Classical music
graham.rickson
Kemal Belevi: Guitar Duos Duo Tandem (Naxos)I might have responded to Kemal Belevi’s music differently had I not encountered him straight after a few hours spent with Schoenberg (see below). These pieces for two guitars don’t do anything earth-shattering, but they’re irresistible, the composer’s Cypriot heritage roots permeating every bar. Belevi’s themes sound like folk melodies and what he does with them is invariably delightful. Dive in and explore his three-movement Suite Chypre if you’re curious. Originally written for cello and guitar, it finishes with a little 2/4 Turkish dance, Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Like many musicians, Danny Driver had not given a recital since the pandemic took hold in March. His return to the platform took place in the intense spotlight of the Wigmore Hall, broadcast live in BBC Radio 3’s Lunchtime Concert and webcast to the world - for which he chose a programme that was demanding, exposed and imaginative and rose to its ferocious challenges as if butter wouldn’t melt. Driver’s selection focused on the idea of études, which the best composers can make into far more than technical exercises. First, an unusual choice: a sonata by C P E Bach, the ground-breaking Read more ...
David Nice
There should eventually be a plaque on the outside of the Fidelio Orchestra Café in Farringdon, to the effect that London’s musical life after lockdown re-ignited here. And how, in early July, with Steven Isserlis exuberantly stepping up to play Bach before a rapt small audience. Even now that so many venues have started cautiously opening up, it was still a physical and emotional jolt of the best kind to hear another of the greatest string sounds in the world, that of violinist Viktoria Mullova, and the double-bass thrumming in the resonant woody space of her son Misha Mullov-Abbado at the Read more ...
David Nice
How do they do it? Bach and Angela Hewitt, I mean, transfixing and focusing the audience in the Wigmore Hall – at home, too, hopefully, thanks to the livestreaming– through 13 and three-quarter fugues and four canons, all starting in the same key and (until the last) on the same theme, plus a benediction, the glorious whole amounting to an hour and a half without a break. No-one knows quite how the master intended his final studies in counterpoint to be performed, or even on what instrument(s), but in this superlative pianist’s hands the sequence makes total sense – centred, radical-sounding Read more ...
David Nice
Clearly it takes peculiar circumstances for some of us to hear the Academy of St Martin in the Fields within its eponymous church – that’s a first for me. The lure was considerable. Quite apart from the relative dearth of live events in London, the programme was of the imaginative kind more ensembles should be thinking about: three solos by a German, a Frenchman and a Scot resonating between each other, followed by the addition of increasingly larger groups of players, a kind of paradigm for lockdown and thereafter.Three Orpheuses (Orphei?) led the way in to meditative depths while straggling Read more ...
Danny Driver
There’s an old saying that goes: if life deals you lemons, make lemonade. To say that the COVID-19 pandemic is a lemon would be a huge and trivial understatement – it has had a massive effect on people’s way of life across the globe, it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and permanently scarred many more physically, psychologically and emotionally. In terms of livelihood, performing artists whose work involves close proximity and live audiences in theatres, concert halls and studios have been particularly badly affected, and it is clear that establishing a new modus operandi for the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Mahler: Symphony No. 7 Orchestre National de Lille/Alexandre Bloch (Alpha Classics)Mahler 5’s five movements trace a lucid journey from darkness to light, and No. 6’s tautly-structured outer movements don’t contain a wasted note. Whereas cynics suggest that No. 7 is an unsuccessful rehash of elements drawn from its two predecessors. They’re wrong. This is the Mahler symphony I got to know first, if only because it was the only one available at my local record library (remember those?). I’ve loved it ever since. That the work is now almost standard repertoire is remarkable, given the Read more ...
David Nice
Songs of the beyond versus the profundity of the here and now struck very different depths in the Castalians’ evening concert at the Wigmore Hall and Elizabeth Llewellyn’s recital with equal partner Simon Lepper the following lunchtime. It was good to have the very human anchoring of Haydn’s “Emperor” Quartet, Op. 76 No. 3, before the awfully big adventure of Beethoven’s Op. 132: none of us who’d adapted to the al fresco mix of sophistication and take-it-as-it-comes in the four quartet recitals in Battersea Park Bandstand would willingly swap it for a more lugubrious Temple of Art, but the Read more ...
David Nice
There was a rainbow over the Royal Festival Hall as I crossed one of the Hungerford foot bridges for the first time in six months. The lights and noises inside did not betray the augury. Was it the sheer hallucinatory pleasure of being within the auditorium with a handful of other spectators watching and hearing a full orchestra after what felt like a lifetime? Partly, perhaps, but I’ll swear that the building-out of the stage to accommodate players at a proper distance has made a difference to the sound. Never again will I diss the Southbank Centre’s main auditorium – I didn’t realise how Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
My first time back in a concert hall since March was also, more significantly, the first time back for last night’s Wigmore Hall performers, guitarist Miloš Karadaglić and saxophonist Jess Gillam. Their pleasure in playing live again was palpable – in introducing the encore Miloš said “without an audience we are nothing” – but playing to a one-fifth-full hall must have felt unusual for these two big stars of what used to be called “crossover” music.I had never heard the sax-guitar combination before, and beforehand I had wondered about balance, pitting one of the loudest of instruments Read more ...
David Nice
Even bigger things have happened to Sheku Kanneh-Mason since I last saw him performing alongside his contemporaries in the Fantasia Orchestra – That Royal Wedding, for instance, and a Decca contract. Yet it looks like he will always have the wisdom to hurry slowly. He played Saint-Saëns’ First Cello Concerto with two orchestras on film recently – the Philharmonia pre-recorded event infinitely superior in sound and vision to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s centenary celebration, though the cellist was equally good in both – because he only had three in his repertoire (the others Read more ...
graham.rickson
CPE Bach: Complete Piano Trios Linos Piano Trio (C-Avi)13 piano trios squeezed onto just two discs is a steal, but we’re talking CPE Bach and not Schubert, and there’s the issue of whether these pieces are piano trios in the accepted sense. Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach’s London publisher issued the Wq 89 set in 1776, describing them as “Six Sonatas for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte accompanied by Violin and Violincello”. The composer variously referred to them as trios, sonatas or “Trios (which are also Solos)”. They were an instant success, and Bach added a further set shortly afterwards Read more ...