Classical music
Bernard Hughes
I’m not sure what exactly this event was – orchestral concert, electronic dance music gig or multimedia extravaganza – but however you define it, I loved every mad minute. Anna Meredith (b 1978) is one of the most successful contemporary classical composers of her generation but revels in crossing genre divides, and this event delighted in smashing boundaries with breathtaking confidence.Meredith, whose starry classical CV includes pieces in the 2008 Last Night of the Proms and the recently announced First Night of the 2018 Proms, has a taste for the unusual or technically challenging, not Read more ...
David Nice
In a classical recording industry seemingly obsessed with marketing beautiful young female violinists, but very often presenting them in repertoire to which most of them seem to have little individual to add, how do you make your mark? Norwegian Eldbjørg Hemsing came up with a bright idea typical of a thoughtful approach in which the music always comes first: to twin a 1914 concerto she genuinely admires by a compatriot very few people will know, Hjalmar Borgstrøm (1864-1925), with what is perhaps the ultimate 20th century challenge to violinists, Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto.Is the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Borgström: Violin Concerto, Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1 Eldbjørg Hemsing (violin), Wiener Symphoniker/Olari Elts (BIS)Hjalmar Borgström sounds like the name of a BBC Four gumshoe, a melancholy detective solving crimes in downtown Tromsø. He was actually a Norwegian composer (1864-1925) who, like Grieg, studied in Germany, remaining there for 15 years. Grieg quickly assimilated his technique with native folk music, later expressing dismay at the younger Borgström’s lack of interest in making his music sound specifically Norwegian. His G major Violin Concerto was premiered in 1914 Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
In the 27 years since he first conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Sir Simon Rattle has steadily integrated its moodswings and high contrasts into a reading of a piece which now feels more than ever like the work of a man engaged in a form of symphonic stock-taking – before, in the Tenth, setting out on bold new paths. Previous hits are revisited, too: in the second movement, Mahler returns one more time to the well of his beloved Scherzo form, back to its appearance in the First Symphony, and further back still to Berliozian implications of symphonic autobiography.A masterful display of tempo Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Matthias Goerne has an exceptional ability to sustain evenness and legato through a vocal line. His breath control and his tone production are things to be marvelled at. He is able to function at impossibly slow tempi, and to make an audience hold its collective breath in admiration. The problem comes when he performs a recital programme which sets out to prove that point. Again and again. All evening.I was probably in a minority, because this Wigmore Hall recital, with the 23-year old South Korean-born pianist Seong-Jin Cho, was loudly applauded at the end of each half. But I found the Read more ...
David Nice
Why would any conductor resist Mahler's last great symphonic adventure? By which I mean the vast finale of his Tenth Symphony, realised in full by Deryck Cooke, and not the first-movement Adagio, fully scored (unlike most of the rest) by the composer and puritanically regarded as the end of the line by supposed Mahlerians. Not Simon Rattle. Ever since his Bournemouth recording of 1980, he has kept faith with Cooke's noble venture to fill out an entire symphonic structure of unassailable conviction, and to judge from this visceral yet painstakingly articulated LSO performance, he feels it ever Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Featuring two Russian composers, the two halves of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s programme could hardly have been more different. In the first, pianist Xiayin Wang (pictured below) joined the RSNO for Scriabin’s florid, rarely-heard Piano Concerto. The orchestral sound under Peter Oundjian – in what is his final season as Music Director – was lean yet strong, as the vast number of violins played as a single, powerful muscle.While this made for a captivating orchestral presence, Wang’s solo playing was for most of the first movement either overshadowed or downright drowned out. Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Brahms violin sonatas make a perfect spring evening recital. The Second and Third were inspired by a summer retreat, but all three are light, bright and with direct melodic appeal. Violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien conveyed that carefree spirit perfectly, the long melodic lines simply but elegantly shaped and the accompanying textures always carefully calibrated. They also made the most of the occasional dramatic outbursts, providing valuable contrast, while always maintaining the essential intimacy of expression.Brahms (pictured below) places much of the violin Read more ...
graham.rickson
Hans Abrahamsen String Quartets No. 1-4 Arditti String Quartet (Winter & Winter)The opening section of Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen’s 2012 String Quartet No. 4 is subtitled “light and airy”, and, aptly, the four strings produce extraordinary, airy sonorities: a sequence of euphonious, ethereal whistles which suggest distant wind. At certain points, the music becomes elusive to the point of invisibility, moving imperceptibly into a faster, featherlight “dance of light”, the mood revisited in Abrahamsen's shimmering finale. The technique is ingenious, the craft immaculate, though neither Read more ...
David Nice
Kudos, as ever, to Vladimir Jurowski for making epic connections. Not only did he bookend a rich LPO concert with two very different symphonies from the late 1930s by Stravinsky and Shostakovich; he also masterminded and attended the early evening special event, another variegated shell in the cornucopia of the Changing Faces: Stravinsky's Journey festival.Featuring the young players of the orchestra's Foyle Future Firsts programme and their mentors, it started with a lovable performance of Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto - exactly contemporary with the Symphony in C heard later - Read more ...
David Nice
STOP PRESS (10/4/2020): this performance is up for a short period on the Deutsche Kammerphilhamonie's website for free viewing. Paavo Järvi is offering a live Q&A on conducting Brahms on Saturday 11 April 2020.They did things differently in 1858. Between the movements of Brahms's surprising new Requiem in the Biblical German of Martin Luther, resounding in Bremen's Romanesque Cathedral on Good Friday, came "Erbarme dich" from Bach's St Matthew Passion, Schumann's "Abendlied" and "I know that my redeemer liveth" from Handel's Messiah. Absent from the Requiem at that time was Brahms's own Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Space is big – that seems to be the message of Unsuk Chin’s new oratorio Le Chant des Enfants des Étoiles. The work sets texts, ranging from the Baroque to the present day, concerned with space and scale. The work’s cosmic aspirations are reflected in its performing forces, a huge orchestra with augmented percussion, chorus, children's choir, and, for good measure, a suitably Gothic organ part. The work was given a colourful and atmospheric performance by the Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen, with lighting effects – almost total darkness to begin, later a blue/green flood across the organ Read more ...