chamber music
David Nice
John Adams, let's face it, was the reason many of us came to hear the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Their performances and recordings as dedicatees of his labyrinthine First String Quartet and Absolute Jest, in which the four players function as soloist with orchestra, led to high hopes for the UK premiere of a second quartet. As it turned out, the yield was smaller beer than expected. What really hit home, for those of us who don't spend as much time as we should with the first and most varied quartet canon in the literature, was an early Haydn masterpiece.Not the curtainraiser, Op. 20 No. 1 Read more ...
David Nice
"Total immersion", the term used for the BBC Symphony's one-composer days, takes on a whole new meaning in the Thames Tunnel Shaft now transformed – but fortunately not subject to makeover – under the mantle of Rotherhithe's Brunel Museum. All the more so with the pioneering Modulus Quartet, who presented the mostly consonant music of six collaborative composers with the main lights out, shifting colours on the performing space and films either to accompany three of the works or to let the creators speak in short, unpretentious introductions.The ambitious peripherals weren't perfect; Read more ...
David Nice
More than just a great and serious pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes is a Mensch. His special gift in recent years has been to bring young musicians just establishing their careers together with star players like himself in beautiful and/or interesting places. I feel privileged to have heard him and his juniors in a programme of rare Sibelius melodramas in Bergen, Kurtág and Liszt in the main room of Grieg's humble home at Troldhaugen, and two shared recitals linked to the revelatory exhibition of little-known Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Now Andsnes has just curated a Read more ...
David Nice
All the best festivals develop organically, with a guiding hand from the best directors. When I first came to the East Neuk Festival two years ago, on its 10th anniversary, it was already a special case, thriving on the spirit of place and including an all-day Schubertiad from top international artists, many of whom were returning because they loved this special peninsula of the Fife coast so much. Since then a weekly "Retreat" for outstanding young artists guided by superlative coaches has started yielding unmissable special concerts, and beloved visitors have come for longer, three- or four Read more ...
David Nice
After a grey start, there was a spectacular sunset around midnight on the second of my two days in Reykjavik. It's what brings one of Iceland's most brilliant younger-generation talents, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson (and yes, he's worked with Björk), back to his homeland every June. He launched Reykjavík Midsummer Music in 2012, the first full year of programming at Olafur Eliasson's ever amazing Harpa concert halls and conference centre on the harbour. Clearly Ólafsson relishes working with distinguished friends, but he also happens to be a programme-maker of genius whose ideas work as well in Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Some chamber ensembles flourish through creative conflict, contrast and tension. Others streamline their approach, not so much relinquishing individuality as allowing the best of each to blend into more than the sum of their parts. The Trio Shaham Erez Wallfisch has grown, in its five-year existence, to be one of the latter.Partly the secret of its success could be that the three musicians – British cellist Raphael Wallfisch with two Israeli colleagues, pianist Arnon Erez and violinist Hagai Shaham – are not only old friends, but long-experienced chamber music players, each with a wealth of Read more ...
David Kettle
It was a simple yet beautifully elegant way for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to kick off its 2016 chamber concerts: a recital for flute, viola and harp, with Debussy’s beguiling Sonata as the centrepiece, and other contrasting music for the same trio orbiting around it.And it was a similarly sensible decision for the orchestra to spotlight two of its principal players – flautist Alison Mitchell (pictured below) and violist Jane Atkins (main picture) – who joined together in what felt like an entirely unforced, natural partnership, both equally supple in phrasing and tonal variety, alive to Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Please, sir, I want some more. Will Tuckett and Alasdair Middleton's Elizabeth is soul food for the hungry dance fan; an ingenious blend of words, music and dance that beguiles and entertains in equal measure. The shame is that it will be seen by so few people: created in 2013 for a special performance in Greenwich and now restaged for a week's run in the Royal Opera House's Linbury studio theatre, it will reach a total audience of mere hundreds – but I'd back it for a month or more, and to be a huge hit with theatre-goers as well as dance-lovers.The piece focuses on Elizabeth I, from Read more ...
David Nice
It was a sad coincidence that this Monday Platform “showcasing talented young artists” took place only weeks after the death in a road accident of Roderick Lakin, Director of Arts for 31 years at the Royal Over-Seas League which was last night's backer. For no concert could have been more sensitively tuned to a personal farewell. Overt melancholy only surfaced in the slow-movement theme of Brahms’s Second Piano Trio. But wouldn’t you want Dowland, Bach and Schubert at your memorial concert? I know I would, and especially from these artists, all so inclined to mature introspection that they Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
She is habitually called “the violin star” but this was Nicola Benedetti in the role of dedicated chamber music player, thoroughly prepared and hard at work. Any expectations that she might play in a flamboyant or limelight-seeking way proved completely misguided.Benedetti was at Cadogan Hall for the last of the eight Proms Chamber Music concerts, in her established trio with Frankfurt-born cellist Leonard Elschenbroich and Ukrainian pianist Alexei Grynyuk. In this context she is just one of the team, doing complete justice to a major work, in the full knowledge that the whole will be bigger Read more ...
David Nice
It only takes one outstanding musician with links to an out-of-the-way place to gather his or her top-notch friends and give a mini-festival of international quality. They’re springing up all over the UK: guiding lights that come to mind are violinist Anthony Marwood in Peasmarsh and tenor Toby Spence at Wardsbrook Farm. Now another leading British tenor, Ben Johnson, has set up a Young Artists' Programme and a band of the brightest and best young string players in the village of Southrepps, less than two miles from the beautiful North Norfolk coast. What I heard in two of the seven concerts Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom, these corrugated ridges formed a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman.” Lushly green and densely planted, today the view out over Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia is unrecognisable as the blasted landscape first witnessed by author Iris Origo in 1923. From a barren wilderness, the valley was transformed by Origo and her husband into a thriving farm, crowned by one of Italy’s loveliest landscaped gardens, where now, some 80 years later, Origo’s children and grandchildren continue the family legacy. But while Iris and husband Antonio brought water, life Read more ...