Classical music
David Nice
Aldeburgh offered strong competition for the three evenings of Schubert at the discreetly restored Ragged School Museum, but I knew I had to return for the last event of Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s third festival here, much as I’d love to have heard Allan Clayton in Britten’s Our Hunting Fathers. And if anything, the three-part all-Schubert programme was even more levitational than I’d expected.The circumstances are unique. Kolesnikov and Tsoy welcome you as if into their home to sit in a close semi-circle for wonders in the schoolroom at the top of the building – now more spacious, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To mark this year’s summer solstice, a small audience gathered at London’s newest concert venue, the World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, a small and perfectly formed hall bristling with “state-of-the-art” acoustics and digital facilities. On a balmy midsummer’s evening, the pianist and composer Rieko Makita invited us to reflect on the different moods and aspects of the night, in a programme that combined music with digital art projections.Makita is part of the ever-expanding movement in London to explore technology and new venues as a way of taking classical music to different audiences. For Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two concerts in the BBC Philharmonic’s series in their own studio form the climax of studies at the Royal Northern College of Music for a small number of soloists on the postgraduate International Artist Diploma there, and also for some young conductors on the master’s course run by Mark Heron and Clark Rundell.The conductors get the chance to direct the BBC Philharmonic and the soloists perform with them – it’s a chance to spot stars of tomorrow. The IAD represents, says the RNCM, the highest level of performance achievement there, welcoming a select group of exceptional artists each year Read more ...
graham.rickson
Michel Béroff: Complete Erato Recordings (Erato)My associating French pianist Michel Béroff with ‘modern’ music says more about my age than it does about Béroff’s actual specialities. If you were looking for Messiaen in an early 1980s record library you’d probably find his EMI LPs of Turangalîla, the Quatour pour la fin du Temps and the Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus on the shelves, the last named a work which Béroff played extracts from to its composer in 1961, at the age of 11. The mind boggles; as it does when you learn that the earliest recording in this 42-disc box is the Quatuor Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the Saxony of 1725 – still in the grip of Europe’s “Little Ice Age” – Bach and his musicians would seldom have had to deal with the sort of midsummer sauna that enveloped Trafalgar Square last night. Yet, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Masaaki Suzuki, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists managed to beat the heat with an exhilarating shirt-sleeved journey through the cantatas that Bach wrote exactly three centuries ago for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Suzuki and his crew always looked cool but, excitingly, didn’t sound it. Here was choral and instrumental Bach performed Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
This year’s Aldeburgh Festival – the 76th – takes as its motto a line from Shelley‘s Prometheus Unbound. The poet speaks of despair “Mingled with love and then dissolved in sound”. With or without words, music shapes and voices feelings that would otherwise lie beyond expression.Shelley’s high-flying Romantic ideals may feel abstruse but, as the Festival’s opening weekend showed, music’s power not just to charm but to heal and reveal can have striking, and practical, real-world effects. Pianist George Xiaoyuan Fu and mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean prefaced their “Solitude with Schubert” Read more ...
Robert Beale
The opening and closing concerts of a season tend to be statements of intent – to pursue a path of exploration or (latterly) to celebrate a destination attained. John Storgårds’ final programme of the BBC Philharmonic’s series at the Bridgewater Hall was definitely the latter of those.In the opening concert he gave us The Planets, a Beethoven piano concerto and a new work by Grace-Evangeline Mason. For the final one, he chose Mahler’s Third Symphony: the longest, most affirmative, most philosophically indebted to Nietzsche and in some ways most challenging of the whole cycle. For listeners, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
For the first encore of the evening, it was not just the audience but the whole ensemble of Hespèrion XXI that was mesmerised as its leader, Jordi Savall, executed a fiendishly rapid sequence of notes that sent the rosin from his bow rising up like smoke. At the age of 83, one of the world’s most influential viol players continues to demonstrate that his genius for teasing out every nuance of baroque allows him to soar through the music as freely as a bird.This joyful, sharply inventive concert with his group was titled Baroque Revolution, reflecting the innovative spirit of the 16th and Read more ...
David Nice
If, like me, chamber music isn’t your most frequent home, there are bound to be revelations of what for many are known masterpieces. Mine in recent years have involved Brahms, a composer I love more the older I get: the Second, A major, Piano Quartet, much less often heard than No. 1, at the 2018 Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, and, last Friday, his First String Quartet from the Cuarteto Casals, also new to me, in an airy room looking out on Dublin’s Glasnevin Botanic Gardens.I missed the first two concerts of this year’s DICMF, arriving on the Friday, but both were greeted with Read more ...
Simon Thompson
There was a neat conjunction of commemorations to this concert, the most obvious one being the fact that that 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, so it’s completely appropriate the Royal Scottish National Orchestra chose to end its season with a concert of his music. More than that, however, the composer himself heard this very orchestra (then called the Scottish National Orchestra) play his Festive Overture in the Usher Hall in 1962, during one of Lord Harewood’s Edinburgh Festivals. Therefore, there’s a pleasing symmetry to hearing this team playing it Read more ...
graham.rickson
Antal Doráti in London: The Mercury Masters Vol. 1 (Decca Eloquence)A couple of recent YouTube videos show DG engineers hard at work remastering Karajan’s 1970s Bruckner and Mahler recordings for new vinyl LP pressings. The process looks tortuous, the multitracked master tapes painstakingly examined and reassembled, artificial reverb added using an empty stairwell. Listen, say, to Karajan’s Berlin performances of Mahler 6 and Bruckner 8 and you’re struck by the density of sound, the orchestral sonority almost oppressive in loud tuttis. Yes, the playing is accomplished, but there’s a Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a spectrum of pieces which brim with wit and inventiveness. This lunchtime concert with violinist Anthony Marwood was a sheer joy, as they together traversed a range of style and tone, richly entertaining a very decent Bank Holiday crowd in the Wigmore Hall.The starting point was an obvious one: the tangos of Astor Piazzolla. This sequence of three run together had a reassuring familiarity, and a strong whiff of the Parisian café. The swooning violin melody Read more ...