Bach
graham.rickson
JS Bach: St John Passion Pygmalion/Raphaël Pichon (Harmonia Mundi)Handel: Messiah Irish Baroque Orchestra/Peter Whelan (Linn)
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Here are brilliant additions to the discography of the two of the greatest choral masterpieces, both of which I have listened to repeatedly over this Easter period. The French choir and ensemble Pygmalion, under its founder and director Raphaël Pichon, has been working its way through the biggies of the repertoire in recent years: in addition to their Bach (brilliant versions of the St Matthew Passion and the Read more ...
David Nice
Was it a risk to attend a third Irish Baroque Orchestra Matthew Passion in as many years, given that previous indelible interpretations had come from Helen Charlston, Hugh Cutting and Nick Pritchard? Not really, because the shaping hand of Peter Whelan, musicianship incarnate, was bound to give us the connected dramatic arc in Bach's greatest of masterpieces as usual. And as ever he had several equals among the instrumental and vocal soloists.The revelation this year was the Christus of Frederick Long (pictured above on the right), supported by hyper-expressive work from the strings of Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
My last St John Passion arrived during the Proms in the vast hanger of the Royal Albert Hall, where the impeccable, discreet musicianship of Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan sometimes struggled with the chilly open spaces all around. At St Martin-in-the-Fields yesterday evening, no such problems: the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, with Peter Whelan directing, balanced intimacy and grandeur in a reading whose visceral impact and involving immediacy wholly filled the church, while never overwhelming it. Vocally and instrumentally, the Monteverdi singers and EBS Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Famously Handel and Bach never met, despite being born in the same year in the same country. So it was fun to see the programme for the English Concert’s delightful, vivacious performance in St George's Hanover Square playfully pit the two composers against each other by presenting works that they both composed in their thirties.When he wrote his Chandos Anthems, the still relatively fresh-faced Handel was working for the fiercely ambitious James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, who established a chamber ensemble that became known as the Cannons Concert at his estate in Middlesex. Though there Read more ...
David Nice
Our most adventurous guitarist never does anything twice, at least not in quite the same form. Days after a recital in Dublin's Royal Irish Academy of Music, he included several items from that programme in a unique three-parter.It started with a selection of international lute dances from the Scottish Rowallen Manuscript – talking about them in between, as he apparently didn't in presumably a different Dublin selection – in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, before leading us in to the Purcell Room for Bach and Adès on guitar, and then out for Part Three in a differently organised foyer, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
If this time of year should prompt everyone to count their blessings, then one precious musical gift shines brightly over Smith Square Hall this week. For the choral ensemble Polyphony, its director Stephen Layton and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, it’s just a normal Christmas festival in Westminster: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio last night, Messiah this evening.Yet I came away from the Bach reflecting that, four decades or so back, period-conscious Baroque music-making of this quality and commitment would still have struck most listeners as a revolution – perhaps a miracle of sorts Read more ...
graham.rickson
Leopold Godowsky: Java SuiteTobias Borsboom (piano) (TRPTK)
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There’s surely a thick book to be written about the influence of Javanese gamelan on western classical music. Debussy famously made several trips to the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris specifically to visit the Dutch East Indian pavilion, where a gamelan orchestra accompanied scenes from a recreated Javanese village, the sounds he heard later recreated in his piano piece “Pagodes”. Gamelan sounds crop up in Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos, and the Read more ...
graham.rickson
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American Dream: music by Amy Beach, Dana Suesse and Victor Babin Ludmila Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle (pianos), Orchestre Victor Hugo/Jean-François Verdier and Lauren Comte (Alpha Classics)Wife and husband two-piano duo Ludmilla Berlinskaya and Arthur Ancelle have form when it comes to exhuming rare repertoire, and this new anthology doesn’t disappoint. Amy Beach’s name was on my radar, but Dana Suesse and Victor Babin were new to me. Learning about their backstories proved to be as interesting as hearing their music. Take Read more ...
David Nice
The greatest procession of mass movements ever composed merits the best line-up of soloists, both vocal and instrumental, as well as the perfect ensemble – small in size, big and rich in sound where needed – and inspired direction. That it was likely to get them seemed obvious from the advertised names, but last night, as always, Peter Whelan inspired everyone to go beyond what we might have imagined.He applies pressure points imperceptibly everywhere so that Bach opens out from period-style devotion to something more operatic, above all in the first choruses of the B minor Mass and Read more ...
David Nice
High on the hill of fascinating New Ross in County Wexford sits its greatest treasure, the ruined 13th century Gothic beauty of St Mary’s. Unless you come at it from the east, its glories are concealed behind the working church which completes it and takes the place of the old nave, built in 1813 and “improved” twice later that century.Plain and spacious inside, with a few military memorials on the wall, the acoustics of its shoebox shape (think a smaller Musikvereinsaal without the trimmings) are perfect, as pianists great and less well-known have attested over the 19 years of the stunningly Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
One piece that you’re unlikely to hear at the Lammermuir Festival is Lucia di Lammermoor. As co-director James Waters explained during a drive to the absurdly picturesque church and castle at Crichton (fit setting for a Netflix epic, let alone a blood-soaked bel canto opera), venues and resources do set some limits to works that can be presented to the standards he demands.But not many: this year the festival hosted a double-bill of one-acters from Scottish Opera; it will welcome both the Philharmonia Orchestra at full strength, and Reinaldo Alessandrini’s legendary Concerto Italiano ensemble 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 ...