Lieder
Jessica Duchen
This recital of love songs by Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms, devised by the pianist Helmut Deutsch and sung by the megastar duo of soprano Diana Damrau and tenor Jonas Kaufmann, looked on paper like the Lieder event of the year. In practice, it left a good deal to unpick.Deutsch had pulled together 40 songs – yes, 40 – by the two composers, exploring aspects of love from myriad angles. Each half was arranged in three groups of songs (six by Schumann, seven by Brahms, etc), the idea being to build a narrative of sorts from number to number. The first half was the darker (Damrau Read more ...
David Nice
After a too-much-too-soon debut disc, Lisa Davidsen has just rolled out the gold on CD with her great fellow Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes in songs by their compatriot Grieg. The visuals last night, in the first concert of a Barbican mini-residency, made the Grieg first half better still: Davidsen lives each world, communicates so well with her audience – as she moves so beautifully on and off stage, too, she looks around as if to engage – and has the benefit of a well-lit stage, the auditorium duly darkened, with translations projected on a screen above (why doesn’t the Wigmore do that?) Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Sometimes you know the quality of music by the depth of the silence when it ends. Last night at Middle Temple Hall – and thank Mahler’s mystical heavens for it – the final ghostly “Ewig” of Der Abschied faded away into a soundless void that lasted just as long as it had to. No braying dunces shrieking “Brava!” spoiled the stillness that Alice Coote and pianist Julius Drake left in the wake of the supreme rhapsodies of leave-taking that close Das Lied von der Erde. On Remembrance Day, at the finale of this recital devoted to Mahler’s “songs of life and death”, that silence felt more than Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Soprano Sabine Devieilhe (pronounced Devielle) and pianist Alexandre Tharaud are both well on their way to becoming "Monuments Nationaux" in France. When their most recent album Chanson d'Amour (Erato/Warner) was launched in September 2020 – the title is a nod to Fauré rather than Manhattan Transfer – the radio station France-Musique more or less cleared its schedule for an entire day, with no fewer than half a dozen separate programmes to mark the release.The appeal of Devieilhe’s singing is instantly understandable. She graduated with flying colours from the Paris Conservatoire in Read more ...
David Nice
Now that the summer opera-house companies have pulled off staged triumphs under the most difficult of circumstances, it’s time to celebrate semi-al-fresco concerts. Not so many have cropped up as I’d hoped after the success of the Battersea Park Bandstand Chamber Music series last year. The Wigmore Hall made a start in nearby Portman Square and we have a host of impressive August events planned by Bold Tendencies in Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, building on the successes of 2020. Opera Holland Park's dazzling mini-festival of song, dreamed up by enterprising baritone Julien Van Mellaerts Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Some lockdown-era recital programmes have doled out miserly short measures, as performers gallop through a brief, rushed hour (or less) of music as if afraid to tax the online patience of their disembodied audience. If this final concert in Leeds Lieder’s spring weekend of song had a fault, it lay on the opposite side: an abundant generosity that saw Dame Sarah Connolly and pianist, and festival director, Joseph Middleton pack a full-length bill (introduced by presenter Tom McKinney) with intensely flavoured major works almost to the limits of digestion – and then add some extras to the menu Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The screen lights up, the Zoom link connects and there, blinking back at you (30% awkward, 70% enthusiastic) is a familiar face. Is it definitely working? Can you hear me? What do we say now? God, I'm getting old. Even after 12 months of conversation through webcams it still feels forced to me; something to one side of real life, simultaneously weird and routine, intimate and alienating, even as memories of the Old Normal grow increasingly remote. Is that a piano? Well, why not, these days? And then the face on the screen – I knew I recognised him; it’s the tenor Joseph Doody, who I last saw Read more ...
David Nice
Young performers seeking platforms for their careers have had it especially rough over the past year, most slipping through the financial-support net and now facing the further blow of the Brexit visa debacle. So it’s always good to welcome quality streamings supporting their progress. The Royal Opera has kept its Jette Parker Young Artists regularly in the public eye – we’ve got to know and care about many of them – while Barbara Hannigan’s recently-launched Momentum project teams up new talent with more established performers, as happens in the Blackheath/Leeds Lieder Brahms special (three Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Why, in Lieder singing above all, should an outpouring of deep feeling so frighten critics? Alice Coote’s unabashed emotionalism as a recitalist can sometimes bring out the worst in the stiff-upper-lip brigade, as reactions to her high-impact Winterreise (last given at the Wigmore prior to the current lockdown) revealed. At least with Tchaikovsky’s song output, no one can plausibly claim that they really ought to be delivered with strait-laced placidity. Yet what struck me about this ambitious programme of his songs, interspersed with Russian poems spoken by Ralph Fiennes, was Coote’s ability Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The bleak isolation and lonely angst felt in Schubert’s Winterreise is only too appropriate for a lockdown January. However, one positive to shine from this gloom is tenor David Webb’s own "Winter Journey". Cycling around his home in London every day since "Blue Monday" – 18 January, supposedly the most depressing day of the year – Webb has clocked up 500 miles and is raising money for both MINDS and Music Minds Matters, to help pay for at least two people to have counselling and therapy for a year. This concert – streamed live from the Wigmore Hall on Friday – celebrates the culmination of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“It’s SO good to be back,” said Catherine Bott, and it would be impossible to disagree with her. She was presenting the livestream of the first concert to be performed in front of an audience at Wigmore Hall since March. The rules as originally in place (presumably from Westminster council) were going to limit that audience to a meagre maximum of 56 people, or just 10% of the seats, but the ruling was suddenly overturned, and the capacity last night was expanded to accommodate 112 of us fortunate souls.It felt not just like an imperative, but also a duty and a pleasure, to be able to produce Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Of course, we just had to end with a midsummer Winterreise. The Wigmore Hall’s month of lockdown concerts for BBC Radio 3 had begun with a legendary elegy – the Chaconne from Bach’s D minor Partita, written according to musical folklore in memory of his first wife, with which Stephen Hough so gravely, beautifully, broke the pandemic silence on 1 June. It finished, perhaps inevitably, with Schubert’s farewell journey of a forsaken spirit through storm, ice and snow, while the sun blazed down outside over a fretful, still fearful city. But art, even on the level that Mark Padmore and Read more ...