Handel: Sonatas for Violin and Basso Continuo The Brook Street Band (Avie)
Streya: New works for solo violin and violin with electronics Olivia De Prato (violin) (New Focus Recordings)
Manchester Collective is a new and enterprising group of musicians determined not just to create performances of high quality but to offer a new way in which the performances themselves are done. They started from scratch at the end of 2016, and I saw one of the first of their efforts, given at Islington Mill – a laid-back space in the basement of an old industrial building in Salford – in March last year.
In a classical recording industry seemingly obsessed with marketing beautiful young female violinists, but very often presenting them in repertoire to which most of them seem to have little individual to add, how do you make your mark? Norwegian Eldbjørg Hemsing came up with a bright idea typical of a thoughtful approach in which the music always comes first: to twin a 1914 concerto she genuinely admires by a compatriot very few people will know, Hjalmar Borgstrøm (1864-1925), with what is perhaps the ultimate 20th century challenge to violinists, Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto.
The Brahms violin sonatas make a perfect spring evening recital. The Second and Third were inspired by a summer retreat, but all three are light, bright and with direct melodic appeal. Violinist Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien conveyed that carefree spirit perfectly, the long melodic lines simply but elegantly shaped and the accompanying textures always carefully calibrated.
There’s a crisis in popular musical vocals. They’ve reached a very naff stasis. After a decade-and-a-half of Cowell hegemony and stars that have risen during the same period, a generation thinks there are only two ways to express emotion. One is melismatic singing (for women – wandering wildly about the higher registers on every syllable, a la Mariah Carey/Whitney Houston), the other is voice-breaking (for men - cracking into a vulnerable falsetto a la Jeff Buckley/Coldplay). It’s all very boring. There are so, so many other ways to express emotion. Just ask Louis Armstrong, Ian Dury, Courtney Barnett and thousands of others, including Greg McDonald.
McDonald, once of indie band The Dawn Parade, then a solo artist, now fronts folk outfit Glymjack (Victorian slang for lantern-bearing street-child guide). He has a voice that quavers in a way that, when the song is up to muster, is wrenching. A comparative reference might be the late Nikki Sudden, but McDonald has his very own style. A decade ago he released a fantastic, underheard singer-songwriter album Stranger at the Door, which he’s struggled to match since, but on Light the Evening Fire he occasionally hits its heights, albeit in a different medium.
For fans of proper folk-rock, in the Fairport/Bellowhead vein, there’s plenty to get their teeth into, with McDonald backed energetically by fiddler Gemma Gayner on songs such as “Bows of London” and “The Sweet Trinity” which have part-song harmonies and a rich, catchy archaic feel. For me, though, McDonald’s poetic, literate, raw, unadorned songwriting is what hits best on the slow-building doomed darkness of “Night Vision”, the socially conscious storytelling of “Hope Point”, and the soulful outsider statement of “Bright Sparks”.
Glymjack sees McDonald back out there working the circuit, his unique singing style and songwriting skill both on fine form. Maybe Glymjack will finally be the making of him and his accomplices. That would be a welcome development.
Overleaf: watch a trailer for Glymjack's album Light the Evening Fire
When a great musician pulls out of a concerto appearance, you're usually lucky if a relative unknown creates a replacement sensation. In this case not one but two star pianists withdrew – Maria João Pires, scheduling early retirement, succeeded by an unwell Piotr Anderzewski – and instead we had that most musicianly and collaborative of violinists Isabelle Faust in Schumann, not the scheduled Mozart.
Punching well above their weights, population-wise, on the international music scene, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are celebrating, and being celebrated, in style over the year of their 100th birthdays.
"You have to start somewhere," Debussy is reported to have said at the 1910 premiere of The Firebird. Which, at least, is a very good "somewhere" for Stravinsky, shot through with flashes of the personality to come. The Symphony in E flat of two years earlier, however, is little more than a theme park of all the ingredients amassed in Russian music since Glinka forged its identity less than a century earlier.
You can’t help liking Joshua Bell. The Peter Pan violin soloist of the classical world has been in the business for more than 30 years and still has his boyish looks and, more importantly, his enthusiasm and sense of enjoyment in making music. At the Bridgewater Hall last night the pages of his score stuck together at one point between movements, but he had a quip for the audience and carried on with a smile.