Britten
Boyd Tonkin
As the January chill began to bite around the Barbican, Sir Mark Elder and the Britten Sinfonia summoned memories of spring and summer – but of sunny seasons overshadowed by the electric crackle of storms. On the face of it, they offered us a pleasing, even serene, pastoral spread to mitigate the chill outside. It began with Britten’s late folk-song suite and continued through early Mahler songs to conclude with Brahms’s bucolic Second: one of the cycle of Brahms symphonies that Elder launched last year with this tight-knit and fine-toned ensemble. Although Elder – whose unfussy authority Read more ...
graham.rickson
Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain Apollo’s Fire/Jeannette Sorrell (Avie)Subtitled "an Irish-Appalachian celebration", this disc follows the Scottish and Irish immigrants who pitched up in rural Virginia in the 19th century, fleeing unemployment, exploitation and famine. In Jeannette Sorrell’s words, “Appalachian music is the voice of the down-trodden,” and that Christmas is an ideal time to sing in celebration of “history's greatest advocate for the poor.” If you buy just one Christmas CD this year, my advice would be to get this one, an electrifying sequence of folk songs, traditional Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
We’re not good at lack these days. Just look at the concert hall, where increasingly you turn up to find not just an orchestra and soloists but a giant screen. Videos, projections, live speakers, "virtual choirs"; if there’s so much as a chink of an opening in the music, you can bet that someone will try and fill it. It seems to come from a place of generosity, a desire to reach out, to supplement, to amplify, to explain, just in case we didn’t feel or see or understand before. But it’s also a gesture that takes away our agency as an audience, turns us spongy, limp as listeners.English Read more ...
David Nice
First it was the soft acoustic guitar playing, which on three occasions to three very different audiences won a silence so intense it was almost deafening. Then the loud electric, first heard in Anstruther's Dreel Halls as part of the 2017 East Neuk Festival; the ear-plugs we were given at the door proved unnecessary – just – but the shock of Julia Wolfe's LAD, transferred from nine bagpipes to Sean Shibe live alongside eight recorded selves, was massive.There's more than a touch of creative genius in all this, and as Graham Rickson confirmed in this week’s Classical CDs Roundup on Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
A tradition seems to have been invented. First nights of the LSO’s seasons with Sir Simon Rattle as its Music Director start with a concert of music by British composers. The first one last year had Helen Grime, Thomas Adès, Birtwistle, Knussen and Elgar. This year’s selection was Birtwistle (again), Holst, Turnage and Britten. Rattle described the formula as a mixture of the brand new, the undiscovered and an "established masterpiece". As with most things going on in this fissile country at the moment, there were some very fine moments, but it left mixed feelings.The inclusion of Birtwistle Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A day after John Eliot Gardiner and wandering violist Antoine Tamestit had converted the Royal Albert Hall into a sonic map of Hector Berlioz’s Italy, conductor Peter Oundjian and his full-strength divisions transported us to the Western Front. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, premiered in the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in May 1962, combines the Latin text of the requiem mass with the First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen to speak, now as then, of fragile human understanding and affection in the face of overwhelming terror and violence. Yet its plea for the still, small voices of truth and Read more ...
David Nice
It's Britten outside-in time for English National Opera. Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which played host earlier this year to an only partially convincing production of his 1950s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, would have been the perfect choice for the prelapsarian American forests of his pre-Grimes operetta/musical Paul Bunyan. Instead, Wilton's Music Hall and Jamie Manton's sometimes hazy office-clutter production between them defuse the wild-woods magic as well as much of the fun and sharpness of this often miraculous collaboration with W H Auden, furnishing the best libretto Britten Read more ...
David Benedict
It was all about the acoustic. Well, almost. Disregarding the awe-inspiring grandeur of the Royal Albert Hall, there’s a school of thought that believes the Proms is the world’s greatest concert series in the world’s worst hall. Why? Because its problematic acoustic is so ungovernable. It certainly wreaked havoc in Sunday’s Prom of the Brandenburg Concertos – I’ve never heard professional orchestral playing so lacking in ensemble – and in this intriguing Anglo-American BBC Philharmonic concert, the cavernous space proved as much a hindrance as a help.Initially, it was all gain. Juanjo Mena Read more ...
David Benedict
“It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.” Oscar Wilde was being ironic when he had Gwendolen contemplate the sound of her beloved’s drab name in The Importance of Being Earnest, but he had a point when it comes to composers and poetry. With their own “vibrations”, great poems rarely warrant musical interference; bad poetry, meanwhile, can resist even the finest scoring. Choosing poetry that can be richly enhanced by music is not always a trick composers have pulled off, so it’s to Sarah Connolly's and pianist Joseph Middleton’s enormous credit that they created such an eloquent Read more ...
David Nice
Once the Proms season is under way, you soon regret dissing the prospectus. Connections become apparent, long-term programming a merit, especially this weekend just gone, which took us from elegies and meditations on two world wars heavenwards at the halfway point - Britten's cautious but still cathartic optimism at the end of the masterly Sinfonia da Requiem - and up to the heights of Beethoven's "Choral" finale and Mahler's Eighth. It was also a fabulous demonstration of how a world can be captured as much in a five-minute piece as a 90-minute so-called “Symphony of a Thousand”.We began Read more ...
David Nice
Opera and music theatre have set the birds shrilling in Regent's Park before in the shape of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess – a very forgettable production – and Sondheim's Into the Woods – much better, and a score which can give any 20th century opera a run for its money in terms of thematic interconnection. Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream would have been the obvious candidate; its earlier, tauter, smaller-scale companion-piece in terms of a very English haunting, The Turn of the Screw, was the more problematic choice for the Open Air Theatre's first collaboration with English National Opera Read more ...
Michael Chance
Out of the blue comes a phone call. A freelance career is based on those to a certain extent. Certainly mine has been. But this one was a bit different. “Would you come and talk to us about the way forward?”. I soon learnt that what this actually meant was, “would you launch and run a new opera festival for us?”Singers as a bunch are inveterate gossips and effortless complainers. The hierarchy of targets usually starts with the incompetence of their agents, then quickly the unpleasantness of a recent conductor or director, before inevitably slagging off successful colleagues. Oh, don’t we Read more ...