Wigmore Hall
Bernard Hughes
Wigmore Hall does not dish up a great deal of contemporary music, preferring a menu of mainstream chamber music. But this programme by the Nash Ensemble offered a different kind of mainstream: within the world of contemporary music this was a middle-of-the-road offering. A roster of composers including Harrison Birtwistle, Simon Holt and Mark-Antony Turnage, all at one time enfants terribles, now more les vieux terribles, made for a somewhat monochrome concert that was a bit indigestible, even for a modern music fan like me.And is it ok, in 2021, to have a programme like this, comprising Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What comes to mind when you think of Brian Elias? The violence and humming, background threat of The Judas Tree, his score for Kenneth MacMillan’s brutal final ballet? The outpouring of Electra Mourns, cor anglais a schizophrenic double for the mezzo’s monologue? Or perhaps his breakthrough 1984 Proms commission L’Eylah, a Middle Eastern love-song gradually revealed at its core?Elias’s output isn’t enormous, but there’s a real breadth within it. Thanks to a series of fine recordings on NMC, it’s easy to lose an afternoon in the British composer’s taut, carefully crafted music. But Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The baroque music ensemble Arcangelo have been around since 2010 but I hadn’t heard them before this pair of concerts streamed from Wigmore Hall in the last week. But what I heard has certainly encouraged me to seek out more – and they have quickly built up a large discography ready to be tucked into. This includes the Bach violin concertos with Alina Ibragimova, who joined them for a journey through Vivaldi, Bach and Corelli last Friday, while frequent collaborator Iestyn Davies duetted with Carolyn Sampson in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater on Tuesday.The Wigmore Hall has been a particular oasis Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A year into the pandemic, it is hard to imagine anybody relishing the prosect of Lenten austerity. But the liturgical calendar trundles on, and here we are in Holy Week. The aptly named Tenebrae Choir, under conductor Nigel Short here offer a traditional Lent programme, mostly solemn but with a few lighter numbers. At the heart were three Bach motets, contextualised by similar music from earlier and later centuries: Schütz, Reger and James MacMillan.The Wigmore Hall stage proved insufficient for the ten singers, given social distancing requirements, and an extension had to be added at the Read more ...
David Nice
Some pianists would take the chance of a birthday celebration to pioneer a solitary epic. Not the ever-collegial, unshowy, some would even say visionary Steven Osborne. For this ultimately unforgettable Wigmore Hall concert, he’s devised a programme of two Schubert and two Ravel masterpieces, trios from himself and four ladies encasing piano works duo and solo. It’s all first rate, but technical weaknesses in the sound presentation mean it only all comes into proper focus in the second half of what remains, owing to the nature of the times, a relatively short event.Why, you wonder, can’t we Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Returning to the Wigmore Hall for another socially distanced concert, Edinburgh-born guitarist Sean Shibe brought a programme of moving, often melancholy music, apt for these still locked-down times. He opened with a trio of works by John Dowland written originally for lute. "Preludium" was delightfully intimate, Shibe expertly teasing out the subtleties of its emotion, while the descending chromaticism of "Forlorn Hope Fancy" was played with an almost jazzy sense; here Shibe toyed with the rhythm as he exposed the music’s crunchy discords. "Fantasia" began with a simply played melody which 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 ...
Peter Quantrill
Aside from the happy accident of longevity, something that set Bach and Handel and Telemann apart from their contemporaries was fluency. I’m speaking here of musical rather than verbal tongues: the least polyglot of them was Bach, with his command of four languages, German, Latin, French and Italian, in decreasing degrees of facility. While Handel criss-crossed Europe, Bach and Telemann anchored themselves in small areas of central and northern Germany respectively.Yet the world came to them. Bach especially composed in French and Italian with mother-tongue fluency, albeit a strong German 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 ...
Miranda Heggie
Fast making a name for themselves in contemporary chamber music, The Hermes Experiment players here give a wonderful debut recital at the Wigmore Hall, With a range of pieces as eclectic as their line up – harp, soprano, double bass and clarinet – the quartet perform a multifarious array of works, from Lili Boulanger’s lilting, soothing "Reflets" to composer and visual artist Oliver Leith’s intriguing and weirdly catchy Uh Huh Yea, written for the quartet in 2019.The recital opens with a new arrangement by soprano Héloïse Werner (pictured below) – who co-directs the group as well as Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
From a distance, the pianist Christian Blackshaw bears an uncanny resemblance to Franz Liszt, silver hair swept back à la 19th century. At the piano, though, you could scarcely find two more different musicians. There seems not to be a flamboyant bone in Blackshaw’s body. His playing of the Mozart piano sonatas at the Wigmore Hall over the past few years has been matchlessly gorgeous, pure as the driven snow, and in yesterday’s short but intense programme of Mozart and Schubert, the solitary pianist’s performance spoke direct to his locked-down listeners, screen to screen, with playing Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Another year, another lockdown. Though I have little doubt this was not the way most us of hoped to start 2021, we can at least be grateful that we’re not suffering quite the same drought of live music we experienced back in March. Despite the stringent restrictions, many venues and ensembles are able to offer an array of live and recorded streams, something which wasn’t possible in the UK at the start of the first lockdown. Last Saturday saw the Wigmore Hall host not one but three such events, in a day of performances dedicated to the music of pioneering American composer Morton Feldman. Read more ...