sat 05/04/2025

Schubert

theartsdesk in Verbier: Musicians Peak in the Alps

You want to see Yuri Bashmet, arguably the greatest living viola player, but you can't because you've chosen to go to a recital by Yevgeny Kissin, one of the world's top pianists, on the same evening in another hall. Even the option of dashing from...

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Performing Die Schöne Müllerin

Few great works of art are as disarming as Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin. With its folksong-like melodies and deceptively simple harmonic palate, it is quite hard to account for the cycle’s profound emotional effect. How is it that over the course...

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Ivana Gavrić, Wigmore Hall

There are some recitals where you think only about the abstracted music - the harmonic arguments, the structural cleverness, the textural ingenuity - and there are others where you are forced to confront  the presence of a set of living,...

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Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Fischer, Royal Festival Hall

Rossini provided the lively curtain-raisers to both halves of this Chamber Orchestra of Europe concert, streamed live to Aberdeen where Shell, the sponsors, have something of a vested interest in keeping their employees entertained. The liquid gold...

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Christopher Nupen on Filming Music and Musicians

Nupen at work: 'Filmmaking is storytelling'

"What is it about Schubert’s music that has such power 180 years on?  It has nothing to do with who he slept with or what he had for breakfast – it’s the work," insists filmmaker Christopher Nupen, whose series of films about composers is currently...

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Razumovsky Ensemble, Wigmore Hall

Eight for Schubert: the Razumovsky Ensemble's latest team triumphs

Just to contemplate the shifting talent pool of this chamber co-operative can be giddying. Last night 10 great ensemble players, from top violin soloist Alexander Sitkovetsky to three London orchestral principals who must have jumped at the chance...

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Classical Music CDs Round-Up 3

CD of the Month: 'All the frisson of live performances but none of the technical disadvantages'

Our pick of the latest Classical CDs ranges from Tchaikovsky's first and final symphonies to Greek-themed songs by Schubert, by way of late Stravinsky ballets, rare Roussel, a complete Sibelius cycle, cross-over music for recorder and a Superman...

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Imogen Cooper, QEH

Franz Schubert: sweet but probably not sane

Even Schubert’s very earliest compositions terrify. His first songs, written when he was only 13, are unforgettably vivid, gory, messy, mangled, full of darkness and horror, like dead little birds. He never shakes off this Gothic sensibility; it’s...

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Wolfgang Holzmair, Andreas Haefliger, Wigmore Hall

Baritone Wolfgang Holzmair and pianist Andreas Haefliger: two to admire for musicianship and integrity

There’s something beyond detailed and attentive musicianship that’s needed in Schubert’s last, most desolate song-cycle, Winterreise (“Winter’s journey”). It’s a dramatic arc that unites these 24 songs into a journey, the number of breaths in time...

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LSO/Tilson Thomas, Goerne, Barbican Hall

Michael Tilson Thomas’s association with the London Symphony Orchestra runs deep - he was its principal conductor for eight years, and for his latest return to his old band last night the American programmed works that, while they had a Viennese...

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Tread Softly/ Carnival of the Animals/ Comedy of Change, Rambert Dance, Sadler's Wells

At its best (ie when it’s not trying to be gimmicky and snare so-called “new audiences”), Rambert is unique in Britain in providing music and dance as theatre. No other company matches it in commitment to this, not even the Royal Ballet, which long...

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Matthias Goerne, Alexander Schmalcz, Wigmore Hall

When you go to a Schubert recital, you’re plunged into a whirlpool of emotional ambivalence, heat and chill running together, music and lyrics not always playing the same tune. When Schubert seizes on a poem, it’s not because he’s interested in...

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