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6 days ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Ukho Ensemble Kyiv is Ukraine’s leading new-music group, founded in 2015 by the Italian conductor Luigi Gaggero. Since the Russian invasion of the country in 2022, its members have inevitably been dispersed and its activities curtailed, but it has continued to perform a wide range of 20th and 21st-century repertories outside Ukraine.
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1 week ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Many years before he severed his connections with the period-instrumental ensembles and choir that he founded, John Eliot Gardiner had recorded the Brahms symphonies with his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique. In that Brahms Project in 2007 and 2008, he made a “reappraisal of Brahms’s sound world and ... the close link between the symphonies and Brahms’s choral works”.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Completed in 1906, The Kingdom was intended as the central panel in what Elgar had conceived as a New Testament triptych, preceded by The Apostles, from three years earlier and to have been followed by The Last Judgement, a score that got no further than a few sketches.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
In 1973, György Kurtág began composing piano miniatures to which he gave the collective title of Játékok (Games). He has continued to add to the series, so that now there are well over 400 such pieces, for both solo piano and four hands, which have been published in 10 volumes so far.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Even if it doesn’t really seem like one, this year’s Proms marks the beginning of a new era for what styles itself as the world’s biggest classical music festival. Though Sam Jackson took over as controller of BBC Radio 3 and director of the Proms two years ago, the 2023 and 2024 programmes were essentially planned under the aegis of his predecessor as Proms supremo David Pickard.
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4 weeks ago | 
msn.com | Andrew Clements
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4 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
Bruckner and Gesualdo may be the two composers highlighted on the cover but, in fact, this first disc from the Monteverdi Choir since its traumatic split from its founding conductor John Eliot Gardiner last year begins with music by Palestrina. More accurately, it’s Palestrina refracted through 19th-century sensibilities – an arrangement of his Stabat Mater for double choir that Richard Wagner made for a concert in 1848, and which apparently has never been recorded before.
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4 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
According to the sleeve notes, the two concert performances of Wagner’s most compact and regularly performed stage work that Edward Gardner conducted in Oslo last year are likely to be the only occasions on which Lise Davidsen will appear as Senta, since it’s not a role that she intends to sing on stage.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
‘Every great composer wrote some kind of quartet with piano”, says Krystian Zimerman. “It’s a fantastic richness of music history that is often underestimated.” That’s even true of the three examples by Brahms, which are certainly less often heard than many of his other chamber works, such as the piano quintet and piano trios.
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1 month ago | 
theguardian.com | Andrew Clements
After collections devoted to Duparc, Fauré and Poulenc, pianist Malcolm Martineau adds Ravel to the surveys of French song he has curated for Signum, nicely timed for the composer’s 150th anniversary this year. As before, Martineau is partnered by a lineup of mostly British singers, who tackle the songs as if determined to demonstrate that this repertoire should never be seen as the exclusive preserve of Francophone artists.
