Wigmore Hall
David Nice
Benjamin Britten would have been 99 on the day of this concert. He died aged 62, nearly six months after the premiere of a masterpiece, the 15-minute "dramatic cantata" Phaedra, ruthlessly sifting key speeches from Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine. The compression of inspired, marble-hewn ideas, the like of which few contemporary composers come anywhere near in operas of two hours’ length or more, places Phaedra on a pedestal. Many of us would be happy to admire it in isolation, especially in the company of Alice Coote, a mezzo as equal to its stature as the original interpreter, Janet Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s something of a fashion at the moment for countertenors to break out of the baroque, to have a bit of a fling with classical and even romantic repertoire. David Daniels has experimented with Berlioz, Philippe Jaroussky has flirted as only a Frenchman can with the mélodies of Massenet and Hahn, and now Andreas Scholl is embracing his native lieder. A concert last night at the Wigmore Hall took his latest disc on the road, stripping the singer of the safety of the recording studio and letting his audience judge his latest, and in some ways most ambitious, programme for themselves.The Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Tigran Hamasyan is a brilliant jazz pianist who is clearly on the rise – for one thing, like many a star before him, he has dropped his surname, and is now, according to his latest record The Fable, simply Tigran. When I meet him in London, he tells me one reason he became addicted to the acoustic piano as a child was that there were so many blackouts in his native Gyumri in Armenia, and it was something he could play by candlelight. When he was 18 months old, in December 1988, there was a terrible earthquake in the region. When the Soviet Union collapsed the next year, Armenia went to war Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“For if their musicke please in earthly things/How would it sound if strung with heavenly strings?” Listening to viol consort Fretwork last night, the audience at the Wigmore Hall didn’t have to imagine the answer to Gibbons’ question. Listening to the vitality and variety of tone colour this group so reliably produce, it’s hard to remember that this is ear(th)ly music – hardly the wan and consumptive sound so many people still stubbornly associate with viols.Joined by the Hilliard Ensemble to form a sort of Renaissance supergroup, Fretwork gave us a programme of Orlando Gibbons, passing his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When you hear Christian Tetzlaff play you hear Brahms, or Beethoven or, in this case, Bach. What you don’t hear a lot of is Tetzlaff himself. I mean that in the best possible way – so willing is the violinist to submerge himself, to set aside ego and agenda. It’s an approach that is at its purest in Bach’s solo violin music, and as he presented the sonatas and partitas to a full Wigmore Hall last night the generosity of this extraordinary musician allowed his audience to set ourselves aside for a moment too as we listened.It has been almost 20 years since Tetzlaff first recorded Bach’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
By the time she went to college to study to become a singing teacher, Joyce DiDonato had been to exactly two different American states: Kansas and Colorado. New York and San Francisco were as yet unvisited, Europe and Asia as yet undreamed of. It’s a story DiDonato herself tells with practised humour. Jump forward 20 years and there isn’t a continent or metropolitan hub unconquered by this supreme mezzo-soprano, whose career may have taken her impossibly far from her Kansas beginnings, but whose sunny, unpretentious workmanship is still pure Midwest.Last night at the Wigmore Hall it was Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Musicians can go one of two ways after a period of prolonged professional absence. The hiatus can either set them free (Horowitz) or screw them up (Pogorelich). In the case of Maxim Vengerov, we already knew that the latter hadn't happened. A successful early reappearance with the St Petersburg Philharmonic at the Royal Festival Hall a few weeks back - where he stepped in for an AWOL Martha Argerich - proved that. But the real test was always going to be his recital comeback at the Wigmore Hall last night. How has the Russian violinist evolved since we last heard him in London in 2007?A lot Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The roar with which Leonidas Kavakos and Emanuel Ax dispatched Beethoven’s mighty Op. 30 C minor Violin Sonata – flinging off the writhing semiquaver coils of the Finale with desperate vigour – was enough to remind anyone in the Wigmore Hall last night of the serious talent of this Greek violinist. It was not however quite enough to banish the memory of the evening’s whimpering start – the ragged gesture in the general direction of the Violin Sonata in A Op. 12 No. 2 – with which we opened.From the flurry of competition wins that launched his career, Kavakos has built a mature performing Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Wigmore Hall staged its own Entente Cordiale last night with an operatic double bill bridging both sides of the Channel. Christian Curnyn and the Early Opera Company looked beyond predictable partners for Purcell’s inconveniently short Dido and Aeneas, lighting on Charpentier’s Actéon, another miniature tragédie en musique. With rather more emphasis on the musique and rather less on the tragédie, the work may not be quite the equal of Purcell’s concise emotional epic, but as an evening’s musical dialogue this was harmonious indeed.Near contemporaries, Charpentier and Purcell have both Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The poster boy for a generation of thinking, reading, researching soloists, tenor Ian Bostridge is a regular recitalist. But the programmes he has curated for the current Bostridge Project at the Wigmore Hall have given him the opportunity to show that there’s a lot more to his skills than just performance. Sharing the stage over a sequence of concerts with artists including Angelika Kirschlager, Nicholas Daniel, Sophie Daneman and The English Concert, Bostridge has constructed a mini-season of “Ancient and Modern” themed events that bridge the divides between early and twentieth century Read more ...
David Nice
Now that Margaret Price is no more and Kiri's well past her heyday, whose is the most limpid soprano of them all? "The beautiful voice" was a label slapped by PR on Renée Fleming, but that fitfully engaging diva is all curdled artifice alongside Anne Schwanewilms, the German soprano who shines in Strauss and should be an example to any singer for ease, charm and what to do with the hands in the exposed light of song recital. Here she duly took the palm for the two loveliest songs of all time, Mahler's, but worked her way towards them through a myriad of humorous, otherworldly and earthy Read more ...