thu 28/03/2024

Classical Reviews

Sonica, Glasgow

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

At first it looked like a joke. But, as each muscle spasm, set off by an electric shock, did appear to produce a pained expression in the performer and a subsequent note, one slowly had to accept that these four string quartet players were indeed being electrocuted into performance. The Wigmore Hall, it wasn’t. Sonica, it certainly was.

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Britten 100: Birthday Concert, Union Chapel/A Life in Pictures, National Portrait Gallery

David Nice

“Translated Daughter, come down and startle/Composing mortals with immortal fire.” So W H Auden invokes heavenly Cecilia, patron saint of music, and it seems she did just that with Benjamin Britten, who set Auden’s text for unaccompanied choir and happened to be born on the saint’s day 100 years ago.

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Stotijn, Fritz, LSO, Harding, Barbican

Mark Valencia

The alpha (Schubert) and omega (Mahler) of Austrian romanticism made for a musically satisfying pairing as the London Symphony Orchestra resumed normal service after its recent Gergiev-Berlioz marathon. Buoyed by the contrasting delights of a sprightly symphony and a weighty song-cycle, the spring was back in the musicians' collective step as they played as one for their principal guest conductor, Daniel Harding.

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Stile Antico, Cadogan Hall

alexandra Coghlan

Earlier this year early music ensemble Stile Antico released a really fabulous disc. The Phoenix Rising is a collage of the Tudor church-music classics that all gained their status and familiarity thanks to the work of the Carnegie Trust and their Tudor Church Music edition. The recording has – very deservedly – won or been nominated for a handful of awards, and if this were a CD review I’d be able to leave it at that.

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Dame Felicity Lott, Graham Johnson, Wigmore Hall

Mark Valencia

As farewell galas go it was less an obituary, more a celebration of an artist who has earned every whoop of the rock-star welcome she received from an adoring crowd. Dame Felicity Lott – "Flott" to her friends (i.e. pretty well everyone present) – was cheered to the echo by her fans and eulogised at either end of the evening by Wigmore Hall director John Gilhooly.

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Classical CDs Weekly: Brahms, Janáček, John Harle

graham Rickson

 

Brahms: The Symphonies, Orchestral works Gewandhausorchester /Riccardo Chailly (Decca)

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Boris Giltburg, Queen Elizabeth Hall

David Nice

Among the diaspora of younger-generation Russian or Russian-trained pianists, there are at least four whose intellect and poetry match their technique. Three whose craft was honed at the Moscow or St Petersburg Conservatories – Yevgeny Sudbin, Alexander Melnikov and the inexplicably less well-feted Rustem Hayroudinoff – have made England their home.

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Schools' Prom, Royal Albert Hall

alexandra Coghlan

This year I’ve sat through Carrie Cracknell’s Wozzeck dry-eyed, seen a handful of Mimis take their last consumptive breath without so much as a tremor, even heard Shostakovich’s shattering Symphony No. 13 without obvious emotional distress. I was beginning to think I was getting irretrievably jaded, hardened; then a bunch of Welsh kids with ukuleles and a folk trio from the Highlands came along and everything changed.

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Jerusalem Quartet, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Wigmore Hall

alexandra Coghlan

A previous visit to the Wigmore Hall saw the Jerusalem Quartet make headlines for all the wrong reasons, after political protestors disrupted the live-broadcast concert. Last night however all was mercifully calm and music-focused for the start of the first three-concert sequence in the quartet’s Shostakovich cycle, though audience members did have to brave the rather incongruous bouncers, lined up in their casual-with-just-a-hint-of-don’t-even-think-about-it chic outside the hall doors.

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Philip Glass/Steve Reich, Royal Festival Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

The Southbank’s artistic director Jude Kelly was out in force at this penultimate weekend of The Rest is Noise festival, delivering little triumphalist, Ryan Air-like fanfares, reminding us how pioneering they had been to programme composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Philip Glass - composers who no one had ever heard of before they'd bravely decided to put them on.

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