Classical music
Oliver Pashley
“Why the name?” and “Why the instruments?” are the two most common things we get asked about our group. As a member of The Hermes Experiment, a quartet consisting of harp, clarinet, soprano and double bass, it’s perhaps understandable that these are the two things that stoke people’s curiosity. The combination of instruments was a stroke of chance, the collision of imagination and pragmatism. The structure of the group provides a traditional bass-chords-melody setup (albeit in an unconventional way), and we all knew each other (and each other’s playing) having recently finished studying Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
This powerful, austere collaboration between Les Arts Florissants and the Amala Dianor Company – presented as part of Dance Umbrella – excavated all the violence, grief and transcendence of the events surrounding Christ’s betrayal and crucifixion.Gesualdo published his tortured, piercingly beautiful Tenebrae Responsories in 1611, 21 years after he murdered his first wife and her lover, imbuing the music with the anguish and contradictory emotions of a man who many believe was seeking redemption through his art.Perhaps it’s not surprising then that betrayal with a kiss dominated the first “ Read more ...
graham.rickson
British Piano Concertos: Walton, Britten & Tippett Clare Hammond (piano), BBC Symphony Orchestra/George Vass (BIS Records)I really liked this programme of neglected British piano concertos by the always excellent pianist Clare Hammond, accompanied by conductor George Vass, himself committed to the cause of promoting British music over many years. Britten’s one-handed Diversions, written for Paul Wittgenstein, and Walton’s Sinfonia Concertante are both full of youthful vivacity, although both have troubled histories.Best known by far is Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto, a top-three Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester Camerata have had a ten-year association with composer-conductor Jack Sheen. For this short programme, one of the free Walter Carroll Lunchtime Concert series at the Martin Harris Centre in the University of Manchester, he and they created a partial re-enactment of the January 1914 inaugural concert of the Société Musicale Indépendante in Paris. To works by Stravinsky, Delage and Ravel were added two UK premieres, by Sheen himself and by Isabella Gellis. The plan back in 1914 had been to set new compositions alongside the recently created Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg, Read more ...
Robert Beale
Dennis Russell Davies and his musicians from the Czech Republic’s second city began a UK tour last night with an enterprising programme and a large and appreciative audience in Manchester.Freddy Kempf as piano soloist was an undoubted part of the attraction, but he was not there to play a conventional concerto but to join the bouncing Czechs in their love of jazz idioms.The Brno Philharmonic could hardly omit Janáček from their concert, as theirs is the city in which he spent most of his career, but it was a brief acknowledgment in the form of four out of six of his Lachian Dances – an early Read more ...
David Nice
Forty years ago, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was born, and I heard Handel’s Solomon in concert for the first time. Charles Mackerras’s sprightly performance convinced me it was a masterpiece. Now I’m not so sure, despite the presence of two national singing treasures, Nardus Williams and Helen Charlston, and great double choruses superbly delivered by 32 vibrant voices under the ever-reliable guidance of John Butt. Bad librettos don’t usually detract from music as fine as Handel's, but this one takes the palm for silliness. Palms, in fact, and cedars and other Holy Land Read more ...
David Nice
Never mind the permutations (anything up to eight hands on the two pianos); feel the unwavering quality of the eight pianists and the 13 works, each perfect in their proper place across two and a half hours of more or less continuous music. Above all, applaud the artistic directors of the London Piano Festival, Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen, for choosing so unerringly how and with whom to celebrate this spectacular 10th anniversary. Given the even distribution of superb pianism and compelling repertoire, it will merely be a matter of personal preference what came out tops for various Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Echo Vocal Ensemble have their genesis in Genesis. Sarah Latto’s group were initially formed by a cohort of the Genesis Sixteen young artists’ programme – and she has turned them into one of the most innovative vocal groups around. The programme at Union Chapel on Sunday night was a good example of their approach, with eclectic repertoire, new commissions, improvisation, a smattering of classics – and a loose-limbed dancer adding a visual element.The conceit of the programme was the progression from dusk to night. We started at 6pm, to catch the last light of the day, and ending with the Read more ...
David Nice
One miracle of musical performance is that a work you’ve loved for years can be revealed as never before in an outstanding interpretation. That happened to me last week at the New Ross Piano Festival when 22-year-old pianist Magdalene Cho turned us upside down in Bach’s Sixth Partita. It happened again last night when Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra hit 1788 with one of the three symphonic masterpieces Mozart composed in a single summer, the 39th.Problematic, on the other hand, was the first-half Mozart, third of the four concertos he composed for his beloved horn virtuoso Joseph Read more ...
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 ...