Helen is an oboist at the Royal College of Music. She is delighted to be based in London and so able to take advantage of the wide variety of concerts the city provides. She also loves to teach and is keen to use this and every other opportunity to interest new people in classical music.
Three symphonies in one programme! Anyone who has ever sat through all ninety minutes of Mahler’s 3rd Symphony would be permitted a slight shudder upon reading the concert order of Sir Simon Rattle’s latest performance with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
High expectations are a dangerous thing: reality has a cruel way of bringing keenly anticipated events to their knees every so often. This unfortunate fact was verified once again this Friday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, where the youthful Spira Mirabilis appeared to perform Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Have you been to Kings Place yet? London’s newest concert hall opened in 2008 and is rapidly building a reputation as a vibrant cultural centre with a phenomenal acoustic and a friendly smile. If you haven’t been yet, I urge you to select a good programme – this weekend’s Shostakovich cycle with the Brodsky Quartet was ideal – and head to the concert hall at King’s Cross.
The history of British music reads rather like the old joke about buses: there was no composer of note in the two hundred years after Purcell, and then three came along at once. Whilst Elgar and Vaughan Williams have become household names, the third composer who came along at the end of the nineteenth century has been relegated to the dusty shelves of musical history.
When one thinks of the ‘X factor’, it’s fairly certain that the first image that comes to mind is not that of a quiet, unassuming man in his mid-sixties, clad in evening dress.
Do you remember when Steve Reich, “America’s greatest living composer”, came to your school concert and you performed his seminal work Clapping Music with the great man? No? Well, Joshua Kellie does. Joshua was one of the talented (and fortunate) St Paul’s School pupils chosen to perform in a concert in honour of the minimalist composer on his 75th birthday.
Following their acclaimed 'Bartók: Infernal Dance' series, the Philharmonia moved on Thursday to another of the twentieth century’s great composers: Richard Strauss. Strauss’s youthful tone poems, Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche were contrasted with his gloriously autumnal Four Last Songs, with Mozart’s 25th Symphony serving as a rather unexpected companion.
Whether intentionally or not, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment has done Christianity’s street cred a great service this week. As the St Paul’s protest furore continues to grow, the orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis was a reminder that for the composer and countless others, religion is first and foremost about the comfort of spirituality.
Béla Bartók was a composer of extremes. An avid collector of Hungarian folk songs, he published arrangements of these simple tunes alongside his own more ascetic music. The detailed programme notes for the Philharmonia’s Bartók series entitled ‘Infernal Dance’ divide his music into three categories: the banned, the rarely played and the fully approved.
Famous for his operas, Benjamin Britten had been planning something new for some time when he was invited in 1958 to compose a work to celebrate the rebuilding of the bombed Coventry Cathedral. The composer saw the resulting War Requiem as a force for unification, choosing his three soloists from the UK, USSR and Germany, the countries he believed to have suffered the most during World War Two.
Piano. Concerto. Opera. The Italian origins of these well-known musical words hint at the enormous influence that country had on the musical world during the Baroque period, when classical music as we know it began to take shape. The scale of this influence was explored last night by Ian Bostridge, tenor and former historian, in the first concert of his year-long residency at the Wigmore Hall.
How do you fill a concert hall? This question is asked despairingly of venues across the globe, usually in one those gloomy articles which heralds the death of classical music with barely restrained glee. The Wigmore Hall does not seem to suffer from empty-seat syndrome, however Director John Gilhooly has struck on a smart solution to ensure that this malaise never strikes: diversification.
Following the Philadelphia Orchestra’s stellar performance at last night’s Prom, Chief Conductor Charles Dutoit presented a second violinist with a bouquet of flowers. This unusual gesture, he explained, was a fond farewell to a man who has played in the orchestra for 50 years. During the past half-century, that violinist must have played last night’s pieces many times.
There are few greater disappointments than an event which fails to live up to high expectations: film adaptations of favourite books and the January sales seem like obvious examples of events which are often perfectly pleasing but drowned under hype.
Sometimes concerts are just concerts: music is performed, and if the juxtaposition of two pieces happens to provide some insight into the composer or his music, then this is a pleasing by-product of the performance. Other concerts are barely-disguised lectures; these concerts have grand aims and programmes thick with scholarly arguments.
Among the LSO’s many attributes is their bold and rich sound, those enormous waves of music that pin you to your seat at the very back of the Barbican Centre.
If the Cadogan Hall’s “Celebrity Recital Series” conjures up unwelcome memories of Jordan’s brief career as a singer, never fear: the Hall has attracted a very different type of famous figure. Hilary Hahn is as unlike Katie Price as could be imagined: small, dark and unassuming, you could pass her in the street without a second glance.
The air was thick with excitement in the Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday night. Strangers turned to talk to each other and every conversation seemed to be about Pinchas Zukerman: their first Zukerman experience, favourite recordings and how far they had travelled to see their hero.
Perhaps visions of the royal princes in battle dress influenced last night’s programme. Or perhaps it was merely felt that Beethoven’s Eroica symphony requires a suitably epic companion. Either way, the result was a rare performance of Britten’s enormous Battle of Heroes, written to honour the members of the International Brigade who died in the Spanish Civil war.
