contemporary classical
Robert Beale
Manchester Collective’s string orchestra programme, opening last night at the Royal Northern College of Music and touring to the South Bank, Leeds and Liverpool, is notable chiefly for the world premiere of will o wisp, by Oliver Leith, a remarkable piece of writing for the medium.The set is titled “Places We Know” and was devised by Pekka Kuusisto, but he had to withdraw from performing because of illness. His place is taken by Rakhi Singh, the Collective’s music director, leading the ensemble.The overall impression, considering that set title and the information given on the music played, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Is Artificial Intelligence pointing the way to musical composition in the future? The BBC Philharmonic, conductor Vimbayi Kaziboni and colleagues at the Royal Northern College of Music made a case for it in this concert.The highlight of the college’s Future Music festival, the programme celebrated the fifth anniversary of PRiSM (the centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music) at the RNCM, and also the supposed centennial of the orchestra itself. It presented two works by Emily Howard, PRiSM’s director: Antisphere (from 2019) and Elliptics, a setting of a poem by Michael Read more ...
David Nice
In its three weeks of world-class events, Muskfest Berlin has managed to be all things to all people – like a mini-Proms distilling the aspects of top international visitors alongside home-grown excellence, and of a focus on at least one relatively unfamiliar 20th century/contemporary work per concert. The Berliners deserved the cornucopia of very special guests, but to justify my visit, I went for the local – Berlin Phiharmonic, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester and Berlin choirs on a par with very distinguished counterparts from the UK and Georgia.It was disappointing that my third train on the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlin Philharmonic Horn player Sarah Willis’s Mozart y Mambo caused a stir in 2020, its mixture of Mozart and traditional Cuban music making it a bestselling crossover disc.Two years on and the second volume has just been released, the sessions held in Havana in January and April this year. As with the first album, a percentage of the proceeds will go towards raising money for new instruments for the Havana Lyceum Orchestra. We discussed the project over Zoom in August.What prompted you to record a second CD?Second albums are notoriously difficult! The mixture of Mozart and mambo proved Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
For the penultimate concert in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s residency at the Edinburgh Festival, the chosen repertoire was evidently considered so obscure that the box office managers didn’t even try to sell any tickets in the Usher Hall’s cavernous upper circle. To shut off nearly half the concert hall for a world class orchestra that has crossed the Atlantic shows either a healthy disregard for the fickleness of audience taste, or a near suicidal disinterest in box office revenue.That, you could say, is what festivals are all about, an approach that might have found some justification in a Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Violinist and composer Ruby Colley combines elements of folk, contemporary classical and jazz with explorations and evocations of the natural world.Her debut release, 2010’s Murmurations, was a minimalist, paired-down evocation of nature and natural forms, and since then, she has written music for films, collaborated on a range of theatre and dance projects, and played with the likes of Sinead O’Connor, The Unthanks and Cosmo Sheldrake.Some of the music from Overheard, her first album in 12 years, stems from collaborations with the arts-and-tech AltPitch festival, and a film of the album’s Read more ...
David Nice
When I first came to Estonia with a then still-exiled Neeme Järvi and his Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra in 1989, the world-class young musicians who dazzled at this year’s Pärnu Music Festival hadn’t been born.A new Estonian musical golden age is now reaping the benefits of a superlative musical education system, but experience also counts: the central force that makes this festival the most welcoming I’ve ever experienced, Paavo Järvi, will be 60 this year; father Neeme, back in Estonia’s lovely summer capital by the Baltic after two years’ enforced absence, and brother Kristjan marked their Read more ...
David Nice
Semi-standing ovation at a lunchtime concert in a London church? Predictable, perhaps, from the first recital I heard George Xiaoyuan Fu give at the Two Moors Festival, an avian programme which made me long to hear him play Messiaen’s complete Catalogue d’oiseaux. Yesterday’s “Chopin Revisited” sequence heightened the sense of originality in planning and confidence in presentation. This is one of the most exciting young pianists of our time, no question.It's often said that Chopin's supreme originality is to be heard in his Mazurkas. Not exclusively so, of course, but Fu's selection certainly Read more ...
David Nice
Best new opera in years, they said – don’t ask who – after the Aldeburgh Festival premiere of Tom Coult’s Violet. I’d have been happy in Hackney had it been as good as, say, Philip Venables’ 4.48 Psychosis or Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside. Alas, nowhere near.The premise is interesting: oppressed wife Violet, a prisoner in her own home, starts to find a zest for life as time begins to disappear and what seems like global meltdown heads towards the end of the world. But Alice Birch’s doomy libretto gives no powerful words to make us care about the four characters, and when the overwritten Read more ...
Christina McMaster
In 2020, during a gentle easing of lockdown restrictions, I was asked to play for the Culture Clinic sessions at Kings Place, a creative initiative where small groups of up to six people could book a ticket for a private, personally tailored performance. After speaking together briefly, I would then prescribe and perform music I felt they needed to hear.One concert-goer described my role as "Physician of the soul", a job title I like the sound of, and a way to use music that feels meaningful. I’ve been thinking about this format since and how different it was from performing to a large Read more ...
David Nice
"Contemporary classical", for want of a better term, works best in concert as a cornucopia of shortish new works offering a healthy range of styles and voices. Add to the mix six of the most exhilarating and original chamber concertos ever, by no means casting complementary premieres in the shade, put together some of the UK’s best musicians and make it an afternoon marathon taking place in the round aatn extraordinary venue, and success should be total.And it was, on Saturday from noon to 5.30pm, in the exquisite surroundings of Malling Abbey The idea isn't unprecedented: the Swedish Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Ennio Morricone’s collaboration with director Giuseppe Tornatore on 1988’s Cinema Paradiso was one of the countless highlights of his career, and it’s Tornatore who has masterminded this sprawling documentary tribute to the composer, who died in July 2020.Apparently it took him five globe-trotting years to amass interviews with a huge list of Morricone’s admirers and collaborators, so perhaps it’s no great surprise that he seems to have found editing his material into a manageable shape a daunting task.Tornatore’s decision to plough doggedly through Morricone’s career, from his days as a Read more ...