Classical Reviews
Best of 2014: Classical ConcertsTuesday, 30 December 2014
Offshoots of the Venezuelan El Sistema’s worldwide dissemination as well as other youth and music projects continued to bloom and grow in 2014. The morning after what was the orchestral concert of the year for many who caught it, Alexandra Coghlan (see below) and myself included, players of the European Union Youth Orchestra reconvened in the Albert Hall to workshop three classics with musicians from nine British youth orchestras and London schools. Read more... |
Bach B minor Mass, Trinity College Choir, OAE, Layton, St John's Smith SquareTuesday, 23 December 2014
While the embers of the concert year are dying out around the country, you can be sure of a great blaze-up at St John’s Smith Square. The annual Christmas Festival of quality early-music groups and top choirs – this is the 29th – now traditionally culminates in two great works for chorus and orchestra. Read more... |
Fretwork, Shoreditch ChurchTuesday, 16 December 2014
There is nothing quite like Fretwork at their best. When the viol consort put themselves through their paces in the music of the late 16th and the 17th centuries, with music by Byrd, Dowland, Lawes and Purcell, the results are infallibly and unvaryingly stunning. The mutual listening, the sense of pacing, the balance, the homogeneity of sound, the results they reach are joyous. Read more... |
Ohlsson, BBCSO, Oramo, BarbicanSaturday, 13 December 2014
How disorienting it is to find century-old works in the concert repertoire of which you can still say “I’ve never heard anything like it”. That must have been the reaction of most audience members last night to Tuscan-German composer Ferruccio Busoni’s 85-minute symphony-concerto for piano, orchestra and male voice choir, since only a few will have caught what classical anoraks tell me was its only other London performance in recent years, at the 1988 Proms. Read more... |
Le Concert Spirituel, Christ Church SpitalfieldsFriday, 12 December 2014
The magnificent Christ Church Spitalfields is a masterpiece of the British baroque and very much an ideal venue for this Spitalfields Winter Festival visit by French period instrument group Le Concert Spirituel. Travelling as a chamber ten-piece without conductor Hervé Niquet, the group performed a selection of early 18th-century works from across Europe, bringing in Muffat, Purcell, Biber, Zelenka, Charpentier, Corelli and Bach. Read more... |
Messiah, OAE, Howarth, Royal Festival HallWednesday, 10 December 2014
Goldilocks would not have been a good conductor. There’s a reason why there isn’t a dynamic marking between mezzo forte and mezzo piano. Mezzo on its own would be a pretty bland state of affairs, sat solidly in an inoffensive state of not-too-loud-and-not-too-soft, not swelling to a crescendo or pining away to a decrescendo, but content with a steady sonic compromise. Read more... |
Siglo de Oro, Allies, Shoreditch ChurchWednesday, 10 December 2014
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Greed Tuesday: they all vanished from memory once the first notes of Siglo de Oro’s Christmas-themed concert started. This young British choir, now six years old, began with what’s already become a modern classic, Jan Sandström’s magical setting of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, where the first staggered entries open like a fan and we drift thereafter in slow-motion bliss. Read more... |
Stefanovich, Currie, Queen Elizabeth HallMonday, 08 December 2014
Tamara Stefanovich and Colin Currie – a dream team for Birtwistle’s The Axe Manual. Both are new music specialists with a gift for grace and dexterity, even in the most complex works. The score sets up a range of sophisticated relationships between piano and percussion, from sympathetic resonances to complex interplays of stretto and hocket. Yet none of this fazes the two players, nor ever challenges their close ensemble, seemingly telepathic in its precision. Read more... |
Garbarek, Hilliard Ensemble, King's College Chapel CambridgeSunday, 07 December 2014
This was “Officium – the final concert.” The Hilliard Ensemble took their decision around three years ago to disband as a group, and – for three of them – to retire, rather than to re-launch with a new generation of voices. They are now on the road doing a series of farewells. Their final bow will be at the Wigmore Hall on December 20th, and between now and then, their victory lap takes in Taunton, Gdansk, Châlons-en-Champagne, Florence and Cologne. Read more... |
Aimard, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival HallSunday, 07 December 2014
In words and music Harrison Birtwistle isn’t always as gruff as he’s been painted. Interviewed over the summer during one of his 80th birthday Prom concerts, the composer tossed off enough humorous remarks to suggest that a new career could almost beckon as a stand-up comedian touring the northern clubs. Read more... |
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