Wigmore Hall
Rachel Halliburton
When Giuseppe Torelli made the journey from his birthplace of Verona to Bologna in the late 17th century, the trumpet was still seen as something of a brash outsider, suitable for military displays but not for sophisticated music ensembles. Within decades, it would seem perfectly natural for both Vivaldi and Bach to write major works featuring the trumpet.But both owed a considerable debt to Torelli who – beyond being Vivaldi’s teacher – put the instrument on the map by composing 30 concertos for it. So it’s not difficult to see why La Serenissima launched its glorious, vibrant celebration of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
I came to Isata and Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s Wigmore Hall recital on Saturday armed with a certain degree of scepticism. Not about the siblings’ stupendous talent and technique – their manifold achievements speak for themselves – but about the popular idea that family connections make for closer, more cohesive music-making. Well, the more fool me. Sheku’s delighted little glances back to his sister at the keyboard as he waited for her opening notes in a movement or a work hinted at the solid but playful rapport, and rippling empathy, that bound the quartet of fairly disparate pieces they Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Víkingur Ólafsson had something to prove at the Wigmore Hall. And prove it he did, even if, this time, his Goldberg Variations left a few features of Bach’s inexhaustible keyboard panorama at the edge of his pianistic picture. The much-loved Icelandic chart-topper had promised Beethoven’s final three sonatas for this concert. His last-minute reversion to the familiar Goldbergs – which he played on 88 occasions around the world last season after a supremely successful DG recording – had disappointed a portion of his vast fan-base. Besides, the prodigious newcomer Yunchan Lim had just performed Read more ...
David Nice
Igor Levit is a master of the unorthodox marathon, one he was happy to share last night with 24-year-old Austrian Lukas Sternath, his student in Hanover. Not only did Sternath get the obvious stunner of two Prokofiev sonatas in the first half; he also had all the best tunes and phrases as the right-hand man, so to speak, in Shostakovich’s piano arrangement of his towering Tenth Symphony. The best, as in absolutely no holds barred, came at the very end.Had Prokofiev's Ninth Piano Sonata received a more straightforward interpretation, it should have followed the Seventh, not begun the concert: Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Mahan Esfahani play the harpsichord is to watch a philosopher at work. While there’s often playfulness and shimmering levity you can feel the thought behind each note. The Iranian-American’s passion for the harpsichord began when he was nine – the moment he heard it on a cassette his uncle gave to him when he was visiting Iran, he knew he wanted to spend his life devoted to the instrument. In a Guardian interview he once described it as the “posh, pretty boy in prison. He’s gonna get beaten on” – a witty yet defensive quote that accounts for an approach that’s as radical as it’s Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night was the first time I had heard the 12 Ensemble, a string group currently Artist-in-Residence at the Wigmore Hall, and I was very impressed, both by the standard of the playing and the enterprising programming. This gave regular audience-members a little of what they’re used to (a chunk of Brahms) and a decent portion of what they’re not.The first half featured a sequence of pieces which in some way dealt with music of the past, starting with an arrangement of Bach by cellist Max Ruisi (one of the co-founders of 12 Ensemble). Komm, süsser Tod was played with poise and warmth by the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
After a week of illness, heading out into the Sunday afternoon cold and rain was not something I was overjoyed to undertake. But in the event this short Wigmore Hall recital by three young singers and their fellow student pianists was thoroughly cheering, sending me back into the mizzle with a spring in my step. Both in their repertoire choices and their delivery of those choices there was so much to like and I am glad to have been there.The Song Circle of the Royal Academy of Music pairs up auditioned singers and pianists and offers them a number of performing opportunities through their Read more ...
David Nice
Serious realisation of the seven often thorny Martinů string quartets is a major undertaking. When I spoke to Veronika Jarůšková and Peter Jarůšek after an East Neuk Festival concert, they said they intended to do it slowly, with absolute commitment. Tuesday night’s performance of the stupendous Fifth sealed the pledge. It held central place in a concert which only brought relief from Czech grittiness with the great cathartic melodies in Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet.Every performance by "the Pavel Haases" blends searing energy with supreme refinement, and this was no exception; with regular Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Forthright and upright, powerful and lucid, the frank and bold pianism of Leif Ove Andsnes took his Wigmore Hall audience from Norway to Poland (or rather, Paris and Majorca) with a final stop in France. A recital that began with two large-scale Norwegian sonatas – one a remarkable discovery – culminated in the ostensibly remote sound-world of Chopin’s 24 Preludes, part-written on the Balearic island.Yet Andsnes’s sturdy, direct, immaculately even-tempered, playing united these disparate territories, and even stamped his Debussy encore with the same robust character. Fans of a more nebulous, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“O stay and hear,” sings Twelfth Night’s jester Feste in his song “O mistress mine”, “your true love’s coming,/ That can sing both high and low.” And loud and soft, earthbound and airborne, Heldentenor-grave and night-club frivolous: Nicky Spence’s wide vocal span and stylistic versatility made him the ideal soloist for this cheerful post-Christmas canter through several centuries of Shakespeare songs.Roger Quilter’s urbane yet melancholy take on “O mistress mine” (one of a trio of items from the composer) represented just one stop on a musical journey that began with William Byrd and ended Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Enough is as good as a feast, they say. But sometimes, especially at Christmas, you crave a properly groaning table. At the Wigmore Hall, The English Concert, directed by Harry Bicket, concluded their festive Baroque banquet with Bach’s Magnificat – complete with its four Christmas-tide interpolations. They had prefaced the Bach with a trio of lesser-known seasonal pieces dating from the preceding decades, by Charpentier, Stradella, and Purcell. That might sound like a light plate of rather scholarly, even austere, hors d’oeuvres. Not all all: Bicket’s enterprising first half proved that late Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
There were points when this concert felt like the musical equivalent of watching the atom split – as well as notes there were animal shrieks, sinister rattles, sibilant serpentine sussurations, and primal throaty rumbles. Indian-American composer Shruthi Rajasekar, South African cellist and composer Abel Selaocoe (pictured below), and the never less than subversive Hermes Experiment unveiled a fascinating laboratory of noise in a lunchtime session that was as exhilarating as it was enjoyably unexpected.The programme opened with Selaocoe, one of the most charismatic and radically experimental Read more ...