Classical music
Robert Beale
The members of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, on an intensive tour of the UK and Ireland which sees them right now performing daily after long journeys, are heroes by any standard.They are also musicians of high calibre and with a distinguished tradition. The programme they offered in Manchester was designed to link Britain and Ukraine symbolically, but it was – as with all its variants on the tour – built around Beethoven.For a symphony orchestra, their numbers on tour are modest, with 34 string players and 15 others, but it’s a contingent that works very well for Beethoven – Read more ...
Simon Thompson
It’s hard enough to sell tickets for any concert of classical music these days, let alone one that features mostly contemporary music; yet in this week’s offering from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, featuring six recently written works, none of which could be described as familiar, there was hardly a seat to be had in Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall. Why?If there was any justice then it would at least in part be down to the quality of the orchestral playing, which is normally a given from this crew. And, indeed, the orchestra sounded terrific in Anna Clyne’s Sound and Fury, a piece written for them Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The London Handel Festival delivered extra rations at Smith Square Hall on Saturday. A bright, crisp beginning-of-spring afternoon made a fitting backdrop – with sunlight streaming in through the (former) church windows – for Handel’s witty but tender pastoral entertainment, or mini-opera, of 1718, Acis and Galatea.Then, as the shadows lengthened, we returned for the unabashed grandeur and virtuosity of the Ode for St Cecilia’s Day of 1739. The singers and players of Gabrieli (no longer “Consort”) under Paul McCreesh (pictured below by Ben Wright) brought an equal but differently-weighted Read more ...
Robert Beale
Coinciding with Mothers' Day, and a week after International Women’s Day, Manchester Camerata gave this fascinating window into the world of lesser-known music by British women composers.Why such an education is needed is a good question. Are some of these pieces (which are to be recorded for CD by John Andrews, soloists Alexandra Dariescu, Alex Mitchell and Rachael Clegg and the Camerata strings this week) in the nature of what a former, male and very Lancastrian, member of the Hallé brass section once defined for me as “justly neglected masterpieces”?Or should we go looking for hidden gems Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This programme – of Weir, Bartók, Finzi and Stravinsky – was right up my alley, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Sakari Oramo delivered on its promise, with performances that ranged from the grandly ceremonial in the Weir to touchingly intimate in the Finzi. In addition there was an enjoyable concerto for South Korean star Yeol Eum Son and, to finish, one of the great orchestral showpieces, The Firebird, or rather some of it. I have known Judith Weir’s The Welcome Arrival of Rain forever, but performances in the concert hall are sadly few and far between. But it is great to hear it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Lise Davidsen: Live at the Met Lise Davidsen (soprano) James Baillieu (piano) (Decca)
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This really is Lise Davidsen’s moment. At the time of writing, the singer often described “greatest dramatic soprano in the world” has just performed the opening night of a run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera as Isolde. She made her house debut in 2019 (as Lisa in The Queen of Spades) and has been frequently welcomed back: this is her ninth different role in a house which she is starting to call it her second home. The current production of Read more ...
David Nice
The master pianist and pedagogue Heinrich Neuhaus impressed upon Elisabeth Leonskaja the maxim "don't look for yourself in the music, but find the music in you", something she says she reflects upon daily. Which is how she seems to channel the essence, shedding ego but retaining personality. More recently she's given us one-composer marathons - Beethoven's and Schubert's last three sonatas above all - so to be reminded of what genius there is in her more diverse programming was a special pleasure in last night's recital of Beethoven, Schoenberg, Chopin, Webern, Schubert and Mozart. The Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
My last St John Passion arrived during the Proms in the vast hanger of the Royal Albert Hall, where the impeccable, discreet musicianship of Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan sometimes struggled with the chilly open spaces all around. At St Martin-in-the-Fields yesterday evening, no such problems: the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, with Peter Whelan directing, balanced intimacy and grandeur in a reading whose visceral impact and involving immediacy wholly filled the church, while never overwhelming it. Vocally and instrumentally, the Monteverdi singers and EBS Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch Martin Hayes play the Irish fiddle is like watching a man possessed by his music. As his bow flickers across the strings the infectious energy of it spills into the air, through his limbs, and eventually out into the whistling, whooping crowd. Through the course of his career, Hayes – most famous for founding the Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming – has joined forces with musicians ranging from Paul Simon to Yo-Yo Ma, and played everywhere from small pubs to Obama’s Whitehouse. At Koko last night, with his ensemble The Common Ground, his virtuoso repertoire of Irish Read more ...
Simon Thompson
If there was love in the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Valentine’s concert, then it was very much of the doomed variety. There was Romeo and Juliet, of course, as imagined in Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture, and Zemlinsky’s marvellously strange take on The Little Mermaid. Zemlinsky’s Mermaid disappeared for decades until it was reconstructed in the 1980s, and that long absence might go some way towards explaining why it’s such a rarity in concert halls today. We audiences are the losers in that, though, because this 45-minute orchestral fantasy is a cascade of colours in which the Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Pretty much any performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony is a special occasion, but this one perhaps more so than most. For one thing, it was a landmark event in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s 90th anniversary year - the only concert this season that saw the return of Sir Donald Runnicles, their Conductor Emeritus. Runnicles’ Mahler performances were always highlights during his time in charge of the orchestra, and this is a special work for him, not only one of the pieces that persuaded him to become a conductor, but also one in which he sang as a young member of the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Almost everything about Piotr Anderszewski's Wigmore Hall recital pleased, intrigued and even thrilled – except, perhaps, the order of the works. The Polish-born pianist opened with his selection of a dozen of Brahms’s late solo pieces, from the Op. 116 to 119 sets, and returned after the interval with the thunderous heavy cavalry of Beethoven’s final sonata, Op. 111. Compare, and contrast, the supreme leave-takings of both poets of the piano.Now, Anderszewski’s arrangement and performance of the Brahms works – several of them far from “miniatures” – lends them a dramatic and architectural Read more ...