Classical CDs: Muesli, mindfulness colouring and a trip to the boulangerie

CLASSICAL CDS Underrated British symphonies, baroque newly coloured, romantic quartets

Underrated British symphonies, baroque music in new colours and romantic quartets

 

Arnold PennyMalcolm Arnold: Complete Symphonies and Dances National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Queensland Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Penny (Naxos)

Nicola Benedetti, Barbican Hall review – from Bach to the Highlands via New Orleans

★★★★ NICOLA BENEDETTI, BARBICAN From Bach to the Highlands via New Orleans

A bold solo voyage through three centuries of violin virtuosity

If a standard-sized recital hall can be a lonely place for a solo violinist, playing an auditorium of Barbican dimensions must feel like crossing a desert under pitiless spotlight sun. Happily, Nicola Benedetti’s prowess as a communicator means that she made those trackless wastes shrink into a shared garden where she, and we, explored her instrument’s many kinds of bloom. Defiantly, a solitary figure in red on the enormous stage, she began her recital with Bach’s D minor partita – and the mighty, earth-moving Chaconne which completes it.

First Person: pianist Filippo Gorini on head, heart and the contemporary in Bach's 'The Art of Fugue'

PIANIST FILIPPO GORINI On head, heart and the contemporary in Bach's 'The Art of Fugue'

Taking off from a masterly marriage of rigorous means and expressive ends

A past work of art either still speaks to us in the present, or it is dead. To try and understand a masterpiece, we tend to look at its past: we study it, analyse it, read biographies of the artist behind it and chronicles of its historical background. But it is even more interesting to see what happened to the work after it was finished. What did it mean to the following generations, and, more critically, what does it mean to us today? Is the flame that lit it still burning, or did the ashes die out?

Classical CDs: Star sopranos, forest spirits and a Mexican funeral march

CLASSICAL CDS Star sopranos, forest spirits and a Mexican funeral march

A debut disc from a young German soprano, an ear-stretching Icelandic string quartet and two collections of nonets

 

 

Dorothea Herbert

Die stille Stadt: Songs by Alma Mahler, Franz Schreker and Erich Wolfgang Korngold Dorothea Herbert (soprano), Peter Nilsson (piano) (7 Mountain Records)

St Matthew Passion, Arcangelo, Cohen, BBC Proms review – journey to the end of night

★★★★★ ST MATTHEW PASSION, ARCANGELO, COHEN, BBC PROMS Bach's great Gospel tragedy crowns a Proms season of hope and healing

Bach's great Gospel tragedy crowns a Proms season of hope and healing

No disrespect to Sakari Oramo and his colleagues in tomorrow’s farewell jamboree, but I wonder whether this performance should have featured as the Last Night of the Proms. After all its terror, grief and sorrow, the St Matthew Passion ends with such a gentle and healing leave-taking (“Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh”) that it would surely capture our pandemic travails across the past two years.

Ólafsson, Philharmonia, Järvi, BBC Proms review - a ravishing Proms debut

★★★★ OLAFSSON, PHILHARMONIA, JARVI, BBC PROMS A ravishing Proms debut

Musical time-travel from top Icelander, Estonian and great London orchestra

What does it mean to be Classical? It’s the question award-winning Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has consistently asked in a career that has collided music from Bach to Debussy, presenting them as part of a single conversation and continuum. Here, in a striking BBC Proms debut, he continued to probe and challenge, with a little help from the Philharmonia Orchestra and Paavo Järvi.

Bach & Sons, Bridge Theatre review - humorous and deeply intelligent

★★★★ BACH & SONS Humorous and deeply intelligent

Raine beautifully evokes how music captures the mess of life

In John Eliot Gardiner’s magnificent wide-ranging biography of Bach, Music In The Castle of Heaven, he tells the story of the composer’s early run-in with a bassoonist with his typical zest for detail. “[H]e called him a Zippel Fagottist. Even in recent biographies this epithet continues to be translated euphemistically as a ‘greenhorn’, a ‘rapscallion’, or a ‘nanny-goat bassoonist’ whereas a literal translation suggests something far stronger: Bach had called Geyersbach ‘a prick of a bassoonist’.”