thu 28/03/2024

Classical Reviews

Zimerman, LSO, Rattle, Barbican

Peter Quantrill

Over the past decade Krystian Zimerman and  Sir Simon Rattle have created and evolved a performing idea of Brahms’s D minor piano concerto which is still remarkable for its considered weight and grimly imposing grandeur, Michelangelo’s Mosè in music.

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NYCC, NYJO, Southwark Cathedral

David Nice

Cleopatra in her barge gliding down the nave of Southwark Cathedral? Only figuratively, in the hypnotic “Half the Fun” movement of Duke Ellington’s constantly surprising Shakespeare compendium Such Sweet Thunder. Still, it wouldn’t be that much stranger than the combination of a jazz orchestra and a chamber choir – so superlative as not to need the “youth” in their names observed – celebrating Shakespeare in his local place of worship.

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Max Raabe, Wigmore Hall

Sebastian Scotney

Fair exchange? German humour, perhaps?

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Continuum Ensemble, Headlam, Kings Place

Gavin Dixon

Zeitoper, single scene micro-opera for modern times, enjoyed a brief vogue in the Weimar era, but disappeared as fast the Republic itself. This programme from the Continuum Ensemble resurrected four examples, all from the years 1927-28, to offer a snapshot of Germany’s quickly evolving music theatre scene between the wars. The works, by Hindemith, Ernst Toch and Kurt Weill, are short, with little narrative, and even less musical subtlety.

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Classical CDs Weekly: Gál, Prokofiev, Raffi Besalyan

graham Rickson


Hans Gál: Symphonies 1-4 Orchestra of the Swan/Kenneth Woods (Avie)

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Juntunen, Philharmonia, Ashkenazy, RFH

David Nice

Vladimir Ashkenazy should be made an honorary Finn: not just for his constant championship of Sibelius’s orchestral works throughout his conducting life so far, but above all for the way he understands them.

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Phantasm, Elizabeth Kenny, Wigmore Hall

alexandra Coghlan

There’s an intimacy, an interiority, to music for viol consort that even the string quartet can’t match. The physical placement of the three members of Phantasm who opened this concert of music by Gibbons, Purcell, Locke and Lawes was telling. Occupying three sides of a square, facing one another directly, theirs was a private musical conversation the audience was permitted to overhear.

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Schubert Sonatas 4, Barenboim, RFH

Jessica Duchen

One man and his piano can occasionally fulfil a role more satisfying than the finest orchestra in full sail. The last of Daniel Barenboim's four-recital traversal of Schubert's piano sonatas proved just such an occasion.

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Jansen, LSO, Harding, Barbican

Gavin Dixon

How to respond to Mahler? That was the challenge set by the London Symphony Orchestra to Edward Rushton when they commissioned him to write an opener for this programme. Rushton’s response was to take a story from a biography of Alma and spin it into an orchestral fantasy. The story goes that Alma, listening to Gustav compose the Fifth Symphony, complained about the excessive orchestration, which he then dutifully toned down.

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Schubert Sonatas 3, Barenboim, RFH

David Nice

“You don’t love Schubert’s music?” Such, according to the greatest of living Schubert interpreters Elisabeth Leonskaja, was the response of her mentor Sviatoslav Richter to students who omitted the exposition repeats in the piano sonatas. Daniel Barenboim doesn’t observe them either, on the evidence of yesterday afternoon's concert, but four recitals and much in them ought to prove th

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