chamber music
David Nice
The great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau noted of 1920s Berlin that "itimes of trouble, people seek a better life in culture". But what if that culture can no longer be accessed live? Earlier this week theartsdesk brought you reports of two sensational Sunday concerts at each of London's biggest arts centres: a recreation of Beethoven's massive 1808 programme from Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall, and a stunning trio of powerful British masterpieces from violinist Vilde Frang, the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano at the Barbican. Then everything Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Six weeks ago, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation announced that it the winner of its prestigious and extremely valuable main annual prize for 2020 "to a composer, performer, or scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the world of music" will be the viola player Tabea Zimmermann. She commented to an interviewer that what mattered to her most was neither well-paid concert appearances nor playing in large halls, but rather to be involved in things that are interesting for what she called their "Inhalt". The German language is blessed with words that have a whole field of Read more ...
David Nice
Startlingly high levels of expression and focused fire made this rich concert worthy of the dedicatee who radiated those qualities, Jacqueline du Pré. Beyond even that, this Wigmore Hall special was an oddly synaesthesic experience – or maybe I'm just suggestible; at any rate Joanna MacGregor's full-blooded way with Frank Bridge's torrid late romanticism seemed to drip red, there was ethereal silver in the more other-worldly Shostakovich playing of the Gildas Quartet and gold from their viola player, Jenny Lewisohn, as well as from superlative cellist Adrian Brendel, in perfect synchronicity Read more ...
David Nice
Three concerts, three fascinating venues, seven world-class young(ish) players, an audience of all ages and a musical storytelling event for 200 schoolchildren: this is how to launch a festival with outwardly modest means. Artistic Director of Classical Vauxhall Fiachra Garvey already has form, as the founder of the West Wicklow Festival (of chamber music), in the part of Ireland where he accommodates his schedule "to help with the yearly lambing, dipping, shearing, harvesting and all the other elegant and refined activities of home" (he was delighted, he told us, to discover Vauxhall's City Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
When I reviewed the Philharmonia’s Weimar season last year I expressed a hope to hear more Hindemith performed in London. When, also last year, I reviewed chamber music at Conway Hall I looked forward to my next visit. So a Conway Hall programme including Hindemith’s Clarinet Quartet was like a magnet. And I wasn’t disappointed by the Hindemith, or by Messiaen’s extraordinary Quartet for the End of Time that made up the second half.Conway Hall is an enterprising venue, as much community centre as concert hall, with a long tradition of Sunday evening chamber music. The attendance was Read more ...
David Nice
When celebrated individuals get together to play chamber music on special occasions, the result can often turn out as what the late cellist of the Borodin Quartet, Valentin Berlinsky, disparagingly called "festival quality" – meaning a clash, rather than a blend, of personalities. That was never the case for a moment in the opening concert of the eighth Highgate International Chamber Music Festival.Two of its three founders, violinist/composer Natalie Klouda and cellist Ashok Klouda, had invited two of the most experienced soloists in the string world - powerful personality Alexander Read more ...
David Nice
From the epic-lyric heaven storming of Beethoven's last three piano sonatas to the lyric-epic dances on the volcano of Schubert's two late piano trios isn't so big a leap, especially when you have the clairvoyant poise between colossal and intimate of the great Elisabeth Leonskaja. After her late-night solo turn at the Wigmore three Sundays ago, she was joined last night by two other superb instrumentalists who seem to have a direct and unshowy line to genius, violinist Liza Ferschtman and cellist István Várdai.It isn't clear which of the two trios was composed first, though both appeared on Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
July in Tuscany and the heat is intense. Oak-forested hills offer tempting shade; pale dust flies from the roads; in the houses curtains are drawn against the ferocious sun and around irrigated gardens the mosquitos are growing plump. If you love Italian sunshine, food, wine and chamber music, this is your ideal festival, as long as you pack some citronella. Its name: Incontri in Terra di Siena. The background to the event is both unusual and inspiring. In the 1920s the writer Iris Origo and her husband Antonio set up home in a sprawling villa, La Foce, overlooking the Val d’Orcia ( Read more ...
David Nice
Anna Larsson's fellow Swedes can count themselves lucky that the worldwide first choice to sing Wagner's Erda and the midnight song in Mahler's Third Symphony has made so much of her Dalarna inheritance. In what's called a "Concert Barn" (Konsertlada) built on land bought next to the birthplace of her father, who lived in Vattnäs, a small settlement on Lake Orsa, and later moved to Stockholm, she has already established a working theatre serving a strong operatic tradition with her country's best fellow singers, and a nurturing of young musicians who include many outstanding players in this Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Emanuel Ax here celebrated his 70th birthday with an all-Schumann recital. In fact, it was an all-Schumann marathon, a three-hour concert at Wigmore Hall featuring solo works, Dichterliebe with Simon Keenlyside, and, with the Dover Quartet, the Piano Quartet and the Piano Quintet. Ax has an unassuming stage presence, and blends easily into chamber ensembles. Even so, he remained the centre of attention here, with the other performers softening their tone and applying an extra level of grace in order to match the supple flow of Ax’s Schumann.The Arabeske, op. 18, began the concert, and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The whole raison d’être of the Longborough Festival was always the performance of its founder Martin Graham’s beloved Wagner. So it’s perfectly natural that the twelfth anniversary of the start of the festival’s original Ring cycle should be marked by the inauguration of a completely new cycle, under, so to speak, new management: the Grahams’ daughter Polly, who took over as artistic director last year, and the Royal Opera’s Amy Lane, directing The Ring itself.Natural perhaps, but still an extraordinary achievement for a rural festival in a converted barn seating five hundred (in bucket seats Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Bartók: Complete String Quartets Quatuor Diotima (Näive)Technical infallibility is now a non-negotiable when it comes to Bartók's six fiendishly difficult string quartets. Still, there's much more to these pieces than simply hitting the right notes and ensuring that the pizzicato thwacks ring out in all the right places. An influential early digital set by the Emersons now sounds a little brutal and mechanical in places. It’s easier to love a 1960s DG cycle from the emigré Hungarian Quartet, with hairy moments but plenty of soul. This new set on the revived Näive label comes from the Read more ...