wed 19/02/2025

Classical Reviews

Lachenmann Weekend, Southbank Centre

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Helmut Lachenmann is to instrumental technique what The Joy of Sex was to suburban nookie. A conduit to a whole new carnal world. Even those of us supposedly well versed in what a stringed instrument can do watched the Arditti Quartet perform the Lachenmann string quartets at the Queen Elizabeth Hall mouths agape. You...

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BBC Symphony Orchestra 80th Birthday Concert, Barbican

David Nice Kari Kriikku as Kaija Saariaho's unicorn, with David Robertson conducting the BBCSO

Eighty years ago yesterday, the 41-year-old Adrian Boult launched the distinguished history of what was then a 114-strong BBC Symphony Orchestra with Wagner's Flying Dutchman Overture in Portland Place. Three months later ice-and-fire Ernest Ansermet was over to conduct Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in a programme which included the composer at the piano. Both works were indispensible to last night's celebrations: crispbread and butter wrapped around an equally...

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Tetzlaff Quartet, Queen Elizabeth Hall

David Nice Strange meeting: Viola-player Hanna Weinmeister, violinists Elisabeth Kufferath and Christian Tetzlaff, and cellist Tanja Tetzlaff

Their oaky, cultured and selectively scary-wild playing seemed to cast long autumn shadows over a sparse but intent audience. This is the kind of rare programme top violinist Christian Tetzlaff, his cellist sister Tanja and friends like to work on when they get time to play together....

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100 Years of German Song, 1810-1910, Schade, Martineau, Wigmore Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

As we take in news of the cuts that the arts will have to absorb, and wait for the Cassandras to start hollering, it's important to remind ourselves of one arts venue that won't be wiping one bead of sweat off its brow as a result of today's announcements: the Wigmore Hall. This season, Britain's finest chamber music venue has a line-up of unsurpassed quality and variety. Yet it does so with less subsidy than any other equivalent music organisation in the country.

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Nicholas Daniel, Britten Sinfonia, MacMillan, Queen Elizabeth Hall

David Nice Nicholas Daniel: Tackling MacMillan's tough and brilliant new Oboe Concerto before slipping back into the ranks of the Britten Sinfonia

If you were one of the world's top soloists but with a limited concerto stock - as woodwind players' tend to be - wouldn't you find it more rewarding to work as a principal in the orchestral ranks? That's the ideal, surely, but few carry it out in practice. Nicholas Daniel, the beefiest-sounding oboist to appear on the scene since the great Maurice Bourgue, is one who does. Last night he not only shone in the bright ensemble of Beethoven's Second Symphony; he also scored a triumph with a...

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Stephen Kovacevich 70th Birthday Concert, Wigmore Hall

David Nice

Heartfelt birthday salutations to the great pianist first known as plain Stephen Bishop. For a recital in the early 1980s, when he first added the paternal Croatian "Kovacevich", introducing me to late Brahms piano music - Op 117, never more evanescent or troubling since - and the Beethoven Tempest Sonata, an incentive to tackle that work as best I could.

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Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Vásquez, Royal Festival Hall

David Nice

It's now 21 years since I first heard the then-untrumpeted protégés of El Sistema, the Venezuelan phenomenon which has launched a thousand youth-and-music projects worldwide.

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Szymczewska, LPO, Vänskä, Royal Festival Hall

Edward Seckerson

The flurry of fanfares at the start of Magnus Lindberg’s Al largo (UK premiere) sounded almost Waltonian. Or maybe that was because the prospect of Osmo Vänskä in Walton’s First Symphony was such an enticing one that premonitions of its highly distinctive sound-world were already being suggested in the somewhat predictable pyrotechnics of the Lindberg. Lindberg is a great showman and an accomplished technician, but against Walton’s startling originality (circa 1935) he sounded, well...

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Michael Jarrell, Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff

stephen Walsh Michael Jarrell: 'As thrilling and instantaneous as a tidal wave or an avalanche'

Music, Wagner famously pronounced, is the art of transition. For the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, by contrast, music is “the art of punctuation”. On the one hand, how to get from one thing to the next; on the other hand, how to separate one thing from the next. But in the end the problem is much the same: how do we make sense of large chunks of time that contain nothing but music?

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Mutter, LSO, Sir Colin Davis, Barbican

David Nice

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