| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 13-Oct-2012 St George's Bristol | Suite and sour: Brandon Hill Chamber Orchestra at St George's Bristol |
| I’d been assured from friends who knew I was attending this concert that the Brandon Hill Chamber Orchestra is the finest amateur orchestra in Bristol and I was in for a treat. Despite the recommendation, I did not expect them to be one of the best amateur orchestras I’ve ever heard. The sound they produced under Ewa Strusinska’s baton belied their status as amateur.
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| 23-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 54: Vasily Petrenko, Tasmin Little and the Liverpool Philharmonic |
 I can’t work out if it was surprising or to be expected that Maxwell Davies, part of the New Music Manchester group that included Birtwistle and Goehr, should have become Master of the Queen’s Music. The earlier output of all of these composers now dates in its avant-garde leanings but this extraordinarily talented group of composers have all matured to become rather different to each other and their younger selves. Symphony no.Read full review... | |
| 4-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 29: The National Youth Orchestra take on Messiaen's Turangalîla-symphonie |
 Despite knowing what was going to happen, it was a still surprising when, amid the chatter and bustle of the audience before the concert (there was a distinct lack of communal coughing before it started), the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain began Tuning Up.Read full review... | |
| 29-May-2012 Institut Français (French Institute) | Quartet for the End of Time: Mercury Quartet at the French Institute |
 Not being a French national and having only just heard about their excellent series of Tuesday night concerts, this was my first visit to the Institut Français, Kensington. This was the last in a series of concerts focusing on French music, moving chronologically toward contemporary/modern composers over the course of the series. It was a shame then that only 40 or so people had made the trip to see the Mercury Quartet (a mixed-instrument group who are hot property at the moment, as part of the cool set signed by the wildly proactive Nonclassical record label).
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| 25-May-2012 The London Coliseum | Caligula slain in the Coliseum: A triumph for ENO |
 Where could be more appropriate to see the story of Caligula, Rome’s most notorious emperor/self-proclaimed God, than in the Coliseum! Its purple SPQR livery made the opening to this performance all the more striking as Caligula, dishevelled, unhinged and not a little scary, crept on stage through the curtain in dead silence. So the decidedly menacing tone of the opera was set before the curtain had even been raised or a sound heard. When the curtain rises we see his sister collapse, dead, and he releases a primal scream to spark up the orchestra.
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| 26-Apr-2012 Barbican Centre: Hall | Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest at the Barbican |
 The Importance of Being Earnest is Gerald Barry’s fourth full-length opera; his previous three have set texts much more at home in the opera world than this ambitious libretto from Wilde’s famous play. I approached this concert staging of the work with intrigue, but not a little trepidation – setting a text like this is bold and ensures bums on seats, but has its fair share of pitfalls, although Barry, mostly, avoids them.
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| 21-Apr-2012 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | London Sinfonietta Perform Conlon Nancarrow |
 Having missed a chance to hear Conlon Nancarrow’s Player Piano Study no. 21 (Canon X) due to a spontaneous programme switch earlier in the day, I was delighted that Dominic Murcott’s arrangement of the piece for London Sinfonietta and player piano opened this concert. The piece is predicated simply on an upper voice beginning very fast and slowing down, and a lower voice beginning slowly and speeding up so much that the final 12 seconds of music contain no fewer than 1,028 notes.Read full review... | |
| 21-Apr-2012 Southbank Centre: Purcell Room | Impossible Brilliance: An Ambitious Celebration of Conlon Nancarrow |
 This weekend saw the Southbank Centre embark on an ambitious festival programme of rarely performed composer Conlon Nancarrow. One of the main reasons Nancarrow’s music is rarely performed is that the vast majority of what he wrote was for the archaic player piano. Even a Nancarrow devotee (like myself) must admit that his biography and approach to music is nothing short of eccentric – a communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, he found it difficult to adapt to the developing anti-communist movement in America so he adopted Mexico as his home from 1940.
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| 17-Apr-2012 Hampstead Theatre | Rihm's Jakob Lenz at Hampstead Theatre: a Testament to Modern Opera |
 In the cosy confines of a packed Hampstead Theatre ENO’s English adaptation of Jacob Lenz produced an exciting, entertaining and emotionally draining 70 minutes of opera. Premiered in 1979 this is Rihm’s account of Sturm und Drang writer Jakob Lenz’s descent into madness. Friends with Goethe, Lenz was part of the romantic ‘set’ whose decline into madness is documented in Georg Büchner’s novella Lenz. The opera depicts his stay in a mountain retreat where his hallucinations, fantasies and the voices he hears lead him to attempt suicide no fewer than three times.Read full review... | |
| 3-Apr-2012 Southbank Centre: Purcell Room | Movements and Expressions: Alda Dizdari at the Southbank |
 Violinist Alda Dizdari may just have taken a while to settle in to the performance, but the opening Debussy Sonata did not come across particularly well. Piano and violin didn’t quite lock in together and the Debussy ‘wash’ of sound, akin to an impressionist watercolour, was not apparent – the tone was harsh and rhythms angular. It was a style of playing that fitted Schoenberg’s Phantasy much better.Read full review... | |
| 25-Mar-2012 Royal Festival Hall, Foyer | Morsels and Miniatures at Oliver Coates' Harmonic Series |
 The Southbank Centre is riddled with cubby-holes, and it was in a particularly tucked-away corner – the “Spirit Level” bar – that a small audience of dedicated sound-lovers heard this exciting concert of morsels and miniatures. Perched in this top-floor bar, our picturesque backdrop to the stage was a dusk view of Westminster. Delightful but devilishly distracting!
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| 1-Mar-2012 Wigmore Hall | The Elias Quartet perform Haydn, Sibelius and Dvořák |
 In what would turn out to be a concert of two very distinct halves, the Elias Quartet impressed in the cosy confines of Wigmore Hall. After a full ‘daily grind’, arriving at this cocoon of a hall – where outside noise is absent, save for the occasional underground rumble – felt like a real treat. Here was a chance to sink into some cosy chamber music to wash over the listener – or maybe not. The first half consisted of a quartet in unusual form by Haydn, and Sibelius’ 1909 piece Voces Intimae: both pieces which demanded concentrated listening.
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| 26-Feb-2012 Royal Festival Hall, Foyer | Micachu, Adès and Lucier: Oliver Coates' Harmonic Series at the Southbank Centre |
| Arriving to Southbank’s Purcell Room after a romantic Sunday evening walk along the river, I was in the perfect frame of mind to hear this excellently conceived concert. A concert that turned out to be both excellently performed and thoroughly enjoyable. The venue has a lot to offer – the Brutalist design belies the comfort and the sharp acoustic that is rarer than it should be in concert venues.
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| 24-Jan-2012 Hackney Empire | Kronos Quartet at the Hackney Empire |
 Mark Allan.jpg) Cool venue – cool ensemble – cool concert! The Kronos quartet are successful where so many fail in bringing the often-too-distinct worlds of pop/rock and classical together. This concert highlighted their commitment to forging their own performance aesthetic by only programming music that has been written specifically for them. The only exception was the piece that inspired first violinist David Harrington to form the group in the first place – George Crumb’s Black Angels.
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| 13-Jan-2012 Barbican Centre: Hall | Oliver Knussen and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a fascinating programme |
 Oliver Knussen has a reputation for presenting interesting and unusual programmes, and this evening in the sumptuous Barbican Hall was no exception. This concert featured new and rarely-performed music, including both a world première and a UK première.
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| 14-Dec-2011 Birmingham Symphony Hall | An overture, a concerto and a symphony: Perfect proportions from the CBSO, Michael Seal and Peter Donohoe |
 Rarely have I seen a conductor so excited! On completion of Shostakovich’s Festive Overture, Michael Seal looked like the cat that got the cream – and rightly so. He had just launched his audience into this concert with a terrific bang.
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| 7-Dec-2011 Birmingham Symphony Hall | The delights of the CBSO and Poul Ruders. Beginning with an ending... |
 ... The ending of Symphony no. 4 by Poul Ruders, to be precise – or, just as well, the ending of the first half of this concert. Regardless of what and when, it was stunning!Read full review... | |
| 2-Dec-2011 CBSO Centre | Music and talk: The improvisatory basis of Peter Wiegold's Music |
 I love eating out, yet I hate cooking programmes. It is perhaps for the same reason that I’m suspicious of ‘Music and Conversation’ events. Whilst interested in the process and the thoughts of composers, I’d rather these were presented on their own without feeling that the ‘conversation’ part of the concert explains the ‘performance’ part. So it was with the trepidation of an irregular Ready, Steady, Cook! viewer that I arrived to hear Peter Wiegold and his quartet of merry improvisers perform and discuss. To my delight, it was really rather good.
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| 1-Dec-2011 Birmingham Symphony Hall | 1911: A very good year for the symphony |
 ‘Intimate symphonic playing’: an oxymoron perhaps, but in the fantastic acoustic of Symphony Hall and with the polished playing of the CBSO, somehow these symphonies, even with the tooting trumpets, blaring bassoons and sonorous strings (not to mention the tonking timpani), had the feel of chamber music. Much credit for this intimate effect must go to Robert Spano who guided the orchestra, in the most part, with a light touch – flailing only where flailing alone would do.Read full review... | |
| 12-Nov-2011 Coventry Cathedral | Peace concert in Coventry with the English Symphony Orchestra |
 If only Mozart could’ve been there! Had he only one concert to attend from beyond the grave, Wolfgang could have done worse than head to Coventry Cathedral and its sumptuous acoustic on Saturday night. Here he would have been treated to a performance of his final symphony, no.41 ‘Jupiter’ – never heard in his lifetime – alongside his 'Great' Mass in C minor – which he never completed.Read full review... | |
