chamber music
David Nice
A peninsular spirit of place and the greatest of instrumentalists drew me a second time to the eastern nook (hence the “Neuk”) of Fife. But could a second report for theartsdesk be justified – wasn’t the premise the same for the 11th East Neuk Festival as it had been at the 10th? Not quite. Compelling violinist and former leader of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Alexander Janiczek had set up “The Retreat”, a kind of Britten-Pears School for this Aldeburgh of the north, in which he and fellow masters would coach and play chamber music with 10 young musicians at the start of their professional Read more ...
David Kettle
The Cottier Chamber Project is coming to feel increasingly like Glasgow’s answer to the Proms. If the Proms took place in a former church high on shabby-chic charm, that is. And if they ran for just three weeks. And only covered chamber music.Okay, the comparison might not bear much scrutiny. But from a viewpoint near the beginning of the Cottier festival, with its profusion of events – two, three or more a day – stretching off seemingly into the distant future, plus its all-encompassing ensembles, performers and repertoire (Baroque, contemporary, opera, jazz, folk, even film and dance), it’s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If the thought of the annual trek to Hay-on-Wye for the literary festival in May fills you with as much gloom as it does me (and I don’t have to go as far as most of our readers), you might do worse than sample the town’s chamber music festival this weekend as a healthy change or at least a soothing antidote.This is a new event crystallised out of an existing occasional series of concerts featuring the Fitzwilliam Quartet. And though it’s unlikely to spawn chamber music on every street corner of this small border town, in the way that bookshops once exploded out of Richard Booth’s original Read more ...
David Nice
Even in a big orchestral concert, you’re bound to note Berlin Philharmonic principals as among the best instrumentalists in the world. I cited five in the central instalment of Simon Rattle’s Sibelius cycle on Wednesday. Of those, only viola-player Amihai Grosz figured in the Octet, joined by seven more players of peerless sophistication. Rattle may have been taking the evening off – unless he was brainstorming plans for a new concert hall elsewhere in London – and the keynote here was freed-up enjoyment. But there was no self-satisfied coasting: chamber music takes supreme concentration and Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
When you’re visiting someone for the first time, it’s probably just as well that you make a good impression – or else you may not be asked back. If that’s what the Carducci String Quartet was trying to do on their début visit to Liverpool, then they did all the right things. They mesmerised the audience with their performance of the second of Beethoven’s "Razumovsky" quartets, so much so that they were forced to sit down and perform an encore, which turned out to be a little irreverent Shostakovich, in the shape of the Rondo Polka.If anything, this concert – part of the Royal Liverpool Read more ...
geoff brown
The mixed grilled school of programme-making is not for the JACK Quartet. Contemporary, contemporary, and contemporary: that was the bill of fare last night at this challenging recital offered by the young American group, graduates of the Eastman School of Music, who derive their capitalised title from the initial letters of the members’ first names. Like the Arditti String Quartet, one of their mentors, you’d never find them playing Schubert. Even someone as gutsy and game-changing as Beethoven appears to be well off the menu. A pity, in a way. For the three knotty pieces Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What a day for piano-lovers and Beethoven-lovers – Elisabeth Leonskaja for lunch, Maria João Pires for supper. Beethoven from both, stupendous playing from both, all in all generating a general sense of disbelief in this member of the audience. I mean, really! The Wigmore Hall is the epicure’s choice for music, but even by Wiggie standards this was beyond expectations.Still more, these two grand pianists were bringing Beethoven the virtuoso pianist himself to life, turning from a display of his dynamic improvisation powers to his instinctive pleasure in the more rule-based working-out of Read more ...
David Nice
Musical theatre needn’t be dominated by the human voice. Instrumental dramas with an element of acting can be a good way into the wonderful world of chamber music for younger audiences, and the Wigmore Hall’s new gambit of special student tickets for contemporary music paid off with the very different crowd there last night. It was rewarded with playing of the highest imaginative order from soloists in their own right: violinists Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Pekka Kuusisto, viola-player Lilli Maijala and cellist Pieter Wispelway. Yet though they got the musical dramas of early Beethoven and a Read more ...
David Nice
“Ah now, I can’t promise you sun,” says a Scots lady-in-waiting of her native weather to a novice Englishwoman near the start of Rona Munro’s masterly James Plays. It’s the first of many references to make the audience laugh knowingly. Well, after four days of the worst weather Edinburgh Festivalgoers can remember, the sun came out yesterday morning. There’s no better place to be than the airy Queen’s Hall if you want an 11am recital of light and shade – and to say that of yesterday’s duo programme is an understatement. Come late afternoon, and the light was still dappling the green lawns and Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
If you want an image that defines, for this writer at least, the essence of the Edinburgh Festival, it is the sight of Greyfriars Kirk full to capacity at 5.30 pm on a blustery Monday afternoon. At other times of year this sort of event might be hopefully billed as a “rush hour concert”, sparsely attended by commuters en route to the suburbs, but at festival time Edinburgh has a whole new demographic. Fighting its way past the tourists photographing Greyfriars Bobby (pictured below) could be seen an enthusiastic international audience to whom the prospect of an hour-long concert is one sure Read more ...
David Nice
Schubert played and sung through a long summer day by the water: what could be more enchanting? The prospect did not take into account the pain in that all too short-lived genius’s late work: when interpreted by a world-class trio, quartet and pianists at the 10th East Neuk Festival, it could be exhausting. So the hours in between were much needed balm on an afternoon and evening in the picture-postcard fishing village of Crail in the East Neuk (cf "nook") of Fife below St Andrews.Grey skies lifted by early afternoon, leaving the sun to bring out the honey colour of much of the local stone Read more ...
fisun.guner
Well, I’ll be damned if subscriptions don’t shoot up this summer. This lovingly made paean to the New York Review of Books, directed by Martin Scorsese and his long-time documentary collaborator David Tedeschi, was better than any advert, though I’d hesitate – but only briefly – to say that it was one long advert. 95 minutes probably makes it an advertorial feature, like those misleading pages you see in magazines and increasingly newspapers. Still, that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. One’s attention was drawn early on to that famous masthead: the word “Books”, it was pointed out, is Read more ...