| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 27-Feb-2013 Barbican Centre: Hall | Baltic music and Bach: Alina Ibragimova and Britten Sinfonia at the Barbican |
 Alina Ibragimova barely glanced up from her score during her Bach concerto with Britten Sinfonia last night, and the result was some of the most intense, beautiful music-making I can recall hearing. With just six members of the orchestra providing her with impeccable support, this was a performance of a sort of off-the-cuff brilliance in which Ibragimova sounded like she was simply playing a favourite piece of hers in private. Every touch, every shift of style or mood, seemed spontaneous, born of an impulsive, powerful love.Read full review... | |
| 12-Jul-2012 St Paul's Cathedral | Meditations in sound from The Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek |
 In 1993, by some strange musical alchemy, a creative partnership was born that has gone on to bear some remarkable fruit. On Officium, stylish jazz and classical label ECM brought together The Hilliard Ensemble – a vocal quartet known for the precision with which it had tackled and animated austere soundworlds from Perotin to Pärt – and Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek. The resultant album, of early vocal music overlaid and intertwined with plangeant, improvised saxophone, proved not only original but enormously successful.Read full review... | |
| 18-Oct-2011 La Maison Symphonique de Montréal | Juxtaposition: An Intriguing Program by Nagano, Kremer and the OSM |
 Maestro Kent Nagano’s opening words to the audience outlined the plan of the program eloquently. The concert was to be an investigation of form and structure, as elucidated musically by the surprising juxtaposition of Boulez’s monstrous orchestration and Perotin’s plainchant. The Boulez, according to the maestro, is a ‘kaleidoscope of structural evolutions,’ each small piano piece developing expansively into larger and more complex movements. Similarly, the melodic material of the Perotin chant is expanded structurally from one basic unit or idea.Read full review... | |
| 12-Jul-2011 Durham Cathedral | Officium Novum: Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek |
 It has been nearly twenty years since the Hilliard Ensemble and Jan Garbarek released their first recording, Officium, in which the austere harmonies of medieval sacred music sung by the male voice quartet were augmented by Garbarek’s beautiful, freewheeling saxophone melodies. This collaboration is now on its third album, Officium Novum, and it was clear to everyone in Durham Cathedral this evening that it is a partnership that is growing richer and more imaginative with each new project.
Read full review... | |
