contemporary classical
stephen.walsh
“Powerful, Timeless, Inspiring” it says on the front cover of the programme-book for this year’s supposedly 297th Three Choirs Festival at Hereford. So please leave your frivolity at the cathedral door with your gun and your mobile phone.Richard Blackford has certainly taken the hint with his new cantata, The Black Lake, a studiously tearful, elevated distillation of Caradog Prichard’s One Moonlit Night, a coming-of-age novel about a Welsh boy born and brought up in the slate-quarrying village of Bethesda in north Wales just before and during the First World War. It’s a curious thing about Read more ...
Tim Cumming
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 ...
Tim Cumming
Silken ambience is the name of the game on this set from Icelandic composer-producer Olafur Arnalds and dreampop singer Talos, aka Eoin French, who tragically died in August last year, aged 36. Arnalds completed the album after his death.Talos' high, otherworldly voice is the dominant signature, from the opening title track with its heavy swell of strings at the high points, through to the spare piano and voice passages of “Bedrock”, a slow, melancholy piano ballad bathed in shimmering reverb and a chorus of voices. Talos’ delicate lone voice over Arnalds’ spare piano lines draws you in Read more ...
David Nice
Actually it was a Thursday evening to Saturday experience, but what riches in seven concerts. The only Britten I heard was one of the Six Metamorphoses after Ovid as I approached the Red House on a hot Saturday morning, just too late for that pop-up performance, but in time for Berio. The old guard of composers made a mixed impression, but one of several highlights was to discover how imaginative the new generation is proving in six world premieres.The two biggest contemporary triumphs rested partly in the infinitely adaptable voice of tenor Allan Clayton, one of the four “Festival Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera can take many forms and fulfil many purposes: this chamber opera by Zakiya Leeming and Sam Redway is about vaccination. Based on history, it has a story to tell and lessons to teach.“A new opera on medicine, memory and innovation” was the subtitle, and that sums up the themes it explores – but the abstractions are brought to life as aspects of the tale of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the early 18th century aristocrat whose experience of a Turkish public bath enabled her to discover and then promote the practice of inoculation (or, to be precise, variolation – introducing infected matter Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This year’s Aldeburgh Festival – the 76th – takes as its motto a line from Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound. The poet speaks of despair “Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound”. With or without words, music shapes and voices feelings that would otherwise lie beyond expression.Shelley’s high-flying Romantic ideals may feel abstruse but, as the Festival’s opening weekend showed, music’s power not just to charm but to heal and reveal can have striking, and practical, real-world effects. Pianist George Xiaoyuan Fu and mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean prefaced their “Solitude with Schubert” 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 ...
Bernard Hughes
The London Choral Sinfonia are a very impressive group, a professional choir who are churning out terrific recordings at a breakneck pace – I reviewed their latest release of Malcolm Arnold on theartsdesk only last week – as well as a busy schedule of live concerts and educational outreach.At Smith Square Hall last night there was another aspect of their work on view, a commitment to new music in the form of a premiere of a large-scale new piece and, if I had my reservations about it, that commitment and ambition is still very much to be applauded.The first half of the programme was on more Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra has had to put up with its fair share of artist cancellations over the last month, and the ensuing games of musical chairs led to the somewhat implausible scenario of this concert, where Richard Egarr, a conductor more closely associated with Bach and Handel, conducted the UK premiere of a work by Peter Eötvös, that darling of the avant-garde.In fairness to Egarr, he did nothing more than what he does with the Baroque music for which he is so renowned: he played it with the clarity, shape and the expression it needed to come alive. Shape, in fact, was critical Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There’s a lot to be said for the planning that clearly went into this concert by the Cardiff-based new music ensemble, Uproar. Starting with Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto, it added three new commissions for (more or less) the same band and a fourth, existing piece previously composed to go with the Ligeti.The risk, I suppose, is that plenty of the model work, as well as its actual scoring, will rub off on the new pieces. All but one of the four did indeed give the slight impression of having filtered through Ligeti’s originally startling combination of ambient cosmic noise and passing musical Read more ...