chamber music
David Nice
There are probably more fine string quartets in the world than audiences to listen to them, or so a gloomy estimate from a major chamber music festival would have us believe. Fortunately the Wigmore Hall usually guarantees crowds to hear the best, and at the highest level too we’re spoilt for choice. After two outstandingly vibrant recent visitors, the Belcea and Jerusalem Quartets, the equally touted Pavel Haas Quartet merely seemed very good rather than great, though they upped the stakes when mercurial 22-year-old Daniil Trifonov joined them for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet.At first, there Read more ...
Harriet Smith
There are few more beautiful places in the world to make music than Banff, the arts community founded in 1933, originally to teach drama. From small beginnings it became a name uttered with a certain reverence among the music world. And that is still true today, despite the fact that the centre is now as populated by conference attendees and "leaders of the future" as musicians, dancers, writers and artists. It rather nattily describes itself as a "creativity incubator" and, unless you have agoraphobia, it's impossible not to find inspiration and peace in the Canadian Rockies in which it Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
And so it comes to an end. The final Proms Chamber Music concert of the season didn’t offer quite as grand a send-off as the Last Night of the Proms promises to, but arguably that’s no bad thing. These lunchtime events might be slight in size but they are by no means a poor relation to the Royal Albert Hall events, offering thoughtful, miniature programmes that send us all back to our desks in a better state than we left them. Bidding us a tearful farewell (you can always rely on Dowland), Ian Bostridge, Elizabeth Kenny and viol consort Fretwork left us with a celebration of one of England’s Read more ...
David Nice
Three great pianists, one of the world’s top clarinettists and two fine string players in a single concert: it’s what you might expect from a chamber music festival at the highest level. What I wasn’t anticipating on the first evening in Stavanger was to move from the wonderful cathedral to an old labour club up the hill, now a student venue with two halls, for a late-night cabaret and hear five more remarkable performers.Such is the free and easy way you come across top quality in unexpected formations at Stavanger. A lot of it has to do with the boundary-pushing of the clarinettist in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Rock ‘n’ roll was invented in Bodø about 1922,” declares Elvis Costello before kicking into “A Slow Drag With Josephine”. “Then it crept down to Trondheim,” he continues. “Then the squares in Oslo got it about 1952.” Up here, 25km inside the Arctic Circle, it actually seems possible that anything could have developed without the outside world noticing. On the tip of a finger of land between two mountain-fringed fjords, the city of Bodø doesn’t need to shout its identity. The setting is enough.Costello is here with the Imposters, playing Bodø Spektrum as the opening attraction of the 2013 Read more ...
theartsdesk
We're pleased to announce The Arts Desk is a media partner of the Denovali Swingfest London on 20 and 21 April at London's The Scala. It's a good match, as Swingfest and the Denovali label, like The Arts Desk refuse to acknowledge artificial boundaries between “high” culture, the avant-garde and grassroots electronic and club music.Denovali Swingfest has taken place annually since 2007 in Essen, Germany but 2013 sees it expanding to take in weekends in Berlin and London. The Scala event is headlined by Andy Stott, the Mancunian techno powerhouse who in recent years has tended Read more ...
David Nice
“It looks like the Coconut Lounge,” remarked John Adams as he stepped up jauntily to introduce the first of two big string pieces composed 30 years apart. The folk with their drinks at the candlelit tables, though, were never allowed to sit back and let it all wash over them.The seminal Shaker Loops of 1978, heard here in its string-orchestra incarnation of five years later, buffets and charges you as it flies or coasts through space, the polar opposite of the more placid minimalism which inspired it. That was nothing, though, compared to the strange adventure of Adams’ recent String Quartet Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Like a streamlined sandstone-coloured satellite berthed unexpectedly in Manchester’s medieval quarter, the new addition to the country’s largest specialist music school, Chetham’s (pronounced Cheetham’s), makes a confident statement for the future. It looms seven storeys high amidst atmospheric buildings dating back as far as 600 years. At yesterday’s opening ceremony, heralded by a newly-composed fanfare, Head of School Claire Moreland said: “This new building will take Chets into a whole new era, providing the world-class facilities for music making that our students deserve and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Oxford's Message to Bears project – a fluid collective around one Jerome Alexander – is one of music's best-kept secrets. In one and a half albums in 2008-9, Alexander created a new kind of ambient music: floating, rarefied chamber pieces in which classical instruments and folky acoustic guitars are gently embellished with electronic treatments and found sound, capturing the most delicate and fleeting of moods like slivers of time frozen and held up to the light.On this album, many things are added and some are lost. It feels informed by the live shows that Alexander and friends have Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A music broadcaster commented after last night’s concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra that all the hype, all the talk about the surf-obsessed, free-spirited leader Richard Tognetti, had left her half expecting them to surf onto the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. As they walked on however (decorously, and rather more smartly dressed than most English groups) we were reminded that there’s nothing gimmicky about this ensemble. They might stage surf-music retreats, play concerts in the Australian desert, but when it comes down to performance they are as ferociously serious as any of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms composed trios throughout his life - these well-loved pieces contrast with the much rarer works of Hans Gal and the oboist Heinz Holliger, here exposed in his parallel career as a composer.Brahms Piano Trios, Horn Trio, Clarinet Trio Soloists of Villa Musica (Covellio Classics)Brahms’s B Major Piano Trio was originally composed in 1859 but was drastically revised and republished in 1889. Writing to his publisher about the later version, the one generally played today, Brahms felt that “although the old version is bad, I do not maintain that the new one is good!” It’s a fascinating Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
According to Classic FM’s managing director Darren Henley there are many people who find the term “chamber music” offputting, if not downright intimidating. Perhaps the best explanation of the genre comes from a musicologist who has termed it “the music of friends”. It’s a lovely description and one that, for the very best ensembles, can extend beyond the confines of quartets or duos to even the largest of symphony orchestras.While yesterday’s Proms Chamber Music concert from Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques was chamber music at its authentic best, so also yesterday evening’s Read more ...