Classical Reviews
Purcell's Playhouse, Bevan, Barokksolistene, Eike, Purcell Room review - kaleidoscopic delightsTuesday, 27 September 2022
“What about the communication with the audience?” asked violinist and impresario Bjarte Eike in his First Person piece for theartsdesk. “How can a 'normal' concert be turned into a special event?” Explaining how is one thing – but doing it to dazzle our senses is what counts. Though the Alehouse Session which followed out in the foyer was brilliant business more or less as usual, “Purcell’s Playhouse” took us further on the road of making the old absolutely new. Read more... |
Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall review - titanic talent shows his lighter sideMonday, 26 September 2022
It probably tells you all you need to know about Igor Levit that when a mobile phone pinged just before his encore, he neither ignored it, nor seemed annoyed, but turned it into a seamless musical gag. After sending a ripple of laughter through the audience as his eyes widened in comedic shock, he played a responding ping on the piano at exactly the same pitch. Read more... |
Gurrelieder, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - everything in place, but still something’s missingSunday, 25 September 2022
Schoenberg’s “Song of the Wood Dove” takes up a mere 11 of the 100 minutes of his epic Gurrelieder, though it’s a crucial narrative of how King Waldemar of Gurre’s beloved Tove was murdered by his jealous queen. Last night, as in Simon Rattle’s 2017 Proms performance, stunning mezzo Karen Cargill came on stage, immediately in character, and with no reference to the score on the stand in front of her, showed everyone else how to do it. Read more... |
Leonskaja, Staatskapelle Streichquartett, Wigmore Hall review - Brahms the chameleonWednesday, 21 September 2022
Epic-lyric magician Brahms wears a very adaptable garment for certain masterpieces: black on the outside with fur trimming, reversible to show its exquisitely wrought, variegated silk patterns on the inside. Read more... |
Dunedin Consort, Butt, Lammermuir Festival review - majestic Mozart at St Mary’s HaddingtonMonday, 19 September 2022
The Dunedin Consort are most readily associated with the music of the Baroque, but this concert showed that they’re every bit as good at playing the music of the next generation. At times, in fact, I was taken aback by the magisterial scale of the orchestral sound as they played Mozart’s great C Minor Mass. Read more... |
Denk, RSNO, Macdonald, Lammermuir Festival review - dark Sibelius and mighty BrahmsTuesday, 13 September 2022
Once the shock of Queen Elizabeth’s death has faded, attention will surely turn to the many organisations and institutions of which she was patron. This concert not only marked the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s debut at the Lammermuir Festival, but it was also the first the orchestra had played since the departure of Her Majesty. Read more... |
Prom 69, Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Monteverdi Choir, ORR, Gardiner review - shock, fervour and total focusThursday, 08 September 2022
Back in 1990, John Eliot Gardiner with his Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and world-class singers set the South Bank alight with revelatory concert performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo and La clemenza di Tito. Now he's done it again for an even quirkier masterpiece, burning away any Albert Hall mists with the best possible voices and an “Orchestre” which can be called “Révolutionnaire” but decidedly not “Romantique” when it comes to the Missa Solemnis. Read more... |
The Goldberg Variations, De Keersmaeker, Kolesnikov, Sadler's Wells review - keyboard harmony and atonal danceWednesday, 07 September 2022
Jean-Guihen Queyras and five dancers of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company in the Bach Cello Suites was a thing of constantly evolving wonder. So too is Pavel Kolesnikov’s ongoing dialogue with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, different every time he plays them. Would De Keersmaeker alone be able to hold her own dancing to this inventory of technical rigour and human emotions? Read more... |
Prom 64, Beethoven's Last Three Piano Sonatas, Schiff review - morning gloryMonday, 05 September 2022
In more ways than one, Beethoven’s last piano sonatas can make the listener lose track of time. It’s not just the delirious freedom with rhythm, accents, signatures and note-values that the ageing, afflicted composer of Op. 109, 110 and 111 unleashes in these epoch-shifting works. Read more... |
Prom 62, Mahler's Seventh Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic, Petrenko review - hallucinogenic night's journey into daySunday, 04 September 2022
Match the most multi-timbred, flexible orchestra in the world with the iridescent peak of symphonic mastery, and you have an assured winner of a Prom. Yet not even Kirill Petrenko’s previous London performance of Mahler’s Seventh with the Bavarian State Orchestra, nor the brilliance of his two previous Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic, had prepared me for the miracle he achieved last night with players who will clearly do anything for him. Read more... |
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