| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 19-May-2013 Sage: Northern Rock Foundation Hall | Exciting contemporary music for the North East: Ensemble 7Bridges debut concert |
 Ensemble 7Bridges, directed by Richard Rijnvos, Head of Composition at Durham University, and conducted by James Weeks, brings together some of the North East’s specialist professional performers of contemporary music, supported by Durham University, with the aim of contributing to the development of new music in the North East.Read full review... | |
| 17-May-2013 Sage: Hall One | Agony and ecstasy from Northern Sinfonia |
 It’s a slightly topsy-turvy world when a Shostakovich symphony lightens the mood and sends you home grinning, and when a work by Mahler is a filler rather than the main event. It’s also unusual to hear Northern Sinfonia playing full orchestral works by either of these composers, as most of their symphonic output requires much larger forces, so there was much that was new and enjoyable in tonight’s concert, even though there was no obvious connection between the works on the programme.
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| 3-May-2013 Sage: Hall One | Northern Sinfonia: Bradley Creswick's blazing fiddle |
 As their contribution to The Sage Gateshead’s weekend-long “Fiddles on Fire” festival, Northern Sinfonia presented a selection of solo violin and string music that artfully blurred the distinctions between musical periods and genres, putting the emphasis firmly on the instrument itself, and on the spirited playing of their leader, Bradley Creswick.
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| 2-May-2013 College of St Hild and St Bede Chapel | Haydn, Brahms and Janáček: a string quartet taster menu in Durham |
_Benjamin Ealovega.jpg) Durham University’s concert series Musicon has been moving around different venues in the city over the last few years, and this year has been putting on concerts in the College chapel of St Hild and St Bede. The traditional sideways-facing rows of seats are sometimes a bit awkward for concerts, but the Allegri Quartet used the layout to their advantage, and positioned themselves in a circle right in the middle of the chapel, in the heart of the audience.Read full review... | |
| 12-Apr-2013 Sage: Hall Two | Northern Sinfonia Late Mix: Contemporary America |
 On Thursday night, I reviewed the vast forces of National Youth Orchestra, playing big colourful works by European exiles in 1930s America. The following night, I was back at The Sage Gateshead to hear Northern Sinfonia’s clever little coda to this concert, performing contemporary American music as part of their Late Mix series, the huge orchestra and big tunes replaced by intricate chamber music that pushes the definition of music to its limits.
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| 11-Apr-2013 Sage: Hall One | The land of the free: European exiles in America with the National Youth Orchestra |
 The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain brought a small dose of the Southbank Centre’s year long celebration of 20th-century music, The Rest is Noise, to the North East, with a programme of bold and colourful music written by European exiles in America, music that looked to the future, and music that celebrated the best of what had been left behind.
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| 29-Mar-2013 Sage: Hall One | Distant Light with Northern Sinfonia |
 On a day when Christians around the world reflect on suffering, torment and lost hope, but with the distant promise of light soon to return, the strings of Northern Sinfonia offered a programme that could serve as a secular, humanist alternative to Good Friday; music written in dark times and troubled places of 20th-century Europe, music that is at times brooding and disturbed, sadly nostalgic but which never seems to lose its hope, or faith in that distant light.
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| 14-Mar-2013 Middlesbrough Theatre | Comedy and seriousness: Young Opera Venture's The Marriage of Figaro in Middlesborough |
 Young Opera Venture states that its aims are to provide professional performing opportunities for young graduate singers, and to bring affordable opera performances to small venues in towns where opera isn’t normally available. Their production of The Marriage of Figaro, directed by Jane Anthony, had clearly been very carefully thought out in order to meet the needs of audiences and venues that are unaccustomed to opera, and they achieved this impressively, whilst avoiding any “dumbing down”.
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| 20-Feb-2013 College of St Hild and St Bede Chapel | The Rose, the Lily and the Whortleberry: The Orlando Consort |
 The medieval garden was an enchanted place, a place where the beauties of nature took on formal and symbolic qualities, and the perfect setting for the coded artifice of courtly love. Through a carefully selected programme, the Orlando Consort allowed us a peek into the secrets of medieval gardens across Europe, to observe both the rigid formality of the knights and ladies, and much earthier goings-on behind the rose bushes and in the garden shed.
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| 15-Feb-2013 Sage: Hall One | Northern Sinfonia in love with Zehetmair, Brahms and Schumann |
 The day after Valentine’s Day, and Hall One at The Sage Gateshead was filled with love – the love between an orchestra and their conductor, and the love that all the musicians on the stage felt for the composers they were playing, in this their third concert of a Brahms and Schumann double symphony cycle with conductor Thomas Zehetmair.
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| 1-Feb-2013 Sage: Hall One | A Hero's Life: The Bergen Philharmonic at the Sage Gateshead |
 Richard Strauss’s tone poem Ein Heldenleben (“A Hero’s Life”) appears on the face of it to be a musical illustration of a medieval legend – perhaps a knight in shining armour, overcoming evil. The expansive opening theme shouts of heroism, monsters threaten, then there is a tender portrait of his lady before he heads off into battle. Except it isn’t like that at all. The “hero” of Strauss’s poem is the composer himself, the monsters are the music critics of Vienna, and the hero’s lady is an affectionately honest portrait of Strauss’s wife Pauline.
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| 29-Jan-2013 Sage: Hall Two | Northern Sinfonia in the cafés of Paris |
 When I collected my ticket for this evening’s Late Mix concert in Hall Two of The Sage Gateshead, I was somewhat surprised to see it marked as unreserved seating. A computer glitch, I thought, until I walked into the hall and found that the usual rows of seats in this small, in-the-round auditorium had been replaced with café-style tables and chairs. The surprise of this novel seating arrangement immediately set up a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, as people brought drinks in and mingled.
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| 13-Jan-2013 Sage: Hall Two | Russians in miniature at The Sage Gateshead |
 Like much of Shostakovich’s work, his popular Piano Quintet, Op. 57 (1940) is full of ambiguity and contradiction. It was written at the request of his friends in the Beethoven Quartet, who had so enjoyed his first string quartet that they asked him to write something new that they could play with him – but this private piece of chamber music was a huge public success. The composer who had enraged Stalin just a few years earlier was awarded a huge prize for his quintet, and it was hailed as his best work.Read full review... | |
| 12-Jan-2013 Sage: Hall One | Three Baroque tenors and an orcherstra: Ian Bostridge with Northern Sinfonia |
 Sometimes, glancing through reviews and recordings of Baroque opera arias, one might be forgiven for wondering whether tenors and basses ever appeared on the 18th-century stage – the genre seems dominated by the exotic lives of the castrati and the incredibly exciting music that was written for them. This evening’s concert by tenor Ian Bostridge and Northern Sinfonia, conducted by Bernard Labadie attempted to redress the balance, and showed that in fact the sopranos, mezzos and countertenors don’t have all the fun.
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| 1-Dec-2012 Sage: Hall One | Northern Sinfonia: A Messiah with plenty of passion |
-036.jpg) Handel’s Messiah is a challenge to any conductor, particularly in the English-speaking world. It’s probably the best-loved piece in the classical repertoire, guaranteed to bring people out in great crowds. You can’t mess with Messiah, but at the same time, there’s a danger of sinking into tired tradition. The solution Matthew Halls took last night with Northern Sinfonia orchestra and chorus was to focus on details, giving the piece some new sparkle in unexpected places.
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| 23-Nov-2012 Durham Cathedral | A Venetian coronation mass with Gabrieli Consort & Players in Durham Cathedral |
 It’s a long way from modern Durham to renaissance Venice, from a cold winter evening in a small northern English city to a spring morning in one of the richest and most powerful cities the world has ever seen – but Paul McCreesh’s imaginative reconstruction of a Venetian Doge’s coronation mass made the leap almost instantaneous.Read full review... | |
| 22-Nov-2012 Sage: Hall One | Blessed Cecilia celebrated in style by Gabrieli Consort & Players |
 22 November, St Cecilia’s day, lends itself perfectly to music by two of Britain’s greatest composers. Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten both wrote pieces to celebrate Cecilia as patron saint of music, and Britten was inspired and enriched by Purcell’s music. Fortuitously for concert programmers, Britten’s birthday also falls on St Cecilia’s day, and so today also marks the beginning of the Britten centenary celebrations.
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| 15-Nov-2012 Sage: Hall One | Adès, Mason, Dowland, Beethoven: Northern Sinfonia re-imagining the past |
 The ability of musicians to take music from the past and present it in a new way gives an important sense of continuity that holds together our musical tradition, and this applies equally to performers and composers, as demonstrated this evening by Northern Sinfonia and their young guest conductor Ilan Volkov, in Hall One of The Sage Gateshead. The new approaches come through an exciting new interpretation of an existing piece of music, through re-workings of earlier pieces, or through entirely original works that are inspired by the past – and all three were covered this evening.
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| 19-Oct-2012 Durham Cathedral | The Earth Resounds: The Sixteen Choral Pilgrimage 2012 |
 By calling this year’s Choral Pilgrimage tour The Earth Resounds and including excerpts from a piece known as the “Earthquake mass”, Harry Christophers and The Sixteen created an expectation of drama and excitement before they’d sung a single note. The programme was built on the works of Josquin des Prez, Antoine Brumel and Orlando de Lassus, three 16th-century composers who were nominally Flemish, but who all lived a typically cosmopolitan renaissance lifestyle, working as church musicians across continental Europe.
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| 13-Oct-2012 Sage: Hall One | Dancing Nights: Strictly Northern Sinfonia |
 Dancing Nights was a great title for this evening’s concert by Northern Sinfonia – a perfectly balanced selection of light-hearted music, with every piece on the main programme written with the intention of making people happy in one way or another.
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| 4-Oct-2012 Sage: Hall One | Northern Sinfonia: Mozart and Shostakovich |
 Co-leader of Northern Sinfonia Kyra Humphreys took centre stage last night, as both leader and soloist, directing the players through a strangely mixed programme of Mozart and Shostakovich. If nothing else, this juxtaposition demonstrated the incredible versatility and range of this orchestra, because switching between pieces of such contrasting mood and style must have required quite a big mental gear-change.
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| 29-Sep-2012 Sage: Hall Two | The private life of the composer: Chamber music by Brahms and Schumann in Gateshead |
| Northern Sinfonia’s season of music by Brahms and Schumann opened on Friday night with the very public statements of their first symphonies, and the following night members of Northern Sinfonia turned inwards to the introspective and private world of their chamber music.
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| 28-Sep-2012 Sage: Hall One | The Romantic Symphony with Northern Sinfonia, Part 1: Happiness |
 Schumann and Brahms are linked together by their great friendship, their musical influences on each other, and, of course, by Schumann’s wife, Clara, who was one of the most important people in Brahms’ life. Between them, their lives span the entire Romantic period, and in their music, we hear its development from the wistful dreaming and nature-worship of the early years, through to the expressive maturity and emphasis on the past that came with late Romanticism.
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| 2-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 26: An unforgettable B minor Mass with The English Concert |
 J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor was described by its first publisher as “the greatest musical work of art of all times and nations”. It’s also the culmination of one man’s great life of musical creativity, and a great personal statement of faith. Such an important and well-loved work as this places huge extra demands on performers, and Harry Bicket and the orchestra and choir of The English Concert rose admirably to the challenge with a stellar performance last night at the BBC Proms.
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| 31-Jul-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 23: A varied menu of early 20th-century English music |
 Prom 23 served up a menu of English music from the first half of the 20 century in all its variety, with impressionism by Delius, the lush strings of Vaughan Williams, heroic brass from Ireland, and jazzy, sophisticated excitement from Walton.
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| 29-Jul-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 21: Death and dances from the Aldeburgh World Orchestra |
 Like an exquisite insect with a fleetingly brief lifespan, the Aldeburgh World Orchestra has been created as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and brings together young people from 35 countries across all five continents for a few intense weeks of rehearsal, tutoring and performances under the baton of Sir Mark Elder. And what a programme: all of it musically and emotionally challenging, a huge demand for any seasoned orchestra, let alone a freshly formed one whose players have only just met.
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| 25-Jul-2012 Sage: Hall Two | Northern Sinfonia summer chamber series: Beethoven, Raff, Brahms |
 The final concert in Northern Sinfonia’s summer chamber music series followed the pattern of the first two, sandwiching a lesser-known piece between two staples of the chamber music repertoire, and giving different groups from the orchestra the opportunity to step forward. In the two concerts in the series that I have reviewed (the other one’s here), no line-up has been repeated, and very few players have played in more than one piece.Read full review... | |
| 14-Jul-2012 Sage: Hall Two | Northern Sinfonia in miniature: Brahms and Schumann chamber works |
 Early Romantic symphonies lie at the core of Northern Sinfonia’s orchestral repertoire, and so to hear different groups of their players getting together with pianist John Reid to perform chamber music by Schumann and Brahms seemed like the most natural thing in the world, an intimate, scaled-down version of one of their regular concerts.
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| 16-Jun-2012 Leeds Town Hall | Opera North: Die Walküre |
 Opera North’s concert staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle continued last night with Die Walküre, the “first night” proper of the cycle after the “preliminary evening” of Das Rheingold. Following the godly power struggles that play out in Das Rheingold, there is a change of emphasis in Die Walküre, which takes us into an intense family drama – of the fourteen singers, one is Wotan himself, then there are his ten daughters, his son and his wife: only Hunding, Sieglinde’s wronged husband, is outside the clan.
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| 10-Jun-2012 Sage: Hall One | End of term exuberance from Northern Sinfonia |
 There was an atmosphere of end-of-term exuberance at the Sage Gateshead this evening, as Northern Sinfonia brought their 2011/12 season to a close with a programme conducted by Principal Conductor Mario Venzago that cleverly mixed nostalgia and excitement. This was the first time I had seen Northern Sinfonia with Venzago: his big gestures brought out a new emotional depth from the orchestra that I hadn’t heard before.
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| 9-Jun-2012 Durham Cathedral | Renaissance for Durham |
 In my notes for this evening’s concert by Renaissance, a chamber choir founded by the young singer, conductor and composer Ben Rowarth, one word kept recurring – “thoughtful”. This was a programme that had been carefully put together, and which was performed without any unnecessary flashiness or attempts to impress. The result was an evening of outstanding musicality and maturity; it was hard to believe that Ben Rowarth is just 20, and that almost all the singers were under 30.Read full review... | |
| 2-Jun-2012 Durham Cathedral | The NCEM Composers' Awards set in context by the Tallis Scholars |
 A competition for young composers run by the National Centre for Early Music may perhaps, at first glance, sound like a contradiction, but the winning pieces, performed tonight by the Tallis Scholars in Durham Cathedral, acknowledged the glories of early polyphonic choral music whilst conveying their composers’ own distinct musical ideas.
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| 18-May-2012 Sage: Hall One | Northern Sinfonia: Shifting perceptions of Bruckner, Mendelssohn and Gesualdo |
| Northern Sinfonia’s concert in Hall One of the Sage Gateshead last night challenged the audience to put aside our normal preconceptions, to see well-known composers in a slightly different light. Mendelssohn’s “Fifth” Symphony was actually the second one he wrote – at the age of only 20 – but it was not published until after his death and is not played as much as his other symphonies. Read full review... | |
| 13-May-2012 Sage: Hall One | Britain's Got Talent: Young Musician of the Year 2012 |
 Throughout the preliminary rounds of BBC Young Musician 2012, the judges have stressed that the emphasis is on musicianship, on looking for that extra spark that makes every performance really special, but also on the importance of enjoying music. This was the one thing that really stood out at tonight’s final, as all three soloists really communicated their love of what they do to everyone in the hall.
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| 29-Apr-2012 Sage: Hall Two | Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time at the Sage Gateshead |
 Olivier Messiaen’s extraordinary Quatuor pour la fin du temps was written in a German prisoner of war camp, and first performed in the camp by Messiaen and his fellow prisoners on broken instruments. However, there is a danger that the circumstances of the piece’s creation can distract the listener from Messiaen’s own intentions, for he said that it was not written as a reflection on his own captivity, but as a meditation on a passage from Revelations, the last book of the Bible.Read full review... | |
| 21-Apr-2012 Sage: Hall One | Northern Sinfonia and Chorus deliver Mozart, Bach, Lang and masses of fun |
 Between them, Mozart and Bach wrote what is to my mind some of the happiest music in the repertoire, and the works performed in this concert by Northern Sinfonia and Chorus reminded us that great music doesn’t have to be solemn, or deliver a serious message – sometimes it’s about having as much fun as possible.
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| 12-Apr-2012 Sage: Hall One | Beginning with a Sneeze: The National Youth Orchestra Folk Explosion |
 Composers have a long tradition of incorporating folk tunes into their music, and this evening’s concert by the National Youth Orchestra, with support from members of the folk group Bellowhead, really proved the point that musical genres are not separate boxes, but just points on a continuum, with no fixed boundaries.
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| 4-Apr-2012 Sage: Hall Two | Diana Moore presents a celebration of Kathleen Ferrier |
 In her opening words to this evening’s presentation of Kathleen Ferrier’s life and letters, Diana Moore said that Ferrier was an inspiration to every mezzo-soprano or alto who came after her, and despite its flaws, this concert was clearly a heartfelt tribute to a truly great singer, by one who has learned from her. With her co-presenter Brian Kay, Diana Moore gave an account of Kathleen Ferrier’s life and career, and interspersed the narrative with works from Ferrier’s repertoire.
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| 29-Mar-2012 Sage: Hall One | America: Town and Country, with Northern Sinfonia and Nicholas Collon |
 Three of the four American pieces performed this evening by Northern Sinfonia were written to evoke very particular places, and got me thinking about the evocative power of a well-chosen title. The concert opened and closed with two pieces by Aaron Copland: Quiet City, a tone poem salvaged from music written for an unsuccessful play; and one of his best known pieces, the Appalachian Spring ballet suite.Read full review... | |
| 21-Mar-2012 Sage: Hall Two | The Belcea Quartet: Beethoven at the Sage Gateshead |
 Continuing their Beethoven cycle, the Belcea Quartet gave us another selection spanning Beethoven’s string quartet writing, allowing us to see how Beethoven transformed the medium from its elegant beginnings through to the complexity and expressiveness of his final works.
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| 3-Mar-2012 Sage: Hall One | Newcastle Bach Choir offer a St. John Passion for Lent |
 A year after the first performance of his St John Passion, Bach made several significant alterations that divert the emphasis of the work away from Christ’s final triumph over death, focusing instead on human sinfulness. Nowadays, the first version, of 1724, is the one most commonly performed, but appropriately enough – given that we are in the depths of the penitential time of Lent – tonight’s performance by the Newcastle Bach Choir under Eric Cross included some of the 1725 numbers.Read full review... | |
| 2-Mar-2012 Durham Cathedral | First performance of Charles Villiers Stanford's Second Violin Concerto |
 The anthems and service settings of Charles Villiers Stanford form part of the core repertory of Anglican choral music; from the grandest cathedrals to the smallest parish churches, it’s probably safe to say that on any given Sunday, you will find Stanford’s music being sung somewhere. Whilst his choral music has remained extremely popular, his significant orchestral output, which includes seven symphonies and a number of concertos, is less well known.Read full review... | |
| 17-Feb-2012 Sage: Hall One | Northern Sinfonia with Ainārs Rubiķis: Sunshine on a dark evening |
 Like a puzzle where you have to get from one word to a completely different one by changing single letters, Friday evening’s concert from Northern Sinfonia travelled from the sparse simplicity of Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, to the richness of a Brahms symphony in three utterly logical musical steps.
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| 25-Jan-2012 St Oswald's Church | The Orlando Consort bring the early Renaissance to life |
 The fifteenth-century French composer Guillaume Dufay straddles the musical boundary between the Medieval and the Renaissance. Working in France and Italy, writing secular and sacred music, sometimes to his own verses, he seems to have had a finger in every musical pie, and this evening’s concert by the Orlando Consort illustrated his pivotal role in the evolution of later Renaissance styles.
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| 13-Jan-2012 Sage: Hall Two | Dazzling American fireworks from Northern Sinfonia and Nicholas Collon |
 It was hard to believe, listening to this evening’s Late Mix concert at the Sage, that three out of the four pieces played had in fact been substituted at the last minute after a soloist’s sudden illness meant that the original programme couldn’t be performed. Especially as all three pieces retained the spirit of adventure and exploration in which the Late Mix series specialises. If you’ve programmed Richard Ayres, you can’t just drop in a bit of Mozart.Read full review... | |
| 18-Dec-2011 Sage: Hall One | Cool and understated beauty from the Tallis Scholars |
 The last Sunday night before Christmas is traditionally an evening for carol services, but the Tallis Scholars gave a cool and stylish alternative, performing a selection of works devoted to the Virgin Mary at the Sage, Gateshead. The programme was built around four very different settings of the Magnificat, Mary’s great hymn of praise, from the relatively simple early polyphony of John Taverner, to the stark beauty of Arvo Pärt’s setting.
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| 15-Dec-2011 Sage: Hall One | Northern Sinfonia and Thierry Fischer serve up a colourful programme inspired by jazz |
 At first glance, Beethoven isn’t an obvious composer to match up with Ravel and Stravinsky, but Northern Sinfonia’s concert this evening with guest conductor Thierry Fischer did draw out a few surprising parallels. The most notable of these was the spirit of joyfulness and excitement that the orchestra brought out from all three pieces: whether it was the jazz-inspired rhythms of the twentieth century works, the busy energy of the Beethoven, or the attention-grabbing moments in which all three composers delighted.
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| 13-Nov-2011 Sage: Hall Two | Beyond the country garden: a fascinating introduction to Percy Grainger's folk songs |
| Percy Grainger, the Australian composer of Country Gardens, was a highly original musician, but is often overlooked. This year, however, to mark the 50th anniversary of his death, Northern Sinfonia have put on several performances of his work, first at the Proms, and now a weekend of concerts at the Sage. Tonight’s concert of folk song arrangements by Grainger and his friends, performed by members of the Northern Sinfonia Chorus, gave a fascinating insight into the composer’s life and work.
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| 11-Nov-2011 Theatre Royal | Opera North's dazzling Queen of Spades is full of Russian passion |
| Queen of Spades began life as a sharp little ghost story by Alexander Pushkin, quite different in tone and spirit from the melodramatic adaptation by Modest Tchaikovsky, who wrote the libretto for his composer brother. This striking new production by Opera North looks back to the early 19th century of Pushkin in the elegance of its costumes, whilst retaining the full force of Tchaikovsky’s passionate score. Read full review... | |
| 3-Nov-2011 Harrogate Theatre | English Touring Opera: The Fairy Queen goes to Bedlam |
 Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is a tricky thing to stage. It’s not an opera, with its own story-line, but a masque, a series of musical interludes intended to slot into a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One solution could be just to perform it in concert, but the music is so dramatic that it lends itself wonderfully to stage action. The other option is to construct an entirely new drama around the text, as Philip Pickett did so cleverly last year.
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