sun 13/07/2025

Classical Reviews

CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla, Symphony Hall Birmingham

Richard Bratby

Is there anything on a concert programme more guaranteed to make the heart lift – or to prove that a conductor has their musical priorities straight – than a Haydn symphony? If you're tired of Haydn, you're tired of life: there’s no music more joyous, more inventive or more resistant to vanity. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla chose his Symphony No 6 of 1761, called Le Matin for its opening sunrise and the freshness of its ideas, and it was a delight.

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Grande Messe des Morts, BBCSO, Roth, RAH

Peter Quantrill

Lest we forget. On Flanders’ Fields. For the Fallen. No one does stiff-upper-lip, buttoned-up remembrance quite like the English. Since its composition only a little over half a century ago, the War Requiem has become our national anthem for the departed.

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Classical CDs Weekly: Jonathan Dove, Ayako Fujiki, Anne Sofie von Otter

graham Rickson

 

Jonathan Dove: For an Unknown Soldier, An Airmail Letter from Mozart Nicky Spence (tenor), Melvyn Tan (piano), London Mozart Players/Nicholas Cleobury (Signum)

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Ehnes, Hallé, Elder, Heyward, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

Robert Beale

Two things to note in Thursday’s Hallé performance at the Bridgewater Hall: the debut in the Manchester main series of their highly talented new assistant conductor, Jonathon Heyward, and another stride along the road towards the Hallé/Elder complete edition of the Vaughan Williams symphonies.

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Sampson, BBCSSO, Runnicles, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Christopher Lambton

Mahler said of the last movement of his Fourth Symphony that it should be pure, like the “undifferentiated blue of the sky”. Writing the symphony in his lakeside retreat at Maiernigg in the summer of 1900, he probably had a different sort of blue in mind to that which streaked the Edinburgh sky on an icy Sunday afternoon in November.

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Steve Reich at 80, Barbican

Helen Wallace

I could have sworn there was a spontaneous outbreak of phased coughing in the Barbican Hall on Saturday night, rapidly dissolving into laughter; such was the festive atmosphere at Steve Reich’s 80th birthday gig. This three-part epic attracted a full house, spanning the generations – from Michael Nyman, behind me mischievously proclaiming Reich’s debt to him, to students catching a glimpse of a legend.

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Borodin Quartet, Wigmore Hall

Gavin Dixon

The Borodin Quartet has been playing for over 70 years, and in the early days collaborated closely with Dmitri Shostakovich. None of the players from then are in the line-up now, of course, but the group has worked hard to maintain its distinctive identity and performance traditions, even as the players change. And they have a good claim to continuity: Valentin Berlinsky, the legendary cellist who was with the quartet almost from the start, was still playing with them up until 2007.

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Classical CDs Weekly: Glazunov, Shostakovich, Wagner, Dragon Voices

graham Rickson

 

Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No.1, Glazunov: Violin Concerto Nicola Benedetti (violin), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Kirill Karabits (Decca)

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The Sixteen, Kings Place

alexandra Coghlan

And so it comes to an end. Six months, 33 concerts, and many miles of travelling later, The Sixteen’s annual Choral Pilgrimage is now finished for another year. With so many concerts it’s inevitable that the singers’ relationship to the repertoire evolves and develops; the performances we heard last night will not have been those the audience at St John’s College, Cambridge experienced back in April. So what is the effect of living so intimately with this small handful of works?

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The Schumann Project, Oxford Lieder Festival

David Nice

It felt oddly disrespectful showing up in time for Schumann's wake on the fifteenth and final day of this year's Oxford Lieder Festival.

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