Haydn
Gavin Dixon
The Takács Quartet is hard to pin down. The group was founded in 1975 in Budapest, but since 1983 has been based in Boulder, Colorado. Cellist András Fejér is the only remaining founding member, and the violist, Richard O’Neill, only joined in 2020. They also have a British first violin, Edward Dusinberre. So what performing tradition can we expect from them?Well, the sound is impressively unified, but it is not very sonorous or rich, at least on this showing. They have an impressively diverse repertoire, and regularly work with contemporary American composers. This programme was more Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Peter Whelan is best known to Scottish audiences from his years of service as principal bassoon in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He left to pursue other projects several years ago, the most illustrious of which has probably been his work with the Irish Baroque Orchestra and his own Ensemble Marsyas, both of which demonstrate his interest in and flair for the music of the Baroque and Classical periods.He returned to the SCO on Thursday night, but on the podium rather than in the band, and his expertise in period performance lit up a really exciting performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102. It Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Whatever the upsets and uncertainties of this musical season, the return of choral works at full scale and full power has been an unalloyed joy. And sheer, exhilarated, heaven-storming joy branded the Academy of Ancient Music’s reading of Haydn’s The Creation in the Barbican Hall on Tuesday night. The AAM’s incoming music director Laurence Cummings commanded his substantial orchestra, a 26-strong chorus, five soloists and even Alastair Ross’s striking, historically-informed continuo – an 1801 Broadwood fortepiano. They endowed Haydn’s Enlightenment-era vision of a sin-free universe with Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This programme was a bit of a calling card from the Carducci Quartet. They have previously recorded all three works, and the three composers, Haydn, Shostakovich, Beethoven, clearly play to their strengths. Add to that a modest running time, the Shostakovich Seventh and Beethoven op. 95 are the two composers’ shortest quartets, and the result is a perfect offering for casual Sunday morning recital.Not that the Carduccis ever rest on their laurels. They have a distinctive tone, rich and darkly burnished with real complexity and depth, and they bring a keen interpretive sensibility to every Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Royal Northern Sinfonia handed its players artistic control of the programme for this livestream from the Sage, Gateshead and if the result lacked coherence it certainly had the variety and diversity missing from the Wigmore Hall Nash Ensemble recital I reviewed last month. Centred around Piazzolla’s popular Estaciones Porteñas, in the composer’s centenary year, it also featured music by Germaine Tailleferre, Daniel Kidane, Dobrinka Tabakova and – incongruously – Haydn. But if the latter’s Sinfonia Concertante felt like an interloper from another programme, a breezy and generous-spirited Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Polyphonic Concert Club is a collective of musicians – including Isata Kanneh-Mason and I Fagiolini – offering recorded chamber recitals released weekly through March and April. Like the festivals of Voces8 (I reviewed their Christmas series) they are aimed at a premium market: high-quality filmed content at a significant price, here £95 for the six concerts, not far off the cost of live tickets. Only the Club itself will know whether there has been enough take-up to make it financially viable, but on the evidence of yesterday’s recital by the Castalian Quartet, they have not compromised Read more ...
David Nice
In amongst the heavy-hearted duty of supporting orchestras by watching their concert streamings – not something I’d do by choice – there are two real joys here. One is the discovery of Austrian composer Franz Schreker’s Chamber Symphony of 1916. The other is witnessing the London Symphony Orchestra's co-principal oboist Juliana Koch playing to an audience – obviously not a group of lucky people sitting upstairs, as we were allowed to do in better times, but her fellow players, most of whom she’s allowed to face, thanks to the special distribution of the LSO in St Luke's.Koch’s is, in any case Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Seated at the harpsichord, Maxim Emelyanychev introduces this concert in charmingly fractured English. “Hello from Queen’s Hall in Edimbourg, today with chamber group of musicians from Scottish Chamber Orchestra…” But he falters, the camera cuts away, and there follows a mumbled digression on whether the first piece is actually by Hasse, or maybe Richter. Poised with their instruments, the assembled string quintet looks puzzled, and then the music begins, and it’s clear that whatever skill Emelyanychev (pictured below) may lack as an orator is more than outweighed by his skill as a Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly two weeks into the latest lockdown, and already I feel nostalgic about the last day of freedom. You should too, just watching the film released last night of the CLS’s most recent happening in Southwark Cathedral. It’s of the evening performance; I was there in the golden afternoon, sunlight flooding the nave, we spectators free to wander albeit in one direction and masked and head for one of the points of the Charles Ives-like soundscape that suffused the place to hear what a musician had to say, and play, about his or her part in Haydn’s Symphony No. 104.Haydn had more forces at his Read more ...
Ian Page
My latest recording with The Mozartists is the first in a seven-volume series [reviewed by Graham Rickson in his Classical CDs Weekly column] exploring the so-called “Sturm und Drang” (literally translated, “storm and stress”) movement that swept through music and other art forms between the early 1760s and the early 1780s. In its strictest sense this was an exclusively literary movement which developed in Germany during the 1770s, and which owes its name to the title of a play written in 1776 by Maximilian Klinger. Its general objectives were to frighten and perturb through the use of a Read more ...
graham.rickson
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique, Rêverie et caprice, La mort d'Ophélie, Sara la baigneuse Utah Symphony/Thierry Fischer, with Philippe Quint (violin) (Hyperion)Just two big symphonies by French composers can be counted as standard repertoire. Having recorded the current box office favourite as part of their excellent cycle of Saint-Saëns symphonies, Thierry Fischer’s Utah forces now tackle the other one, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. A few of Fischer’s interpretative decisions prompted me to look at the score to see if he’d changed anything. I’m used to the horn and woodwind snarls at Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier George Lepauw (piano) (Orchid Classics)How a pianist tackles the opening C major Prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier can often set the tone for what follows. You’d expect Glenn Gould’s quirky traversal to encompass extremes of tempo and articulation on the basis of how eccentrically he tackles it, and a recently issued live performance of Book 1 from Keith Jarrett is bright, elegant and smiley from the outset. George Lepauw’s performance of the prelude is very striking: he begins slowly and hesitantly, as if he’s dipping his toes in and testing the Read more ...