Classical music
Jasper Rees
The last time the BBC dramatised the creation of a great musical work, it didn’t quite hit the spot. Eroica starred Ian Hart as Beethoven glowering at the heart of a drama which had rather less of a narrative through-line than the symphony it honoured. For Messiah at the Foundling Hospital, the BBC have gone to the other extreme and kept eggs out of the one basket. There was a bit of drama, a bit of documentary, some costumed musical performance and there were even two presenters to come at the story from opposite angles. The potential for hodge-podgery was considerable.The story of Coram’s Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The sophisticated and exquisitely crafted sound of The Hilliard Ensemble has, over the past four decades, become one of the most distinctive pleasures on the choral scene. One of the several pioneers of the medieval and Renaissance repertoire to emerge in the Seventies, The Hilliards have, nonetheless, made this music their own, their glistening sound offering a more contemporary aesthetic than that of historically-specialist period performances. Named after Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, they share that portraitist’s delicacy, urbanity and intense colouring. Today, they have a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Britten to America – music for radio and theatre Hallé/Sir Mark Elder, Ex Cathedra/Jeffrey Skidmore Samuel West (narrator) (NMC)The official catalogue of Britten’s music currently runs to 1183 pieces – so, besides the 95 works with opus numbers there’s an enormous amount which remains little-known. The works assembled here can’t be described as juvenilia. Not everything stands up to repeated listening, but much of the music is highly engaging. Britten’s score for Auden and Isherwood’s mountaineering drama The Ascent of F6 was written largely on the hoof, and he was exasperated by the Read more ...
David Nice
Vladimir Jurowski is a master of the through-composed programme. Yet at first this looked like a more standard format: explosive contemporary work (if 1966 can still be called “contemporary”) followed by popular concerto and symphony. On reflection, though - and there was space enough for that - it turned out to be a back-to-front journey through German musical history, from Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s atom bomb of light to classical-romantic Beethoven and late-romantic Brahms ending in a homage to Bach The sequence of works was executed with the sometimes blinding clarity we’ve come to expect Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
This concert brought to a close the London Symphony Orchestra's focus on Scriabin, in a series appropriately titled "Music in colour". The Third Symphony was partnered here with Messiaen’s early work Les offrandes oubliées and Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto – both in their own way richly colouristic works. Though the LSO never puts half-baked goods on stage, it is fair to say that, having just returned from a European tour which included three performances of this programme, the result was even more polished than usual – especially considering Scriabin is hardly core repertoire these days. Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Sir Adrian Boult laid the foundations for its revival, more recently Sir Mark Elder found astonishing illumination within it, and now a third knight of the realm - Sir Andrew Davis (the latest recipient of the Elgar Medal) - chivalrously stamps his authority on it and brings it in from the cold.Elgar’s The Apostles is both typical and startlingly untypical of the composer. So much about its retelling of the gospels is spare and concentrated, so much is understated with that peculiarly English air of dispassion that until you grow accepting of its stately pace you crave the urgency and Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Soccer-mad Shostakovich’s score for a ballet about a Soviet football team visiting Western Europe, the world premiere of an oboe concerto by John Casken marking the 1914 centenary, and a rare semi-staged performance of Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins made up this remarkable programme. Even Sir Mark Elder pronounced it “eccentric”.The centrepiece and a musical milestone was Casken’s specially commissioned work, Apollinaire’s Bird, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, “A Bird Sings”, written while fighting in the trenches. In that poem, he captured the isolation of a bird singing amid Read more ...
graham.rickson
For record collectors of a certain age, Pascal Rogé is Mr French Piano Music; if you’re looking for decent recordings of Ravel, Poulenc, Saint-Saëns and Debussy, he’s the man. Hearing him perform live, here with his wife and duet partner Ami Rogé, is an overwhelming, entertaining experience, though you’re occasionally confounded by Rogé’s calm, unruffled exterior.In the dryish, intimate acoustic of Leeds’s Howard Assembly Room, the sounds conjured were magnificent. Pedal notes teetered on the edge of audibility; thunderous, fruity chords made the floorboards vibrate. And Rogé never broke a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Some performances evolve so naturally, so inevitably, that they feel... bespoke. Andrew Davis has a long history with both the BBC Symphony Orchestra (who gave him his first big break) and Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and from that moment in the Prelude where the cellos intimate some eternal lullaby to the ebbing arpeggios which waft across the strings in the final page, as if Wagner had for a moment contributed to the scoring of it, this performance felt all of a piece - not so much operatic as symphonic to the nth degree. It was blessed, too, with exceptional soloists in Stuart Skelton Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Can there be a conductor with a clearer and more affirming beat than Mariss Jansons with the Concertgebouw Orchestra when they're at their best? The listener can just marvel at his capacity to work in partnership with this fine orchestra, to underline and reinforce everything they do, to enable them to land cleanly, decisively and unanimously, to introduce new ideas with care, precision and beauty, to treat the end of phrases with respect, love and punctiliousnes.Jansons can make the Concertgebouw sound in every respect and in every department a marvellous orchestra, even in a hall like the Read more ...
David Nice
With tickets only a couple of pounds more than screenings in the Ciné Lumière, back-to-back – sometimes overlapping - concerts by world-class pianists of all ages, and a lively roster of weekend events around the recitals, what more could you ask from the French Institute’s two-and-a-half day festival? Well, perhaps a better and bigger Steinway. The one that can now transform the cinema into a concert hall, and instigated the first It's All About Piano! weekend last year needed bags of restoration, and given the obstinately dull middle register you have to ask, was it worth it? But then again Read more ...
graham.rickson
Brahms and Schumann: Piano Quintets Alexander String Quartet, Joyce Yang (piano) (Foghorn Classics)Schumann was the first major composer to pair solo piano with string quartet. His 1842 quintet remains one of the best examples of the genre, perched between chamber introspection and public assertiveness. It's full of splendid moments, springing into life with inexhaustible exuberance. Schumann's fiendish piano writing rarely lets up, and one of the joys of this beautifully nuanced performance from the San Francisco based Alexander Quartet is the contribution made by pianist Joyce Read more ...