Classical Notes
Reflections on classical music, recordings and performances
Saturday 20 April 2024
The Contenance Angloise - BREMF Consort of Voices sings 15th century polyphony
Classical Music at the Brighton Festival 2024
Antonio Pappano |
Harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani is joined by Britten Sinfonia soloists for a concert of Bach at Glyndebourne, performing two Keyboard Concertos, and the Brandenburg Concertos Nos 2 & 5 (Sunday 3 May, 3pm). Slipping through the net of the printed brochure, a late addition to the Festival is the wonderful Baroque ensemble, Solomon’s Knot, performing Scarlatti, Bach and Handel’s Dixit Dominus (Thursday 9 May, 8pm, Corn Exchange).
12 Ensemble |
Ed Hughes' new opera, States of Innocence, based on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, will be premiered at the Corn Exchange, with cast including Sir John Tomlinson. Texts are adapted from Milton by Peter Cant, and Ian Winters provides video projection design (Sunday 19 May, 6.30pm & 8.45pm).
Danielle de Niese |
The Brighton Festival Youth Choir, conducted by Juliette Pochin, perform Cecilia McDowall’s cantata, The Girl from Aleppo (Saturday 11 May, 6pm, All Saints, Hove). For more on this piece, I reviewed the National Children’s Choir of Great Britain’s recording of it back in 2020 here. They are followed the same evening by the Brighton Festival Chorus, performing the UK premiere of Kim André Arnesen’s The Stranger, weaving together refugee poems and multi-faith texts emphasising our common humanity (Saturday 11 May, 8.30pm, All Saints). Meanwhile, Brighton and East Sussex Youth Orchestra bring us Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, with storyteller Alia Alzougbi retelling some of the tales of the 1001 nights. Former BESYO trumpeter, Alan Thomas returns to join the orchestra to perform Artunian’s Trumpet Concerto (Monday 13 May, 7.30pm).
Apollo's Cabinet |
Details of all concerts, venues and tickets here.
Tuesday 9 April 2024
A strong sea-inspired finish to Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra's 99th Season
Adam Hickox & the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra
© Nick Boston
Adam Hickox (conductor)
Ragnhild Hemsing (Hardanger fiddle)
Joanna MacGregor (piano/conductor)
Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra
Nicky Sweeney (leader)
2.45pm, Sunday 7 April 2024
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Four Sea Interludes from ‘Peter Grimes’
Geiir Tveitt (1908-1981): Violin Concerto No. 2, Op. 252 for Hardanger fiddle, ‘Three Fjords’
Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952-2023): Still Life
Bibo non Aozora
Happy End
Claude Debussy (1862-1918): La Mer
Ragnhild Hemsing, Adam Hickox & the BPO
© Nick Boston
I’ve been fortunate to catch many of the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra’s concerts over recent seasons, and it has been a pleasure to see them go from strength to strength, with imaginative and innovative programming, and some great performances along the way. The final concert of their 99th season was no exception, and certainly sets them up well for an exciting centenary season to come.
Conductor Adam Hickox was at the helm, and his assured confidence and clear direction was key to bringing out the best from the BPO players. Their opening of the Four Sea Interludes from Britten’s opera, Peter Grimes, was full of atmosphere and evocative colour. From its pianissimo opening, Dawn had darkly ominous brass layered with the strange angular violins, and aside from one imprecise pickup, entries were secure. The horns’ bells rang out clear for Sunday Morning, with spiky seagull cries from the woodwind, against a slightly seasick dance from the violas and cellos. As the movement built, there were a couple of moments where the flutes’ birds didn’t quite knit fully into the overall orchestral texture, but Britten’s cumulative queasy effect was nevertheless achieved. Moonlight brings more unsettled atmosphere, and here the BPO’s dynamic range could have been more expansive in places, and there wasn’t total unanimity in note lengths from the strings, revealed by Britten’s use of silence and stop/start phrases. However, Storm had immediate drive and pace, with Hickox eliciting greater range in the brass surges, as well as controlling a tight transition into the briefly calmer central section.
Next came a Violin Concerto, but with a difference. Ragnhild Hemsing performed Norwegian composer Geirr Tveitt’s Violin Concerto No. 2 for Hardanger fiddle, Three Fjords. The Hardanger fiddle is a fascinating hybrid instrument, with four strings bowed as on a normal violin, but also with a second set of strings running under the fingerboard that resonate sympathetically, providing a drone-like quality to the sound produced. It goes back to the 17th century, and is thought of as Norway’s national instrument. Tveitt, whose family came from Hardangerford, was a prolific composer, and today’s concerto was his second for the instrument. As well as the fiddle, folk melodies from the Hardanger region and the traditional Norwegian modal scales were central to much of his music. The three movements of the second Concerto all contain elements of dance rhythms as well as folk-like, pentatonic melodies and harmonies, somewhat dictated by the fixed tuning of those resonating understrings. Hemsing’s fiddle was miked – a necessity in a large venue when the quieter instrument is put against a full orchestra if the resonances were to be heard. The consequent sound in the concert hall was richly resonant, and there was often a sense of Hemsing leading the orchestral violins in particular into the dance, joined in Hardangerfjord by a bright snare drum. Sognefjord had darker moments, with the fiddle opening alone, followed by mournful brass and strings. Nordfjord provided a sparky finish, with jerkier rhythms and wild virtuosity from Hemsing, with swirling and sliding building to an exciting finish. We then got to briefly hear the fiddle on its own, with Hemsing treating us to an encore of two traditional tunes, a ‘listening tune’, with strongly resonating drones and swirling bird-like figures, followed by a ‘dancing tune’, with orchestra and audience alike stomping along to the lively rhythms.
Joanna MacGregor & the BPO
© Nick Boston
Music Director Joanna MacGregor took to the stage to open the second half of the concert, performing three short pieces from Japanese composer and pianist, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 2013 album, Playing the Orchestra. Sakamoto, who sadly died just a year ago, composed, performed, produced, and worked with many musicians and artists, including Laurie Anderson and Youssou N’Dor, as well as acting and writing film scores, such as The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky. MacGregor performed and conducted from the piano in these atmospheric miniatures. First, Still Life, with MacGregor conducting the muted divided violins, shifting independently within the texture, joined by soft woodwind chords. MacGregor then sat at the piano, her playing initially inaudible but then emerging from the texture into the limelight. Bibo no Aozora (Beauty of a Blue Sky) had greater rhythmic interest, with the piano opening alone, joined by pulsing violins. The jazzy harmonies build into lush, romantic expression, subsiding to leave the piano alone once more. Finally, Happy Endcontrasted repeated woodwind notes with a singing, falling cello line, then a walking bass line from the bassoons. MacGregor’s confident octaves on the piano built to a dramatic conclusion and sudden surprise end. An enjoyable start to the second half – although not quite fitting into the overall ‘Sea songs’ theme, perhaps.
Hickox returned to the podium to conduct Debussy’s magnificent impressionist masterpiece, La Mer. In his brief discussion with MacGregor whilst the stage was rearranged, he referred to it as the greatest piece for orchestra, and talked of how Debussy used the strings in particular for rhythmic interest or orchestral colour, rather than simply for melodic lines. And indeed the muted violins shimmered in the opening movement, De l’aube à midi sur la mer (From dawn to noon on the sea), and the multiply divided strings produced complex textures, against which the woodwind and brass provided the ebb and flow of the waves. In Jeux de vagues (Play of the waves), Hickox brought out the sensuous playfulness, and leader Nicky Sweeney delivered a suitably skittish solo. With ringing high harps and moments of swaying waltz (Hickox swinging to the rhythms), this had a real sense of the spray, before disappearing away to a wisp at the end. Dialogue du vent et de la mer (Dialogue of the wind and the sea) opened with ominous low strings, and the woodwind began a little tentatively here, but once the strident trumpet broke through, they rose to the challenge with the melodic line’s increasing rising intervals building relentlessly. And when the final tutti came, there was real power and a sense of stormy turmoil, with the insistent timpani driving to a spectacular conclusion.
Saturday 6 April 2024
Stylish performances of Clive Osgood’s Three Shakespeare Songs from the Sofia Vokalensemble and Bengt Ollén
Wednesday 27 March 2024
20th-century English quintets at Cadogan Hall: sensitivity and orchestral scale
Principals of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Tamás András (violin)
Andrew Storey (violin)
Abigail Fenna (viola)
Jonathan Ayling (cello)
Benjamin Cunningham (double bass)
3.30pm, Sunday 24 March 2024
Cadogan Hall, London
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958): Piano Quintet in C minor
Edward Elgar (1857-1934): Quintet in Q minor for Piano and String Quartet, Op. 84
Friday 22 March 2024
The Atchison Quartet give affectionate performances of String Quartets by Cecil Armstrong Gibbs
The Atchison Quartet is a project based quartet led by Robert Atchison (also of the London Piano Trio), joined by Ian Belton (the Brodsky Quartet), Elisa Bergesen (viola, the Bergesen Quartet) and Sophie Harris (cello, the Smith Quartet), and they have recorded three of the String Quartets, along with Three Pieces for String Quartet and A Birthday Greeting for Ralph Vaughan Williams.
They open with the latest of the three quartets recorded here, the String Quartet in C, op. 95, written in 1940. Gibbs and his wife had recently moved to Windemere from their home in Danbury, Essex, and the opening movement has a spacious, sunny feel, although unsettling moments do edge in, before it feels like a train rushed through the conclusion. The middle movement has a gentle lilt, with a faster, more urgent middle section, before gently dancing pizzicato opens the final movement. As the instruments take up their bows, the music rocks and the cello sings a pastoral, pentatonic melody, with a slightly more chromatic response from the other instruments. The pizzicato returns, and all almost dies away, before a briefly emphatic finish.
They jump back to 1917 for the String Quartet in A minor, Op. 8, one of the few that was performed in Gibbs’ lifetime. It was composed before his studies at the RCM, but it resides in much the same soundworld as the Op. 95 from some 23 years later. The opening movement has a lilting dance feel, although energy builds to something more complex, and a harshly insistent climax, before winding down to a gentle finish from the viola. Lilt is the mood once again the middle movement, with another pentatonic melodic line circling up and down. The finale has a more mysterious opening, but then picks up on the previous movement’s four note idea, with more insistent repetition. Lines swirl around, with perhaps some loss of overall direction, followed by some slightly more angular fugal material which also meanders along towards an energetic coda and an emphatic upward scale from the first violin to conclude.
Next come Three Pieces for String Quartet, three musical impressions of places in the Lake District. Here, his impressionistic and pastoral style comes into its own, with flashes of sunlit chords breaking through the lyricism in Above Blea Tarn, and a flowing folk song gambolling along in Winster Valley, with undulating remnants of rain being driven away by soothing duetting lines in Loweswater: Calm after Storm.
The String Quartet in E minor from 1958 follows, written less than two years before his death. His wife died in January, and then his friend Vaughan Williams suddenly died in the August. So understandably there is more introspection here, and the opening movement, whilst full of rhythmic energy, is full of nagging repetition. The central movement has more poignant lyricism, building to brief anguish, before a clam finish. The finale is a Theme and Variations, with a theme definitely reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’ ‘old English’ tunes. There are hints of viol consort, as well as a homage to (and direct quote from) Warlock’s Capriol Suite, and the final variation is a kind of Bachian fugue. The theme returns at the end, but stalls at the last minute, ending the work with two doleful E minor chords. This is the most overtly emotional of the works here, with Gibbs’ feelings perhaps breaking through that comfortable pastoral style for a moment.
The disc ends appropriately with a short single movement, A Birthday Greeting for Ralph Vaughan Williams, written in 1942 for the composer’s 70th birthday. With its Vaughan Williams-esque melody and walking accompanying parts, it shows the great respect Gibbs had for his teacher and friend.
The Atchison Quartet give warmly respectful performances throughout here, responding to the lyricism in Gibbs’ melodic lines, whilst also taking advantage of the rarer moments of darker harmonies and greater rhythmic activity. It is the Quartet in E minor that sticks out for me in terms of musical interest and diversity of textures, but this collection nevertheless stands as a strong advocate for Gibbs’ neglected chamber works. The album is well supported by informative notes from Nicholas Riddle, and the recorded sound is warm and bright throughout.
Saturday 16 March 2024
A triumphant Esther from Cummings at the London Handel Festival's Spring Awakenings
Esther at London Handel Festival © Sisi Burn |
The London Handel Festival © Nick Boston |