Classical Reviews
Best of 2024: Classical music concertsTuesday, 31 December 2024
As always, great concerts have outnumbered great opera productions over a year, and all of our national orchestras can be proud of their record. I’ve sometimes started by celebrating youth, and it’s good to be able to do that in the shape of two competition finales totally satisfying as programmes. The palm, though, goes to two veterans who made me wonder at their ease and natural communication. Read more... |
Spence, Perez, Richardson, Wigmore Hall review - a Shakespearean journey in songMonday, 30 December 2024
“O stay and hear,” sings Twelfth Night’s jester Feste in his song “O mistress mine”, “your true love’s coming,/ That can sing both high and low.” And loud and soft, earthbound and airborne, Heldentenor-grave and night-club frivolous: Nicky Spence’s wide vocal span and stylistic versatility made him the ideal soloist for this cheerful post-Christmas canter through several centuries of Shakespeare songs. Read more... |
The English Concert, Bicket, Wigmore Hall review - a Baroque banquet for ChristmasMonday, 23 December 2024
Enough is as good as a feast, they say. But sometimes, especially at Christmas, you crave a properly groaning table. At the Wigmore Hall, The English Concert, directed by Harry Bicket, concluded their festive Baroque banquet with Bach’s Magnificat – complete with its four Christmas-tide interpolations. They had prefaced the Bach with a trio of lesser-known seasonal pieces dating from the preceding decades, by Charpentier, Stradella, and Purcell. Read more... |
Messiah, Wild Arts, Chichester Cathedral review - a dynamic battle between revelatory light and Stygian gloomWednesday, 18 December 2024
The Wild Arts Ensemble was founded by Orlando Jopling in 2022 to create a dynamic, pared-back style of performance in which, as he put it, the “costumes, set and props… can be packed up into a couple of suitcases that we can take with us on the train”. Read more... |
Messiah, Academy of Ancient Music, Cummings, Barbican review - once more, with real feelingTuesday, 17 December 2024
When does a concert become a ceremony? You generally visit the Barbican for art rather than ritual. Yet, during the Academy of Ancient Music’s performance last night, the bulk of a packed house still stood up for the “Hallelujah” that closes the second part of Handel’s Messiah. Read more... |
Christmas with Connaught Brass, Milton Court review - delightful seasonal fare from Bach to BoulangerMonday, 09 December 2024
Connaught Brass is a quintet of twenty-something players rapidly establishing an enviable reputation, and on the evidence of what I heard yesterday that reputation is fully deserved: they really are superbly good. Read more... |
Giltburg, Bournemouth SO, Wigglesworth, Portsmouth Guildhall review - seemingly effortless élanFriday, 06 December 2024
A time must come again when British orchestras return to complete Tchaikovsky ballet scores in concert, as in the BBC glory days of the great Rozhdestvensky. We were halfway there with The Nutcracker's second act in Mark Wigglesworth’s second programme as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s Chief Conductor. The "first act” was in any case a shimmering miracle too, a true partnership with another collegial master, Boris Giltburg, in Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto. Read more... |
Bach Mendelssohn Festival, Part I, Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra review - the flame that never diedWednesday, 04 December 2024
“I am not better than my fathers.” Cracked, pained, occasionally rasping, rising to a fearsome roar then subsiding to a throaty whisper, Sir Bryn Terfel’s still-formidable bass-baritone made the great vault of Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford shrink to a shoebox. Read more... |
Currie, Hallé, Wong, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - sparkle and intrigueTuesday, 03 December 2024
Kahchun Wong’s final concert of 2024 in the Hallé Manchester season was something of a surprise. At first sight, the sparkle in the programme seemed likely to come from James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni, Emmanuel – his percussion concerto, with the star name of Colin Currie as soloist – and from Malcolm Arnold’s Four Scottish Dances (especially the third of them) to precede it. Read more... |
Rajakesar, Selaocoe, The Hermes Experiment, Wigmore Hall review - a joyful, fascinating laboratory of noiseMonday, 25 November 2024
There were points when this concert felt like the musical equivalent of watching the atom split – as well as notes there were animal shrieks, sinister rattles, sibilant serpentine sussurations, and primal throaty rumbles. Read more... |
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