Archive for the ‘Concerts’ Category

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Concert Concat 2

Published by peter on 2023-11-16 in Concats, Concert Concats, Concerts and Music. Closed

This post is one in a sequence which lists live music I have heard, as best my memory allows, from the Pandemic onwards. I will update this as time permits. In some cases, I am also motivated to write about what I heard.

Other posts in this collection can be found here.

  • Gabriele Sutkute: Solo recital at St-Mary-Le-Strand, London, 23 November 2023, details here. The programme was:
    • P. Rameau: Suite in D major (Pièces de Clavecin) (I. Les Tendres Plaintes (Rondeau) and #VIII. Les Cyclopes (Rondeau))
    • Scriabin: Piano Sonata in G-sharp minor, Op. 19 No. 2
    • Bartók: “Out of doors” (“With Drums and Pipes”, “Barcarolla”, “Musettes”, “The Night’s Music”, “The Chase”)
    • Liszt: Venezia e Napoli, Années de pèlerinage II, S.162 (Gondoliera, Canzone, Tarantella).
  • Ayane Nakajima: Solo piano recital at Steinway Hall, London, 15 November 2023. The programme was:
    • JS Bach: Prelude and Fugue #12 in Book 2 of the 48, in F minor
    • Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor Op. 111
    • Chopin: Andante Spianato et Grand Polonaise Brilliante in E-Flat major, Op. 22.

    Ms Nakajima played with great technical skill and power.

  • Kasparas Mikužis: Solo Piano Recital at St Mary’s Church, Sittingborne, UK, 11 November 2023. The programme was:
    • JS Bach: Prelude and Fugue #8 in Book 1 of the 48, in Eb/D# minor
    • Rachmaninoff: Variations on a Theme of Corelli
    • Mikalojus Čiurlionis: Five Preludes
    • Chopin: Scherzo #3, Op. 39 in C# minor.

    The concert began at 11am on Armistice Day, so the 50 or so people present first held two minutes of silence to remember the war dead. The opening Bach Prelude and Fugue was very fitting for a recital in a church and on this particular day, and allowed the thoughts that had arisen during the Remembrance silence to linger.

    The Preludes by fellow Lithuanian composer (and painter) Mikalojus Čiurlionis were new to me, and were quite charming. They are impressionistic in a style akin to Debussy; definitely music to seek out and play. Both the Rachmaninoff/Corelli and Chopin Scherzo #3 were excellent. A recording of a previous performance by Mr Mikužis of these two pieces can be heard here.

    Overall, the acoustics of the church were bright, which allowed us to enjoy this superb performance, one of great intelligence, maturity and artistry. Particularly for the Bach, Mr Mikužis’s performance was transcendent and sublime.

  • Various artists: Drake Calleja Trust Scholars Concert 2023, Corinthia Hotel, London, 4 November 2023, to an audience of about 100 people. The artists were: Vladyslav Biliachenko, Joseph Chalmers, Alexander Doronin, Bryan Evans, Maria Filippova, Dmytro Fonariuk, Siping Guo, Oleksandr Ilvakhin, Misha Kaploukhii, Anastasia Koorn, Liu Miao, Kasparas Mikužis, Alexandria Moon, Henna Mun, Eyra Norman, and Agustin Pennino.

    The highlight for me was Alexander Doronin’s performance of two Ligeti Etudes, #10 – Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) and #13 – L’escalier du diable (The Devil’s Staircase). As well as being technically demanding, these are musically very interesting, and this was clear in Mr Doronin’s interpretations. I once heard the late Hungarian-Danish pianist Elisabeth Klein (1911-2003) play a selection of these Etudes, including #10, in a recital in 2002, when she was 91 years old.

Continue reading ‘Concert Concat 2’

Concert Halls

Published by peter on 2022-04-16 in Concats, Concerts and Music. Closed

Herewith a list of concert halls and venues in which I have been fortunate to experience musical performances (excluding working Churches).

  • The Barbican Concert Hall, London
  • Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
  • Brisbane City Hall, Brisbane
  • Cadogan Hall, London
  • Casino Civic Hall, Casino, NSW
  • City Recital Hall, Sydney
  • Sir John Clancy Auditorium, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Ballroom, Corinthia Hotel, London
  • Salle de Flagey, Brussels
  • Salle Gaveau, Paris
  • Hamburgische Staatsoper, Hamburg
  • Hamer Concert Hall, Melbourne
  • Ipswich Civic Hall, Ipswich, QLD
  • King’s Place, London
  • Leggate Theatre, University of Liverpool, Liverpool
  • City Hall, Lismore, NSW
  • Llewellyn Hall, Canberra School of Music, Canberra, ACT
  • LSO St Luke’s, London
  • Auditorium, Maison de la Radio et de la Musique, Paris
  • Melba Hall, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Melbourne
  • Milton Court Concert Hall, Guildhall School of Music, London
  • Auditorium, St Joseph’s Nudgee College, Nudgee, Brisbane
  • Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London
  • Duke’s Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London
  • Royal Albert Hall, London
  • Elgar Room, Royal Albert Hall, London
  • Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
  • Concert Hall, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester
  • Golden Concert Room, St George’s Hall, Liverpool
  • Recital Hall, Seoul Arts Centre, Seoul
  • Seymour Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney
  • Concert Hall, South Bank Centre, London
  • Steinway Hall, London
  • Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
  • Opera Theatre, Sydney Opera House
  • Sydney Town Hall, Sydney
  • Tanglewood, MA
  • Theatre des Champs Elysees, Paris
  • Tyalgum Literary Institute Hall, Tyalgum, NSW
  • Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney
  • Wigmore Hall, London

Female composers

Published by peter on 2016-05-08 in Books, Concerts, Mendelssohn and Music. 0 Comments

Several newspapers have recently carried reviews of a new book presented short biographies of 8 female composers (Beer 2016).  It is certainly true that female composers have suffered from misogyny, and probably still do. But the situation is more subtle than it may appear at first.  The discrimination may arise because composers such as Fanny Hensel (neé Mendelssohn) wrote mostly for small-scale, intimate forms, such as lieder and solo piano.  Hensel wrote no operas or concertos or symphonies, as far as I know.   Since the industrial revolution our society, one could argue, has favoured the grand and the grandiose, so anyone who writes only in small forms is ignored.   This is true even of male composers:  Hugo Wolf, who wrote art song, is unjustly overlooked, for instance.   (This bias for the big and bombastic could also be a strongly male one.)  Against this argument that composers need to go large or be ignored, one could cite the case of nineteenth century French composer Louise Farrenc (pictured), who wrote symphonies and full-length chamber works (indeed, very good ones), yet still was ignored by the musical establishment.  Despite her music being as good as Schumann’s or Mendelssohn’s, she still is ignored.  Even Beer does not, apparently, profile her.
Hensel’s brother, Felix, was a symphonist and composer of overtures who audibly honed his technical craft writing a dozen string symphonies for the pick-up orchestra his mother assembled for the family’s weekly salon concerts each Sunday afternoon in Berlin.  Very few women composers have had such an advantage, which perhaps explains something of Felix Mendelssohn’s comparative abilities.   But Fanny Mendelssohn certainly had access to this resource.  What explains her failure to write for it? Was it some pressure in the family, or just in herself?  Did their parents, perhaps unconsciously and subtly, expect Felix to write pieces for the family salons, but not expect Fanny to do so? Was it a matter of social and class expectations of gender roles which the family had internalised? Or was Fanny simply lacking in confidence?   She once wrote a song to secretly communicate her love for the man who later became her husband at a time when her parents refused to allow the pair to meet or write letters, so it seems she could disobey the spirit of any explicit family imposition, if not the letter.
Or are we looking in the wrong place entirely here?  The Mendelssohns’ father and his brothers were bankers.  Felix’s father took him to Paris as a teenager to meet Cherubini explicitly to assess whether the boy had a future as a composer.  It is easy to imagine that his father wanted him to follow in the family bank, so perhaps Felix had to fight to get to be a composer. It was not, perhaps, that the family discouraged Fanny in particular from a career as a composer but that both children were thus discouraged, but only Felix resisted this pressure.  To be honest, however, Felix’s published letters do not reveal any such discouragement from their parents.
Reference:
Anna Beer [2016]: Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music. Oneworld, London, auK.

A great Norwegian Messiah

Published by peter on 2014-12-29 in Concerts, Jazz and Music. 0 Comments

Until this month, the best performance of the Messiah I ever heard was in 2011, an event I recorded here. I have now heard its equal.

This latest Messiah was performed on 19 December 2014 by The BBC Singers and the Norwegian Wind Ensemble, in an arrangement by Stian Aareskjold, under David Hill (conductor), with Fflur Wyn (soprano), Robin Blaze (counter-tenor), Samuel Boden (tenor) and Mark Stone (bass), in Temple Church, as part of Temple Winter Festival.

My heart sank when I first saw that the music had been arranged for wind-band, since groups of woodwinds, so often shrill and ineffectual, are not my favourite ensembles. But in fact this version turned out to be a wonderful arrangement and was realized in a thrilling performance. The secret, I think, was that the ensemble included a double bass and cello, some marvelous natural horns and three sackbuts, and, most spectacularly, saxophones. The solo for soprano sax in “O Thou That Tellest” played by Kristin Haagensen was just superb. That solo soared, as so did the saxes on “Surely He Hath Borne our Griefs and with His Stripes we are Healed”. A modern Briton, of course, cannot easily hear baroque music played by saxophones without thinking of Michael Nyman, and, just as with his great music, this was a truly sublime experience. The trombones in “He Trusted in God” were also inspired. Mr Aareskjold should be congratulated on this arrangement, and I hope it is soon recorded.

In addition, the performance rocked, and often literally. I was sitting as close to the orchestra as I could possibly get, and even had the two baroque trumpeters between me and the orchestra for the second half – Stian Aareskjold and Torgeir Haara, who had played angelically from the organ loft in the first half. (They played from iPads controlled by foot pedals.) So I could see the movement of choir and players as they performed, and there was a distinct bounce in some of the numbers, particularly in “His Yoke is Easy”. Perhaps the presence of saxes played by jazz musicians, who (unlike most classical musicians) move in time to their playing, led to this. Mr Aareskjold is the son of a trumpeter and the grandson of a trombone player (the reverse of my own ancestry), and brass players are often crossover musicians. The Church acoustics were, as usual here, superb.

For the “Hallelujah” Chorus, only part of the audience stood. Until this performance, I had never heard of the action of standing being construed as showing support for monarchical systems of government, and, frankly, such an interpretation is ridiculous. One stands for the “Hallelujah” because it is a tradition to do so, even if a tradition started by a Hanoverian monarch. Like Karl Marx, I believe traditions are the collected errors of past generations. But, like Morton Feldman, I’ve realized in adulthood that errors are not necessarily always to be avoided.
The concert is available to listen until mid January 2015, via BBC Radio 3. The Ensemble hails from Halden, a town of just 30,000 people. It was nice that the people sitting near me also came from there, and had brought with them tourist brochures to entice us to visit the town. I took one, of course, as it gave to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.
And on the way out of the Middle Temple, in the offices of law-firm Gibson, Dunne & Crutcher in Temple Avenue, a late-working Friday evening team could be seen around a white board, making at least one observer envious of their camaraderie and collective efforts. How much fun it looked!

Earth moving in Folkestone

Published by peter on 2014-05-25 in Concerts, Music, Reviews and Violin. 0 Comments

SSQ Festival 2014
Two life-changing concerts this weekend, both including Finnish violin virtuoso, Pekka Kuusisto, and both in Folkestone as part of the annual Sacconi Quartet’s Chamber Music Festival.

The first was a  concert in St. Mary and St. Eanswythe’s Church that included the Sacconi Quartet and the Chamber Orchestra of the Royal College of Music. With PK, they performed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and knowing they would was the main reason for my attendance.  PK’s recording of Vivaldi is the most exciting and thrilling I know.  But this live performance was on another plane entirely.  Usually The Seasons are twee and effete and smugly complacent.  PK’s recording is not that, but rather raw and rustic.  (See my comments here.) The live performance, in contrast, was sharp and edgy, thrilling and exciting too but in a different way entirely to the recording.  If Vivaldi is usually suburban Barnet gemütlichkeit, then the recording is from the wild places of Cornwall or the Hebrides, and this performance was from the mean streets of Toxteth or Mile End.

PK’s playing as always was superb. He has an amazing ability to mimic the breathy tone of a flute, producing a sound sublime, something I have heard him do before in very different work.  Yet, at other times it was if he construed the violin as a percussion instrument, not hitting it with his hand but striking the strings in a multitude of carefully-calibrated ways with the bow.  Later, in the pub after the second concert, he agreed that this notion of the percussive violin described his intention.  Violinists often see the instrument as a sort of uncanny extension of themselves, and here was an extension that was brash, direct, and forceful – someone who is here to live out loud, in Zola’s great phrase.  How different to the twee Vivaldi of most other performances I have seen.

In addition, PK treated the work as a modern work, interpreting it afresh – moving around the stage, for example, to confront directly the other players in the various duets and rounds, having face-offs at various times, and interacting physically and with immediacy in accord with the temper of each phase of the music.  The other performers responded in kind to his enthusiasm.  The acoustics in the church were excellent, so that everything could be heard well.  This was certainly the best musical experience of my life, and I feel immensely privileged to have witnessed it.

The second concert followed straight afterwards, in the primary school across the street.  We were party to a violin and electronics meditation on Bach’s Partita in D minor, by PK and Teemu Korpipaa.  The movements of the Bach were played without modification by solo violin, and interleaved with duo improvisations on what we had just heard.  This was also sublime, and had the effect of elongating and deepening the emotions invoked by the Bach, an annotation that added to the original.  It was clear the two had worked together before, and so the annotations were profound and heartfelt.

Unfunny music

Published by peter on 2013-11-03 in Concerts and Music. 0 Comments

Last night, I caught the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under Sakari Oramo, with Olli Mustonen (piano) and Sergei Nakariakov (trumpet), at the Barbican, playing Tristan Murail’s Reflections/Reflets and Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto #1.  The Murail work was in two parts, the first (Spleen) a response to Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal, oozed sound colours slowly and langorously across the horizon, while the second (High Voltage) involved rapid-fire scales and runs.   I liked the first part more than the second.   The composer was in the audience.
In the Shostakovich, Nakariakov’s trumpet was superb. I have never heard the sad, muted solo of the second movement played so hauntingly: His tone there was breathtaking, and it was as if the sound was coming from another room, perhaps by some form of ventriloquism (a trumpet ventriloquy?). What came immediately to mind was the similarly sublime green-tinged, luminous moon of Arkhip Kuindzhi’s famous 1881 painting Moonlit Night on the Dniepr (pictured).  In contrast, Mustonen’s piano playing was disappointing.  His left hand was decidedly softer than the right for most of the piece.  At first, I thought this may be an acoustic artefact of where I was sitting (at the front left, almost directly facing the pianist’s back), but when he deployed his left hand loudly I did hear it loudly.   The issue is that for much of the work, Shostakovich was writing – as he does so often – in the style of a two-part invention, not a music-hall song with a cantabile solo with uninteresting accompaniment, so the two hands need to play equally loudly so that we hear the parts clearly.
The performance had another, more existential, problem:  This concerto is one of the funniest works in the entire orchestral repertoire, and yet last night’s interpretation was intensely serious.  Perhaps having in charge two Finns – a nation notoriously dour – overwhelmed the fun in the music.    And, I think it would have been better had the pianist not had his back to the trumpeter.  The entire work is a sharp-tongued dialogue between the two, particularly the duel at the end, and to hear what is meant to be fast-witted banter played so seriously was disappointing.

PKOM at the Wigmore

Published by peter on 2013-04-14 in Concerts, Music and Violin. 0 Comments

This week, I was lucky to catch the first half of a concert by Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto and pianist/composer Olli Mustonen at London’s Wigmore Hall.   I heard them play Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A (Op. 30, #1) and Mustonen’s Sonata for Violin and Piano, which was a world premiere.

As always with PK, the playing was superb and full of energy.   What he lacks in physical height, he more than makes up for in enthusiasm and pizzaz.  He is an extraordinarily talented violinist, and I try not to miss opportunities to hear him play.  (I have also heard him play piano, but the part was not a testing one.)

In the main, Beethoven’s violin sonatas do not impress me – our Ludwig couldn’t play the instrument nearly as well as he could play the piano, and this shows in his writing for the respective instruments.  I view these sonatas as really being piano sonatas with violin commentaries.  And, as so often with Beethoven, the music at some point comes to a stop, or nearly so, mid-way through the develoment section, like a clock winding down, and has to be re-started again.  What underlying psychological thing is going on here, I wonder, that this happens so often in B’s music?  After a while it becomes annoying, like a friend asking you the same unpleasant question every time you meet, and you end up wantIng to avoid talking with that person.

Mustonen’s Sonata was superb.  The programme notes warned us that he began as a composer of “Busonian neo-classicism”.   I thought this piece was not at all neo-classical, but also certainly not in the category of up-town modernist complexity.  The first part comprised an ever-present walking treble line of odd intervals by the violin, sequences of uneven lengths and different intervals not quite repeated exactly, with various waves of piano arising and decaying around this.   The particular odd intervals – tritones, sevenths – brought immediately to my mind some music of Australian composer Larry Sitsky, who studied with Egon Petri (1881-1962), who in turn was a student of Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924).    The emotional waves of this first part were very stark.  Would I have thought of Sibelius and the forests of the North if I had not known the composer was Finnish?  I don’t know.

The transition between the second and third parts was slow and beautiful, and very moving, and the effects PK produced were simply stunning.  At one point, low trembling notes on the G string sounded like a breathy flute being played.  And a series of repeated patterns combining trills and vibrata on different fingers of the left hand, was very impressive.  Not at all clear how these effects were produced, but the independent but co-ordinated action of the left-hand fingers would have required long practice to achieve.  Perhaps the effect was partly due to rapid changes of speed and pressure on the bow, also.

It was a privilege to be in the presence of such superb music played by these two virtuosos.

Here is another review of the same concert, by an anonymous blogger.   Following the review, the blogger cites PK’s recording of Vivalid’s Four Seasons, as “restrained”.   I wonder if he or she was actually listening!    We’ve had 60 years of elegant, effete and twee recordings of The Seasons, so we know what restrained with regard to this music means.  PK’s treatment is rustic and earthy and full-blooded, as if the entire ensemble had been taken outside and roughed-up in the mud of the farmyard, and the complete opposite of restrained!   A simply superb interpretation, original, fresh and compelling.  Your milage certainly can vary, as people say.

Feats of memorization

Published by peter on 2013-01-04 in Concerts, Hands and Music. 0 Comments

Szabo-Daniel-hands
Anthony Tommasini writes in the IHT on the trend to allow concert pianists to play from music, instead of playing recital solos and concertos from memory.  A good thing too!  While playing from memory is an impressive feat to watch, it certainly takes additional  practice effort to achieve:  I would rather good performers played more different music than that they played a smaller collection from memory.
I saw Angela Hewitt play the Bach 48 from memory in Cottonopolis a few years ago.   At the first concert, a woman  in the front row was reading from a miniature score.  After the first few preludes and fugues, Ms Hewitt quietly asked the woman to put her score away, as the page turning was distracting.  My guess is that the page-breaks were happening at places other than where Ms Hewitt had memorized.   (As an aside, her performance was very good but her interpretations undermined by rubato.  I prefer my Bach straight, not with flavoured mixers.)
Note:  The hands shown are those of Szabo Daniel.

Brass in Tyalgum

Published by peter on 2012-09-13 in Concerts, Music and Reviews. 0 Comments

The Brass Band of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music is the only English-style brass band in an Australian tertiary music college, which says something about the impoverished musical taste of those who run Australian music education institutions. Because the brass are mostly little-used in orchestral music (relative to, say, the strings, who play all the time), orchestral brass players usually also play in other wind ensembles and bands, both for the practice and to build their stamina. So a distaste for brass band music is usually not something shared by orchestral brass players.  And a good thing too, given the high calibre of the best brass bands.
With about 100 other people, I caught the QCM Brass Band last weekend, performing as part of the 21st Tyalgum Festival of Classical Music.    The band was led by Peter Luff and Greg Aitken, both of the QCM.  The festival began in this small and isolated mountain village after some performers had experienced the very good acoustics of the Tyalgum Literary Institute Hall, the main public hall in the town.   The acoustics of the Hall are indeed excellent, although surely not of a design praised in modern architecture schools.   The Hall, built in 1908, is a single rectangle, with side walls made of wooden planks, having many windows and doors.  On one side is an enclosed verandah, open to the main room.  The roof has a single pitch and is made of corrugated iron, and there is no ceiling – the iron reflects sound well, and the undulations would send it in all directions.  Mostly, the band sat on the floor at the front beneath the stage, with only the percussion on the small stage, yet the sound in the middle of the room was clear, very full and very loud.  The reverberation was noticeable but not overly long.    Apart from rust (and thus the need for regular replacement), the only downside of corrugated iron roofs is that nothing else can be heard when it is raining.
Tyalgum lies under the calming shadow of Mount Warning, a mountain named by James Cook in 1770, and which is the first place on the Australian land-mass to see the sun each morning.   We could see the close-by mountain from inside the hall.  So it was fitting, then, that the walls were decorated with several paintings of the mountain.  Oddly, though, all these images showed the mountain from the usual eastern vantage point, yet the village itself is on the western side.   So what you saw on the walls did not match what you saw through the windows.  (For that matter, the same wrong view of the mountain is on the Festival poster and web-page.)
The Band made very good use of the space.  A fanfare by Ann Carr-Boyd was played before the concert from the upstairs front windows to people in the street.  This fanfare was repeated inside at the start of the concert, with the composer present in the audience.   Later, a piece by Gabrieli for three brass choirs was played with the choirs arranged around the hall:  At the front, 5 players in SAT (Soprano, Alto, Tenor) instrumental combination, at the side under the enclosed verandah (ATB) and in the first-floor balcony at the back (SAT).  This was superb use of space for surround sound, and stunning playing.
There were some moments to treasure.   The open side doors allowed a sudden breeze to blow away the music of the tenor trombone during the Vivaldi.    As with any music from this period, intonation was difficult, particularly for the horn player, and at times for the two solo piccolo trumpets.   With lots of fast-moving duo passages (the horn with one or other trombone) – very typical of Vivaldi – creating havoc for the three performers accompanying the soloists, it is perhaps not surprising that one trumpet soloist had a look of absolute astonishment on his face when the players ended the third movement together.
The pieces for the full ensemble were all well played, although perhaps more attention was needed to choreography of the percussionists.   Some of the 5 people who were at one time or another on stage in the percussion section appeared unfamiliar with that part of the band.
The complete program was:

  • Ann Carr-Boyd:  Britannia Fanfare
  • Aaron Copland:  Fanfare for the Common Man
  • Antonio Vivaldi:  Double Trumpet Concerto (arranged for 2 piccolo trumpets, french horn, tenor and bass trombone)
  • Leonard Bernstein:  Excerpts from West Side Story
  • Giovanni Gabrieli:  Canzon Septimi Octavi Toni for 3 brass choirs
  • Henry Purcell:  The Fairy Queen
  • Philip Sparke:  Music of the Spheres.

Some of the same players were seen here.