Classical Reviews
Anne Boleyn's Songbook, Alamire, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseMonday, 14 September 2015
Later this week David Skinner’s Alamire ensemble will collect the Early Music Gramophone Award for The Spy’s Choirbook, but last night it was the group’s follow-up album that was in the spotlight (or rather the candlelight) in a performance at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Anne Boleyn’s Songbook is the central panel of a planned trilogy of releases, with a story every bit as compelling as its predecessor. Read more... |
Dunedin Consort, Butt, Brunton Theatre, MusselburghMonday, 14 September 2015
It was, admitted the Lammermuir Festival’s co-artistic director James Waters, ‘a bit of an experiment’. And trying to recreate the fertile atmosphere – intellectual, musical and culinary – of a Leipzig coffee house from the 1730s, complete with Bach, coffee and cake, could so easily have become just an excuse to expand the waistline in the name of art. Or worse, a tempting tasty marketing ploy to bring in reluctant new audience members. Read more... |
Last Night of the Proms, BBCSO, AlsopSunday, 13 September 2015
“A rich and eclectic sequence of works” was the promise made in this evening’s concert programme. It certainly was that, with the Last Night festivities taking in new and old, well-known and obscure, plus a handful of celebrity soloists for good measure. The audience was predictably ebullient, generating the kind of atmosphere you only get at the Last Night of the Proms. Read more... |
Prom 75: The Dream of Gerontius, VPO, RattleSaturday, 12 September 2015
And so it ends – with angels and archangels and “heart-subduing melody”. The Proms might not officially finish till tomorrow night, but this penultimate concert is always the true close of the season, and what better or more fitting an ending – especially on this most poignant anniversary – than Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. Read more... |
Prom 73: VPO, BychkovFriday, 11 September 2015
Every Proms season needs a late-romantic rarity to envelop its audience in a bewitching spider-web of sound. This year’s candidate was of more than passing interest, the incandescent Second Symphony of Franz Schmidt, scion of the Austrian Empire – born in what is now Bratislava, three-quarters Hungarian, an embattled cellist in the Vienna Philharmonic during Mahler’s tenure. The orchestra now wants to do him proud again, thanks to the very centred championship of Semyon Bychkov. Read more... |
Prom 72: Kraggerud, BBCSO, LittonThursday, 10 September 2015
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark attended Nielsen’s 150th birthday concert earlier this year in Copenhagen’s glorious new concert hall. Her grandparents were there at the premiere of Nielsen’s blithest work, his cantata Springtime in Funen on 1921. Read more... |
Prom 70: Lugansky, St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, TemirkanovTuesday, 08 September 2015
Russian classics evening at the Proms? It could be what Alexandra Coghlan, writing about Prom 69, described as “another night at the musical office”. But given the masters in charge of two masterpieces fusing storytelling with symphonic sweep and one deservedly popular standard, there was no chance of that. Read more... |
Prom Chamber Music 8: Benedetti Elschenbroich Grynyuk TrioTuesday, 08 September 2015
She is habitually called “the violin star” but this was Nicola Benedetti in the role of dedicated chamber music player, thoroughly prepared and hard at work. Any expectations that she might play in a flamboyant or limelight-seeking way proved completely misguided. Read more... |
Prom 69: Balsom, BBC Concert Orchestra, LockhartMonday, 07 September 2015
You can see the logic to the programming of this year’s Free Prom: famous opener with a good tune (Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre) to help wash down the new commission (Guy Barker, The Lanterne of Light), before we all get down to business with a nice choral shout (Carmina Burana). Read more... |
Prom 68: Yo-Yo Ma plays BachSunday, 06 September 2015
When was the last time you saw a classical soloist wearing a suit and tie on stage? It was the only formal thing about Yo-Yo Ma’s solo Prom last night – a delicious visual anachronism, at odds with the American’s laid-back performance style that is to cello playing what Western horse riding is to the stiffly upright English version. Read more... |
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