Britten
graham.rickson
Isata Kanneh-Mason: Childhood Tales (Decca)Ernst von Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Song is one of the great concertante works for piano and orchestra, rightly compared to a full-scale concerto by soloist Isata Kanneh-Mason. You’ll struggle to hear a live performance though in the UK, though; hopefully this high-profile release will give the work a leg up. My favourite joke comes at the very start, with Dohnányi’s portentous, brilliantly scored intro dragging us into the depths before a naïve, familiar tune enters as if nothing untoward has happened. This big-hearted piece is Read more ...
David Nice
Rigorous, hauntingly original and unlike each other, Britten’s three numbered quartets could share a programme and still stake equal claims on our attention. That might be tough on the players, but the Castalians haven’t been easy on themselves in the three concerts they’ve given to share out the honours between Britten and other composers.Their previous spectacular pulled off the supreme challenge of twinning the “Grosse Fuge” as finale of Beethoven’s Op. 130 Quartet with the huge Chacony that crowns Britten’s Second. The Passacaglia of his Third, completed in 1975 not long before his death Read more ...
David Nice
The Castalian String Quartet is half what I remember, but only literally: while viola-player Charlotte Bonneton and cellist Christopher Graves may have departed, their replacements, Ruth Gibson and Steffan Morris, more than earned their laurels in last night’s stunning programme.There's another instance where half is just as good. The Castalians' Britten mini-series only highlights how we wish Britten had written twice as many numbered string quartets as he did – Bartók's half dozen allow for a bigger spead across a season – but who’s complaining when all three are masterpieces, and No Read more ...
David Nice
In usual circumstances, a fully staged opera and every voice-and-piano song-cycle by a single genius in one weekend would be an embarrassment of riches. The only problem about Britten hitting the heights, above all in setting toweringly great poetry by Auden, Blake, Donne and Hölderlin, at the top of a long list, meant one sitting and squirming at most of Ronald Duncan’s wretched lines for an opera which even in its very subject is problematic, The Rape of Lucretia.Oliver Mears’ production (pictured below, both production images by Camilla Greenwell), originating here at Snape Maltings with Read more ...
David Nice
After the long interval, as darkness falls, the screw turns in this Garsington revival more woundingly than any I can remember for Britten's most concentrated masterpiece. Evil chords, trills, cadenzas and silences from the 13 superb Philharmonia players conducted by Mark Wigglesworth duly terrorise; Verity Wingate as the Governess to two orphaned children in a house which seems haunted by their former elders really does seem possessed.If everyone has to work harder in the first act, audience included, that's the nature of the beautiful Garsington beast. True, ghosts can appear in broad Read more ...
Simon Thompson
The programme for this concert had Andrew Manze’s fingerprints all over it. Of all the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s semi-regular guest conductors, he’s the one who most consistently delivers on the highest level. A thinker to his fingertips, he constructs programmes as intelligently as he plays them.So what a wonderful idea to begin with music by Grace Williams and end with music by her teacher, Ralph Vaughan Williams. I wasn't familiar with Grace Williams’ music before this concert, but even if you didn’t know the connection you could hear some of RVW’s influence in the way she uses a string Read more ...
David Nice
"Why does he have to sentimentalise this piece?", Britten is reported by former Royal Opera director John Tooley to have said of Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes the tormented fisherman, so very different from the composer's life partner and creator of the role Peter Pears. Britten didn't qualify his disappointment by stating what for most of us is obvious: Vickers was one of the great tenor voices, and his latest successor in the role, Allan Clayton, is heading for that kind of status too.Handsome indeed, as is this production and so much about it; but in both Vickers’ case and this, lacking some Read more ...
David Nice
They’re singing songs of praise in Aldeburgh today – namely Britten’s magical unaccompanied choral setting of Auden’s Hymn to St Cecilia on the composer’s birthday and the annual celebration of music’s martyred patron. And what a right to celebration Britten Pears Arts will have earned after a weekend of concerts from bold John Wilson’s latest super-orchestra, an army of technicolor generals.I heard the first, and possibly for me the best of 2021 (though it's not all over yet), on Saturday evening, after a return to the Red House where in 1983 we Hesse Students, jolly labour for the Aldeburgh Read more ...
Joseph Phibbs
The music Britten composed in his twenties occupies a special place in his output. Even among his detractors there are some who begrudgingly concede that this early period is somehow different: fresher, more extroverted and daring, perhaps less driven by serving a purpose (or “being useful”, in the composer’s words).As a Britten fan since my teens, I’ve always been captivated by the expressive depth, technical brilliance, and sheer beauty of practically all his music. His handling of the orchestra has, in particular, had a big influence on how I’ve approached my own works in this medium over Read more ...
David Nice
When the history of 2021’s slow emergence from lockdown comes to be written, musical administrations will stand out among the heroes. That’s especially true of the country-house opera organisations which have mushroomed in recent years. Don’t ask where some of the money comes from, or who it’s for, but celebrate for now how much work these set-ups have given top-notch singers, players and production teams, many of whom have hardly worked in the previous 14 months. Michael Chance at The Grange Festival has had a particularly tough time – we don’t know the half of it, though I learnt a little Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra believes that its current post-lockdown summer series features the largest orchestra currently performing live in the UK. It’s not an easy claim to verify, and the full string section certainly wasn’t on stage for this matinee performance under the orchestra’s associate conductor Michael Seal. What’s clear though, is that the platform at Symphony Hall, stripped of risers and choirstalls, offers ample space for a large orchestra that’s socially distanced but doesn’t sound like it. The Hall’s pristine acoustic isn’t suited to every kind of music, but Read more ...
David Nice
It began with a sense of wonder, not just from the Barbican's socially distanced audience but also from the stage, at “that sound you make with your hands”, as Simon Rattle put it in what he said was a novelty speech before a performance. What followed was a celebration – reacquaintance with the instruments of the orchestra in Britten’s brilliant set of variations and a fugue on a Purcell theme, wistful beauty from Fauré, rumbustiousness with a dash of poignancy from Dvořák.Perhaps The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra should be renamed Everyone’s Guide to Orchestral Delights, which come Read more ...