Schubert
Sebastian Scotney
Helping to build the careers of superb young singers is what Wigmore Hall has done for decades: I still remember Olaf Bär’s debut in the hall in 1983, having won the Walther Gruner Lieder competition, and also Matthias Goerne’s in 1997.But whereas Bär was 25 and Goerne 27 when they first appeared in Wigmore Street, Austrian mezzo-soprano Anja Mittermüller was not yet 21 when she won the Wigmore Hall/Bollinger International Song Competition last year. She has recently turned 22, and still has another year left as a student in Hanover.Hearing her remarkable Wigmore debut recital at the Read more ...
David Nice
Aldeburgh offered strong competition for the three evenings of Schubert at the discreetly restored Ragged School Museum, but I knew I had to return for the last event of Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s third festival here, much as I’d love to have heard Allan Clayton in Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers. And if anything, the three-part all-Schubert programme was even more levitational than I’d expected.The circumstances are unique. Kolesnikov and Tsoy welcome you as if into their home to sit in a close semi-circle for wonders in the schoolroom at the top of the building – now more spacious, 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 ...
David Nice
When Vladimir Jurowski returns to what used to be “his” London Philharmonic Orchestra, you’d better jump. I would have done on Wednesday had I been able to get to his heady mix of Russian and Ukrainian rarities; luckily I could on Saturday night, because an outwardly standard programme of early 19th century works proved perfect, raising Schumann’s much-denigrated Violin Concerto to the level of Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony.Vilde Frang (pictured below) was the ideal match for Jurowski and the LPO here. Her double-stopping entry, startlingly resonant, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Snow Dance for the Dead: Choral Music by Seán Doherty New Dublin Voices/Bernie Sherlock (Voces8 Recordings)I have come across the choral music of Seán Doherty more and more recently and always liked what I have heard. His music is imaginative, wide-ranging and original, and all these things are evident in his debut disc with New Dublin Voices, under their enterprising conductor Bernie Sherlock. Doherty has been a member of the choir since 2015, and Sherlock describes him as “a tap that pours out great choral music”. There is certainly more than enough variety to sustain a full album – Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michael Tilson Thomas: The Complete Columbia, Sony and RCA Recordings (Sony)Big box sets continue to arrive. This one’s a whopper: 80 discs celebrating Michael Tilson Thomas’s 80th birthday. Artistic qualities aside, the production values here are superb, Sony’s 200-page hardback book accompanying individual discs replete with original sleeve art and spines that display each CD’s contents. This is a minor detail but a significant one, making it easy to find the performance you’re looking for. As with the recent Paavo Järvi set, it’s nice to see a celebration of a conductor who’s very Read more ...
graham.rickson
Reynaldo Hahn: Piano Quartet, Piano Quintet, Songs Karim Sulayman (tenor), Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective (Chandos)I’ve been a fan of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective for some time, having heard them in concert and on their excellent previous albums, which often seek out under-recorded composers and give them the spotlight: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Fanny Mendelssohn, Alma Mahler, Luise Adolphe le Beau. This album is another example of that, comprising chamber and vocal pieces by Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947), not someone whose music I was previously familiar with. From being a darling Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms: Piano Sonata No. 1, Schubert: Wanderer Fantasy Alexandre Kantorow (piano) (BIS)I’d previously encountered pianist Alexandre Kantorow via his exuberant set of Saint-Saëns piano concertos, sparky, lovable performances conducted by his father Jean-Jacques. This solo disc contains weightier repertoire but the Kantorow’s elucidatory abilities prevent things ever getting oppressive; if there’s a more accessible reading of Brahms’s Op. 1 Piano Sonata on disc, I’ve not heard it. Questions of technique don’t arise here, and unless you follow with a score it’s easy to forget how Read more ...
graham.rickson
Schubert: Sonata in G major D. 894, Moments Musicaux D. 780, Fantasy in F minor D. 940 Maurizio Pollini, Daniele Pollini (pianos) (Deutsche Grammophon)What a superb cover image for the last recording by Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024). Pollini ‘père’ is seated at the piano, backlit. His son Daniele (b.1978) stands behind him, looking over his shoulder. Cosimo Filippini’s photograph tells the story of this album so well. Pollini is in the role of the authoritative guide, as if teaching his son – and us listeners – lessons about this music. I can somehow imagine him repeating Paul Read more ...
David Nice
Wonders never ceased in Elisabeth Leonskaja’s return to the Wigmore Hall. Not only did she play Schubert’s last three sonatas with all repeats and the full range of a unique power undiminished in a 78-year old alongside a never too overstated pathos, radiance and delicacy; just before receiving the Wigmore Hall Medal (presentation by John Gilhooly pictured below), she also gave us more revelations in the compressed world of Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, Op. 19.Only this pianist could possibly follow Pavel Kolesnikov's revelatory take on Schubert's crowning glory, the B flat Sonata D960 the Read more ...
David Nice
All five finalists in the Leeds International Piano Competition, at which Pavel Kolesnikov was one of the jurors, should have been given tickets, transport and accommodation to hear his Wigmore recital the evening after the prizegiving. Not that supreme imagination can be taught, but to witness the degree of physical ease (and freeflowing concert wear) that allows all the miracles to happen would be a good lesson to so many tension-racked pianists, including some of Kolesnikov’s peers.As always, the connections he made in his programme were surprising, though obvious once you thought about it Read more ...
Simon Thompson
When you stop to think about it, Schwanengesang is a pretty ridiculous thing. Schubert’s final song cycle was famously put together by his publishers after his death, and so it’s barely a cycle at all. Therefore, unlike Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, there’s no story and, even worse, the lurches in mood between the songs are so extreme that they can become absurd.I reflected on that several times while watching Ian Bostridge singing it during this EIF Queen’s Hall recital, because his identification with the songs and their meaning seemed so complete that he could drag the audience into Read more ...