Classical Reviews
Christian Blackshaw, Wigmore Hall online review - pure as the driven snowTuesday, 26 January 2021
From a distance, the pianist Christian Blackshaw bears an uncanny resemblance to Franz Liszt, silver hair swept back à la 19th century. At the piano, though, you could scarcely find two more different musicians. There seems not to be a flamboyant bone in Blackshaw’s body. Read more... |
Apartment House, Wigmore Hall online review - introspective music for isolated timesMonday, 18 January 2021
Another year, another lockdown. Though I have little doubt this was not the way most us of hoped to start 2021, we can at least be grateful that we’re not suffering quite the same drought of live music we experienced back in March. Read more... |
Gillam, Hallé, Bloxham, Hallé online review - music of poetryFriday, 15 January 2021
Jonathan Bloxham makes his debut as conductor with the Hallé Orchestra in the third of the Hallé’s Winter Season concerts on film. Read more... |
The Soldier's Tale, Scottish Chamber Orchestra online review - top performers master a baggy mini-monsterTuesday, 12 January 2021
Born in exigency at the end of the First World War and soon kiboshed by the Spanish flu, The Soldier’s Tale as originally conceived is a tricky hybrid to bring off. Not so the suite – Stravinsky’s mostly incidental-music numbers are unique and vivid from the off – but the whole story, based on a Russian folk tale about a simple man’s tricky dealings with Old Nick, is awkward, made impossibly complicated and preachy by the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz. Read more... |
Gabrieli Consort, McCreesh online review - joyous Bach Christmas OratorioThursday, 07 January 2021
After the main portion of the Voces8 Live from London Christmas festival revelled in the variety of its groups and repertoire, the final stretch allowed a single group to explore a single masterpiece by a great composer. Read more... |
Vienna New Year’s Day Concert, BBC Two/Radio 3 review - noble integrity and missionary zealSaturday, 02 January 2021
“Without a care” (Ohne Sorgen, the title of a fast polka by Josef Strauss performed here with deadpan sung laughs from the players) was never going to be the motto of a Vienna Philharmonic concert without an audience. Introspection and even sadness seemed frequent companions in the interesting New Year’s Day bill of fare. Read more... |
Bevan, LPO, Jurowski, RFH online review – never-ending storiesFriday, 01 January 2021
The LPO, and its soon-to-depart chief conductor Vladimir Jurowski, began its 2020 Vision season back in February. It set out to mix and match the music of three centuries and show how it echoes in contemporary works. Well, little of that turned out quite as planned: this final concert at the Royal Festival Hall was meant to premiere Sir James MacMillan’s new Christmas Oratorio, now scheduled for the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 16 January. Read more... |
Best of 2020: Classical music concertsMonday, 28 December 2020
No picture of a musician tells more of a story about 2020 than the above image of cellist Steven Isserlis, stepping out on 8 July to play, what else but Bach, to his first live – albeit small – audience in just under four months. Read more... |
Voces8 LIVE from London online review part 2 – an assortment box of Christmas choral treatsSunday, 27 December 2020
I gave a rare five stars to the first half of the Voces8 LIVE From London Christmas online festival and the second five concerts matched the first in their vitality, virtuosity and variety. Read more... |
Stile Antico, The Cardinall's Musick, Wigmore Hall online review – lightening our darknessTuesday, 22 December 2020
Suitably enough, this year’s musical Christmas arrived at the Wigmore not in a dazzle of joyful light and bedecked with winter greenery, but with a lonely band of singers facing the gloom of an unlit, empty hall as fear and confusion multiplied outside. In both of yesterday’s concerts, the closing events of the venue’s defiant and courageous autumn season, a cappella choral music from the Renaissance ushered in a festival more austere than ecstatic. Read more... |
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