chamber music
joe.muggs
There can be few currently operating musicians who have a sound as distinctive as Craig Fortnam’s. Whether solo or with his erstwhile band The North Sea Radio Orchestra, his writing has a kind of zig-zagging melody that’s part Robert Wyatt, part early Kate Bush, part medieval, part super modern, but all Fortnam. And that’s as true on this collection of 12 songs, each – as the title hints – recorded (with a “b-side”) in the space of a month and released on the full moon over the course of a year. You wouldn’t know, though, that this wasn’t conceived and recorded as a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In some ways the concerto da camera was the 18th-century music equivalent of the hatchback – only slightly larger in scale than a basic chamber work but with an ambition that allowed it to carry ideas associated with more substantial structures.At St John’s Smith Square, the dynamic ensemble El Gran Teatro del Mundo gave a diverting tour of this distinctive form, titled "The Art of Conversation", taking us from Germany down to the Mediterranean through Italy and Spain before circling back to Germany again.Telemann was the underlying link, and the concert began with a Sonata in B flat Read more ...
David Nice
How do they do it? Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective ticks all the boxes of diversity and reaching out to all ages without needing to draw attention to it all. The answer is quite simple: the repertoire – in Saturday’s morning and afternoon concerts, French chamber music both known and unfamiliar – is beautifully chosen and programmed, the performers all born communicators as well as musicians at the highest level.Among the first and last artists to appear were recent BBC Young Musician finalists, horn-player Annemarie Federle (2020) and percussionist Jordan Ashman (2022; another, Laura van der Read more ...
David Nice
A 150th birthday cornucopia was anticipated: vintage chamber and vocal Vaughan Williams in a big Wigmore Hall three-parter alongside music by other great Brits. It turned out, instead, to be a handsome if overlarge horn sounding several cracked notes.None of those had to do with the performances, which were first-class throughout: could it be otherwise with players from the Nash Ensemble, baritone Roderick Williams and 14 other remarkable British-based singers? Let’s get the moans out of the way first. This was proof that VW’s Five Mystical Songs and Serenade to Music, typical of his taste in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Album opener “Atapos” was released as a single earlier in September, its sharply angular beats created by Björk and Indonesian duo Gabber Modus Operandi, one of whom has since had his contributions removed following #MeToo allegations. The song’s message is about growth towards connection. “To insist on absolute justice at all times / blocks connection” she sings, intoning “hope is a muscle” towards the end. A muscle we need to keep in good shape, despite the circumstances.Her 10th album over a 30 year solo career, the big songs here are dedicated to her late mother, Hildur Runa – the seven- Read more ...
Tim Cumming
South-African cellist Abel Selaocoe is about to begin his third major concert in London in under a year. As the support artist for kora player Ballake Sissoko and cellist Vincent Segal at the Roundhouse in January, he received a lengthy ovation for his 30 minute set, having demonstrated an uncanny ability to play the audience as dexterously as he plays his cello.A few months later, he appeared with the Manchester Collective at the Southbank Centre, performing some of the pieces that make up his debut album on Warner Classics, Where is Home, alongside works by Stravinsky, Vivaldi and Read more ...
David Nice
Epic-lyric magician Brahms wears a very adaptable garment for certain masterpieces: black on the outside with fur trimming, reversible to show its exquisitely wrought, variegated silk patterns on the inside.For the celebrated G minor Piano Quartet and the First Piano Concerto – which Elisabeth Leonskaja has featured so impressively in concert with its successor – the darkness predominates, but the colours flash too. In the Second Concerto and Quartet, the bright reverse takes the lead. There can surely be no team more adaptable to all the miracles than Leonskaja and members of the Read more ...
David Nice
It feels like a decade, but only two and a bit years have passed since Steven Isserlis stepped out in front of a small but very much live audience at what was then the Fidelio Orchestra Cafe in July 2020. Three hundred or so Fidelio events later, he’s back, and much as he clearly loves the place, he loves the French repertoire he’s been playing with violinist Irène Duval and pianist Alasdair Beatson even more.I’m with Isserlis on Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello being the greatest masterpiece ever composed for that combination – I’d go even further and say for any meeting of two stringed Read more ...
Nick Hasted
If Roman Polanski had directed Whiplash, something like this study of music’s psychological cost might have resulted. Ina Weisse’s film is more incremental and naturalistic, as violin teacher Anna (Nina Hoss) gives special attention to teenage protégé Alexander (Ilja Monti), to the jealous resentment of son Jonas (Serafin Mishiev), while nervously returning to the stage herself.Weisse starts with tableaus of music work at Anna’s Berlin conservatoire. When camera and characters get close-up, the trouble – and, sometimes, loving connection – starts. Because music is in Anna’s family’s bones, Read more ...
David Nice
Three Beethoven quartets, early, middle and late, in a single evening – inevitably as part of a cycle, like the Jerusalems’ Wigmore Hall triptych last night – is demanding on the audience, supremely tough on the players.We could have left this concert enriched and on a high at the half-way mark, open-mouthed at the brilliance of the tumultuous fugal finale in the third “Razumovsky” Quartet, Op. 59 No. 3 in C. Never was an interval needed more before the four players returned to the awesome challenge of the great, seven-movement C shap minor Quartet Op. 131 (one of Beethoven's sketches Read more ...
David Nice
National sensitivities are running understandably high right now in the thick of an ever-escalating aggression. What a shame that the Southbank Centre has excluded Russian artists from performing alongside British and Ukrainian performers to bring a message of peace through the arts in their upcoming fundraiser. Not so "Dance for Ukraine" at the London Coliseum, including Natalia Osipova in its line-up.Other cases of discrimination are emerging. In Switzerland the Ittingen Charterhouse has just cancelled a cello-and-piano recital, claiming that "the reason is the Russian nationality of the Read more ...
David Nice
Comparisons might have been odious between three of the world's most cultured players – pianist Jitka Cechová, violinist Jan Talich and cellist Jan Páleníček of the Smetana Trio – and the young, British-based Minerva Piano Trio (Annie Yim, Michal Ćwiżewicz and Richard Birchall).Not a bit of it. Quotients of sheer joy were high in both the Wigmore Hall Sunday morning programme and the launch of a concert series in classy Christ Church Kensington, but if anything even higher in the Minerva’s double bill by virtue of an extraordinary, heart-overflowing masterpiece, Schumann’s Second Read more ...