programme is a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Jürg Frey: Voices EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble/James Weeks (Neu Records)A new CD from EXAUDI is a guaranteed treat for all the senses: the sound quality is always impeccable, the CD presentation a tactile pleasure. Heck, it even smells good (a mixture of new car and old bookshop). VOICES presents the music of Swiss composer Jürg Frey (b. 1953), which is an intriguing mixture of the sophisticated and the almost naïve, a surface simplicity revealing submerged depths, a place where fragility and steely inner purpose meet. It is music that is extreme in its singlemindedness, the long spans over Read more ...
graham.rickson
Thomas Adès: Orchestral Suites London Philharmonic Orchestra/Thomas Adès (LPO)Here are three orchestral suites taken from stage works by Thomas Adès, from different stages of his career, captured at live performances at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 2018 and 2023. So not new recordings, but good to have these in one place to trace the composer’s career from prodigious breakthrough to acknowledged master. I have not always been convinced by Adès as a conductor when I’ve seen him live – he seems a bit hyperactive and prone to micromanagement – but judging just aurally by the results Read more ...
Robert Beale
Anja Bihlmaier returned to the BBC Philharmonic – for the first time in the Bridgewater Hall as principal guest conductor – with a programme to mark International Women’s Day, and consisting entirely of music by women composers, past and present.Surviving symphonies written by 19th century women are not exactly thick on the ground, but Emilie Mayer’s No. 5 (one of eight) is evidence of what determination and originality could achieve even in a social context where expectations were of conformity and subservience. More of it below. The whole programme was of unfamiliar music: not a single Read more ...
David Nice
As always, great concerts have outnumbered great opera productions over a year, and all of our national orchestras can be proud of their record. I’ve sometimes started by celebrating youth, and it’s good to be able to do that in the shape of two competition finales totally satisfying as programmes. The palm, though, goes to two veterans who made me wonder at their ease and natural communication.In the case of 97-year-old Herbert Blomstedt conducting Mahler’s immensely taxing Ninth Symphony, it was the Philharmonia which did all the burning and intensity, while the conductor’s natural sense of Read more ...
graham.rickson
I’m a sucker for a well-produced box set, and some of this year’s choices examples included celebrations of conductors Paavo Berglund (Warner Classics), William Steinberg (DG) and Louis Lane (Sony). The Berglund box contains no fewer than three Sibelius cycles, my favourite being the earliest one, recorded while Berglund was Chief Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in the 1970s. Other highlights include his pungent, earthy Shostakovich (try his terrifying version 11th Symphony) and cogent performances of music by Bliss, Britten and Vaughan Williams.DG’s William Steinberg Read more ...
graham.rickson
Discussing 1971’s The Music Lovers with writer John Baxter, director Ken Russell suggested, among other things, that “music and facts don’t mix”. They don’t always line up here, but this film does stand up as a worthy successor to the BBC’s Delius: Song of Summer and Dance of the Seven Veils, the latter deemed so offensive by the Strauss estate that it remained unseen for 50 years.There’s plenty to offend in Russell’s lurid, starrily cast Tchaikovsky biopic but its assertive audacity worked for me. Discovering the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 1 upon leaving the Merchant Navy in the early Read more ...