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Longborough Walkure review

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AN AMAZING WALKURE FROM LONGBOROUGH DIE WALKURE Longborough Festival Opera ***** Longborough Festival Opera's legendary reputation in brilliant productions of Wagner operas took on another accolade with this year's amazingly resourceful staging of Die Walkure. Or rather, semi-staging, which made such a virtue out of Covid restrictions. To a meticulously socially-distanced audience the performance area presented a whole new vista, with the strings of the Longborough Festival Opera Orchestra arrayed across the stage, the woodwind, brass and percussion tucked underneath in the auditorium's famous pit. And the sound this perforcedly scale-down complement of the wonderful band orchestral manager Philip Head has created over the years was thrilling under Anthony Negus. Sound was bright and forward, detail was telling, and we had the impression of chamber music unfolding (very much a la Siegfried Idyll), and revealing much wonderfu
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Ex Cathedra Midummer Music review

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ANTHONY BRADBURY RELISHES EX CATHEDRA'S MIDSUMMER MUSIC BY CANDLELIGHT EX CATHEDRA Symphony Hall **** I wonder how many other concerts you'll hear this year will take you on a choral journey from 6th century plainchant, to the 1960s pop charts (an arrangement of Cliff Richard's Summer Holiday, complete with 'repeat & fade' ending), via a new commission? Such is the imaginative programming of Ex Cathedra's Artistic Director & Conductor, Jeffrey Skidmore, whose selection of summer-themed music and readings was appropriately book-ended by the Hymnus Eucharisticus, traditionally sung from Oxford's Magdalen College Tower at sunrise on May Morning, and Night Prayer by Alec Roth which brought the concert to a suitably meditative close. In between, we were treated to a veritable cornucopia of choral music spanning 15 centuries. We had the familiar (the early polyphonic round Sumer is icumen in, and the popular French song La Mer, complete with a
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Romantic Violin Sonatas and Multi-piano Mozart CD reviews

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ROMANTIC VIOLIN SONATAS AND MULTI-PIANO MOZART CD REVIEWS ROMANTIC VIOLIN SONATAS: Carlock-Combet Duo ★★★ Schubert's Sonata for Violin and Piano in A (D574) never reaches the heights of his greatest chamber works but its four-movements are affable, easy-going and cosy – what the German's call "gemütlich". Guillaume Combet's warm and generous vibrato and Sandra Carlock's laid-back unobtrusive piano style fit the work perfectly. Schumann's chamber works, the famous piano quintet excepted, have as many thorns as flowers. The Duo's energy and brio in the finale of his Sonata No.2 in D minor is commendable but elsewhere there are acerbities, oddities and shadows that go unexplored. Listen to Kremer and Argerich's probing performance to hear what I mean. Grieg's Violin Sonata No. 3 in C minor, his last chamber work, has some dull thematic material but the Carlock-Combet Duo make the most of its whole-hearted romanticism and they ensure that its
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CBSO Britten, Arnold review

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RICHARD BRATBY ENTHUSES OVER CBSO'S BRITTEN AND ARNOLD CBSO Symphony Hall **** One of the enjoyable details of the CBSO's sadly-mauled Centenary season has been its sense of heritage – of revisiting, and reclaiming, music with which the orchestra has a historic connection. Sir Malcolm Arnold recorded his Fifth Symphony with the CBSO in 1973. The symphony, at that point, was twelve years old, while the CBSO was starting to show the benefits of Louis Frémaux's energetic orchestra-building. But while any recording of a major work by its composer has a historic value, I doubt either Frémaux or Arnold would have quite believed the quality of the playing or the conviction of the interpretation that the symphony received under Michael Seal this afternoon. The CBSO was playing in its socially-distanced configuration, with a slightly reduced string section: still, as with all the concerts so far in this short post-lockdown summer season, it's clear that
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Two new chamber releases reviewed by Norman Stinchcombe

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NORMAN STINCHCOMBE ENTHUSES OVER TWO NEW CHAMBER RELEASES AMERICAN QUINTETS: Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective ★★★★ American composer Florence Beatrice Price's life is perfect movie material. Of mixed race and born in bigoted Arkansas in 1887 Florence fought bigotry to get a musical education – even pretending to be a Mexican to avoid prejudice against her African heritage. She was indefatigable: her E minor Symphony was premiered in 1933 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The Quintet in A minor for piano and strings featured here was written at about the same time, its conventional late romanticism enlivened by incorporating stomping Juba slave-dance rhythms in its lively third movement. Amy Beach's music is better known and her F sharp minor Quintet has been recorded several times but this is the finest, the KCC giving its full Brahmsian textures weight without stodginess. Sample the passionate adagio espressivo. Samuel Barber's deeply felt setting of Matthew Arnold
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CBSO review 2.6.21

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PAUL LEWIS SPARKLES ON A SOMETIMES DREARY AFTERNOON CBSO Symphony Hall **** The latest in the CBSO's unlocked-down series of concerts was very much in the meat and two veg tradition, overture, concerto and symphony. The only innovation was the absence of the interval, something which must surely be on the table for discussion. Now that there are no longer overnight reviews, I am sure most critics would welcome an earlier end to concerts; against that we have to balance the venue's loss of catering takings. Blissfully there is no room for encores, either. Conducting was someone new to me, the young French conductor Chloe van Soeterstede, very much in the elfin mode in which Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla first presented herself to us, and with an equal outpouring of enthusiasm. Yet her account of Mozart's Don Giovanni Overture, though it zipped along, was lacking in dynamic shading, Chloe (may I? -- like Mirga, she shares a weighty surname), relying instead upon Moza
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CBSO MAY 26 REVIEW

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LISTENER-FRIENDLY CBSO PROGRAMME CBSO Symphony Hall **** Anyone who proudly dec;lares "I don't listen to twentieth-century music" is a fool to himself, missing out on all but one of Elgar's greatest works, most of Puccini, a good deal of Richard Strauss, Debussy and Ravel. My list could go on into the far-off distance, but it would certainly include the three works the CBSO imaginatively bundled together in its latest pair of Wednesday concerts. Not only did they all originate in the first half of that apparently problematic century, their inclusion also built up the personnel of the orchestra in steps towards its massive conclusion in the Fifth Symphony of Shostakovich. Conductor Nicholas Collon spoke of this remarkable achievement, putting "this huge piece" onto this Covid-restricted stage, before launching into an account of Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Balance, detail and ensemble fr
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