Classical music
Boyd Tonkin
Even in the 21st century, it may not take that long for an outlandish literary experiment to jump genres and become an established musical classic. In 2008, I enthusiastically reviewed a strange, poetic, almost Beckett-like novella by the writer and music critic Paul Griffiths.His let me tell you reconfigures the 483 words that the hapless Ophelia speaks in Hamlet into a haunting, melancholy first-person testament of love, sorrow and (in Griffiths’s version, if not Shakespeare’s) dogged survival. Five years later, the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen brilliantly embraced the intrinsic Read more ...
graham.rickson
Corelli/Handel: Sonatas Michaela Koudelková (recorders), Monika Knoblochová (harpsichord), Libor Mašek (cello), Jan Krejča (theorbo) (Supraphon)This disc’s bright, piquant flavour makes it an irresistible acquisition. I dived into recorder player Michaela Koudelková’s new album after several days spent wallowing in Vaughan Williams orchestral music (see below), and it made for an invigorating palate-cleanser. Try the little “Furioso” from Handel’s Recorder Sonata in D minor, two minutes of exuberant froth, Koudelková’s dancing solo line having the upper hand (just) over a Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Schubert’s Fifth Symphony is one of those pieces whose existence in the modern world hangs on the most tenuous of threads. After its posthumous premiere the score was lost for half a century before a set of parts resurfaced, and the work was saved for posterity. I’d hate to imagine a world without Schubert’s Fifth in it, and will never turn down a chance to hear it live, hence a trip to Milton Court to hear the Britten Sinfonia give it a cheerfully loving reading, as the finale of a programme that also featured Schubert’s inspiration, Mozart, and two contemporary pieces.Before we got to the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kahchun Wong’s second Bridgewater Hall concert of the new season was partly an introduction to the Hallé’s artist-in-residence for 2025-26, Anna Lapwood. The star organist brought a new piece by Max Richter for organ, choir and orchestra and a recent one by Olivia Belli for organ solo – both on the theme of space travel.It sounds a bit bald to say it, but they both evoke the vastness of space and the awe it creates in the human mind in similar ways. Richter’s Cosmology – a Hallé co-commission with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra which has still to receive its Australian premiere – was written Read more ...
David Nice
High on the hill of fascinating New Ross in County Wexford sits its greatest treasure, the ruined 13th century Gothic beauty of St Mary’s. Unless you come at it from the east, its glories are concealed behind the working church which completes it and takes the place of the old nave, built in 1813 and “improved” twice later that century.Plain and spacious inside, with a few military memorials on the wall, the acoustics of its shoebox shape (think a smaller Musikvereinsaal without the trimmings) are perfect, as pianists great and less well-known have attested over the 19 years of the stunningly Read more ...
Clara Marshall Cawley
Over the past decade, Manchester Camerata has gained a reputation for continually innovating and redefining what an orchestra can do. But what does this really mean? For us, this means always questioning the status quo, asking what the impact is, and making our beautiful art form as accessible as possible.A lot of this ethos began around the time that Hacienda Classical started back in 2016. Hacienda began from a realisation that the traditional concert hall wasn’t always attracting large crowds and a belief that there were other audiences who would enjoy listening to an orchestra but Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Last night’s concert at Kings Place was a programme of contemporary pieces – including several premieres – by horn superstar Ben Goldscheider and string quartet Brother Tree Sound, “curated”, as the current lingo has it, by young composer Ben Nobuto, whose high-spirited and invigorating music finished things on a high.There were some pieces for horn plus quartet – first violinist Anna de Bruin’s intricately-textured Aurea, John Croft’s beguiling Voi sete la mia stella and Nobuto’s finale Hope Spiral – alongside others for strings along, some garlanded with Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Donghoon Shin has a taste for the esoteric – a love of labyrinths, literary puzzles, and contradictory aspects of the self. One of his favourite authors is the Argentinian essayist and short-story writer, Jorge Luis Borges, whose perspective flipping explorations often feel like the verbal equivalent of art by Escher.“I loved his games of intertextuality when I was young,” he tells me on a Zoom call. “I was already fascinated by labyrinths, partly because of the video games I’d played. So it was really exciting to experience the way he used the concept and perception of the labyrinth. That Read more ...
Robert Beale
Rachel Helleur-Simcock’s first appearance with the Hallé after appointment as leader of its cello section was auspicious – she became the soloist in their performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in the season’s opening concert at the Bridgewater Hall (Truls Mørk having had to withdraw).After 16 years with the Berlin Philharmonic, she’s come to the Manchester orchestra. No stranger to the concerto’s solo role, she brought a highly lyrical, sweetly sorrowful voice to it that made this performance, conducted by the Hallé’s gifted young maestro, Kahchun Wong, one of the most affecting I’ve heard. Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Royal Northern College of Music was in celebratory mood last night for the opening of its new season, in a joint promotion with Manchester Camerata that marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the RNCM’s Junior Fellowship programme.For Benjamin Huth, it was his final performance as the 2024/25 Mills Williams Junior Fellow in Conducting, and with him were three soloists moving on from their time on the RNCM International Artists Diploma, the highest performance accolade the college offers. What better way for a violinist, cellist and pianist to celebrate together than in Beethoven’s Read more ...
David Nice
Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra last seared us in Britten’s amazing Violin Concerto, with Vilde Frang as soloist, on the very eve of lockdown in 2020. The work’s dying fall then was echoed by the spectral drift ending Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony. This time Frang’s equal as the greatest of violinists, Janine Jansen, faced the daunting solo role fearlessly, and the riproaring end of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony proved that this team is here to stay. There were telling links with Thursday’s concert, too. Britten’s emotional demands are as challenging as Read more ...
David Nice
Between bouts of that far from shabby, still shocking masterpiece Tosca, Royal Opera music director Jakub Hrůša went for fleshcreep: too little of Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin – given a chorus, he could have done the half-hour ballet, not just the suite – and too much of a spooky thing in a big Dvořák cantata.The Spectre's Bride was last heard in London at the Proms conducted by Hrůša’s late master Jiří Bělohlávek. I’d only previously heard Rozhdestvensky feature it in a 1991 Prom, and was racking my brains to remember why it didn’t stick. Here’s the reason. Imagine, Read more ...