thu 28/03/2024

Classical Reviews

Choral Pilgrimage 2014, The Sixteen, St John's College Chapel, Cambridge

Sebastian Scotney

The core pulse of Tudor polyphony is often deliciously slow. It gets down to a mesmeric pace of about 30 beats per minute. The listener just has to succumb to it, and the experience, even in the virtually unheated Cambridge College chapel where The Sixteen began its 2014 Choral Pilgrimage last night, was pure pleasure.

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L'Arpeggiata, Wigmore Hall

alexandra Coghlan

Turning every concert into a party, baroque ensemble L’Arpeggiata are performers in the truest sense. Too often early musicians get away with being shy or downright awkward, visibly uncomfortable when forced to introduce an encore. Not so with these European virtuosi, whose signature improvisations give each member (yes, even the percussionist) the chance to step into a starring role. And don’t get me started on the baroque rap that concluded the group’s most recent London concert…

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Classical CDs Weekly: Prokofiev, Schubert, Zemlinsky

graham Rickson

 

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Organ Gala Launch Concert, Royal Festival Hall

Kimon Daltas

The newly restored Royal Festival Hall organ was inaugurated in a celebratory atmosphere with this gala launch concert, which also marks the beginning of the Pull Out All the Stops organ festival.

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St Lawrence String Quartet, San Francisco Symphony, Tilson Thomas, RFH

David Nice

A voyage around Beethoven by Ives and John Adams, and then beyond him by Berlioz, added up to a vintage San Francisco Symphony programme from its music director Michael Tilson Thomas. Forty years on from his first concert with SFS, he’s still youthful in demeanour, still flapping with seagull (or albatross) like flamboyancy. But is there a chill behind the showmanship?

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Classical CDs Weekly: Alwyn, Sibelius, Tenebrae

graham Rickson

 

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Villa Lobos: Total Immersion, Barbican

Simon Broughton

“This is not so much a total immersion, more of a quick shower,” said Simon Wright, biographer of Villa Lobos at the start of the day-long exploration of his music. With up to 1,500 works in existence – the exact number is unconfirmed – he promised we’d be “hacking our way through a tiny part of this immense jungle”, to use another metaphor that seems alarmingly appropriate with this composer.

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Martinpelto, BBC Philharmonic, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

philip Radcliffe

No one could accuse Manchester’s musical forces of short-changing Richard Strauss on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Under the title Strauss’s Voice, over two months three orchestras, eight conductors and a dozen soloists have delivered eleven concerts and several open rehearsals and talks.

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Classical CDs Weekly: Haydn, Weinberg, Battle for Music

graham Rickson

 

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Gabriela Montero, Queen Elizabeth Hall

Sebastian Scotney

Gabriela Montero stands out as different. She is an American-based improvising classical pianist of real quality. She has a courageous civil rights message to convey about the tragedy of unseen arrests and murders in her native Venezuela, but is nonetheless happy to take her curtain call draped in the colourful Venezuelan flag. 

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