choral music
Richard Bratby
“Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound” wrote Gustav Mahler of his Eighth Symphony. “There are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving.” It’s an image that captures the impossible scale and mind-boggling ambition of this so called “Symphony of a Thousand”. But it doesn’t begin to do justice to the freshness, clarity and sheer headlong energy of this performance by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and no fewer than five choruses under the direction of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. Doesn’t the Earth alone move at 67,000 miles per hour? With around 600 Read more ...
David Nice
Not everyone who flocked to Day Two's evening concert in Kings Place's year-long Nature Unwrapped: Sounds of Life celebrations will have realised that they were catching parts two and three of a trilogy. The masterpiece had come earlier, in a 5pm screening: Phie Ambo's poetic documentary Good Things Await, about the tenacity of eccentric Danish biodynamic farmer Niels Stokholm and the obstacles he faces from rigid authorities. There's choral music in there, from Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, performed on the soundtrack by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, whose first soprano Else Torp Read more ...
David Nice
There is no mention of Marc-Antoine Charpentier in David Cairns's comprehensive Berlioz biography. It seems extraordinary that the master of the most intimate and moving of musical Christmas stories, L'enfance du Christ, knew nothing of the next best, Charpentier's Pastorale sur la naissance de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ composed 175 years earlier, with its similar move from darkness to light, its music of tender intimacy and childlike joy as well as sorrow, an elaborate metaphysical final chorus common to both. Charpentier's moments of seemingly small but potentially momentous drama were Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The London Philharmonic’s Isle of Noises, a year-long festival dedicated to music of the British Isles, drew towards its close with this programme of Butterworth, Elgar and Walton. Marin Alsop was a good choice to lead, especially for Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. Although well-known for her performances of British music, she’s not one to wallow in pastoral whimsy. Instead, she brings drive a focus, clearly defining all the rhythms and orchestral lines. And although that rarely makes for comfortable or cozy English Romanticism, it allows the LPO to demonstrate the impressive orchestral skills Read more ...
David Nice
The Apostles is a depressing work, mostly in a good way. Elgar's one good aspirational theme of mystic chordal progressions is easily outnumbered by a phantasmal parade of dying falls, hauntingly shaped and orchestrated. After The Dream of Gerontius, this ostensibly more clear-cut oratorio has less sense of form; it's fragmentary or modern, according to taste. I doubt, even so, if a better argument could be made for it than that from last night's team and its keen guide, Martyn Brabbins – a more flexible shaper, let's be honest, than the admirable champion of the work he was replacing, Mark Read more ...
David Nice
Verdi, Elgar, Janáček, John Adams - just four composers who achieved musical transcendence to religious texts as what convention would label non-believers, and so have no need of the "forgiveness" the Fátima zealots pray for their kind in James MacMillan's The Sun Danced. Dodgily championed by fellow conservative Damian Thompson - ouch - as "fearless defender of the Catholic faith and Western civilization" (for which I read, no Muslims in Europe, please), MacMillan is rather nauseatingly cited as a composer with a direct line to his Catholic God (he doesn't claim that himself); but, dammit, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Gounod: Symphonies 1 and 2 Iceland Symphony Orchestra/Yan Pascal Tortelier (Chandos)Roger Nichols’ lucid sleeve note underlines the point that Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique singularly failed to kick off a 19th century French symphonic tradition. Édouard Lalo complained that critics assumed that you only wrote symphonies if you weren't up to the challenge of composing operas. Saint-Saëns’ 3rd is the only French romantic symphony we get to hear nowadays, Franck’s sublime example having slipped through the cracks. Exactly when Gounod's two symphonies were written isn't clear, though it's Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Our greatest Berlioz scholar, David Cairns, has called Le Damnation de Faust “an opera of the mind’s eye, not of the stage,” and I’ve certainly never seen a production that successfully staged its curious, episodic, actionless mixture of set piece, romantic brooding, and flickering cinematic imagery. I missed Richard Jones’s recent Glyndebourne effort, but it sounds as if he had partially to reconstruct the score to fit it to a theatrical concept at all. One might say QED. In fact La Damnation is one of Berlioz’s most (one could risk saying few) perfectly designed scores; and as the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Scholars still wrangle over the work now known as Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. Was this an integral piece written for a single liturgical occasion, or a sort of anthology of luxury items assembled to help the composer’s bid to escape the underpaid drudgery of life at the Mantuan court and win the top post at St Mark’s in Venice? Yet, from the moment that conductor Laurence Cummings bounced onto the stage at Garsington Opera, barked out the introit, and unleashed the turbo-charged Garsington chorus in the “Domine ad adiuvandum”, all such disputes dropped into nit-picking irrelevance. If Read more ...
Robert Beale
Two hundred years ago next month, an assembly of around 60,000 people gathered on St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to protest about their lack of political representation. Speakers addressed the crowd, bands played and banners were carried.The local magistrates didn’t like it and gave orders for the crowd to be dispersed by the mounted yeomanry, backed up by the hussars, who drew their sabres and charged. Eighteen people were killed and hundreds injured. That was the "Peterloo Massacre", named after the Battle of Waterloo, only four years before. The centre of its site became that of the Free Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The festival Summer Music in City Churches is in only its second year, filling a gap left by the demise of the long-running City of London Festival. This year’s festival had the theme of Words and Music and offered an enticing programme of recitals, talks and walks, focusing on English music through the ages, and finding enterprising ways of combining solo performers with resident ensembles the London Mozart Players and the City of London Choir. The closing concert showcased works inspired by Shakespeare plays, presenting them alongside Shakespeare’s words, spoken by actor Tama Matheson.The Read more ...
Glyn Môn Hughes
It wasn’t really the orchestra’s night. Nor the soloists'. Nor, even, the conductor's. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir totally stole the show, well surpassing the incredibly high standards which they already regularly attain and performing not as a large symphonic chorus but as a something akin to one of the highly specialist choirs with which this country is blessed.That is not to say that all the others on the platform at Philharmonic Hall were at all under par – indeed, they were far from it, setting not one foot wrong in a performance which evidently stirred the audience. Sir Read more ...