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      Timo Andres: The Blind Banister album review – original, arresting and eclectic

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 16:22

    Andres/Segev/Metropolis Ensemble/Cyr
    (Nonesuch)
    These three works showcase the US composer’s distinctive and accomplished musical language

    Like a number of US composers of the thirtysomething generation, Timo Andres takes the minimalism of John Adams and Philip Glass as the starting point for his eclectic musical language. But as shown by the solo piano Colorful History, which Andres himself plays as the centrepiece to this collection, his music explores a much broader musical landscape.

    The solo piece, a chaconne of increasing complexity, is framed by two concertos: The Blind Banister for piano from 2017 (composed for Jonathan Biss, but with Andres as the soloist here) and Upstate Obscura for cello. The piano concerto (Andres’s third for the instrument) was commissioned as part of a series inspired by Beethoven’s five examples: for Andres, the pairing was with the second piano concerto, but there’s no hint of Beethovenian pastiche or allusion in his music. Instead the work begins almost like one of Glass’s piano studies, though when the orchestra enters it quickly veers off into territory that is very much Andres’s own.

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      Fauré: Complete Piano Music album review – fresh and revealing insights into a quiet radical

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 14:50 · 1 minute

    Lucas Debargue
    (Sony Classical, four CDs)

    Marking the centenary of the composer’s death, Debargue’s comprehensive survey of his piano music contains discoveries even for confirmed Fauré fans

    With the exception of just a handful of pieces, as well as the famous Dolly Suite for two pianos, Gabriel Fauré’s quietly expressive yet sometimes startlingly radical piano music remains unexplored territory for many. But significant musical anniversaries provide opportunities to extend and deepen appreciation of all but the most familiar composers, and even confirmed Fauré fans are likely to make some discoveries in this comprehensive survey of his piano music from Lucas Debargue, released to mark the centenary of the composer’s death.

    Debargue presents the works in opus-number order on the four discs, beginning with the three Romances Without Words Op 17, composed in 1863 when Fauré was 18, and ending with the 13th Nocturne Op 119 from 1921, three years before his death. This makes it easy to trace the development of Fauré’s increasingly personal style, whose starting point was obviously the music of Chopin and Schumann. Several musical forms associated with Chopin especially were thoroughly explored by Fauré: he composed ballades, impromptus and a set of preludes, but it was his series of nocturnes and barcarolles, 13 of each, that formed the spine of his piano output.

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      Wigmore Hall launches £10m fund in bid to be self-sustaining

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 14:11

    The London classical music venue announces plan against a background of arts funding cuts and in ‘an uncertain public environment for classical music’

    London classical music venue Wigmore Hall has announced a £10m fund with the aim to be self-sustaining without need for public funds. It is believed to be the first major concert hall to take such a step in what a statement described as “an uncertain public environment for classical music in the UK”.

    The venue has an annual grant of £344,206 from Arts Council England (ACE) but John Gilhooly, Wigmore Hall’s artistic and executive director, says that it is “already 97% self-funded”. He added that £7m had already been pledged for the new fund, called the Director’s Fund, and that the venue hoped to raise £10m by 2027, and £20m within a decade.

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      Nash Ensemble: A Birtwistle Celebration review – an intense and poetic tribute

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 13:53

    Wigmore Hall, London
    The Nash and BBC Singers selected poignant vocal and instrumental works in memory of the late composer, as well as the premiere of a new Simon Holt work honouring sculptor Richard Serra

    H arrison Birtwistle’s relationship with the Nash Ensemble stretched back over four decades, and in his final years he composed a succession of works for the group. Two years after Birtwistle’s death , and a few months short of what would have been his 90th birthday, the ensemble had assembled a generous three-part celebration; the first concert was shared with students from the Royal Academy of Music, while the second and third, conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, featured the soprano Claire Booth and the BBC Singers.

    Both concerts alternated chamber pieces with some of the songs with ensemble that Birtwistle composed intermittently throughout his career – Three Songs from the Holy Forest, to poems by Robin Blaser, the librettist of Birtwistle’s penultimate opera, The Last Supper; Songs by Myself, to the composer’s own texts; and the wonderfully spare Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker, in which Booth’s supple, intense singing was supported by just a solo cello line.

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      The Sixteen review – alchemically distilled choral beauty

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 5 days ago - 11:25 · 1 minute

    St Martin-in-the-Fields, London
    The group’s unequivocally world-class quality rang out, albeit intermittently, in this lucid performance of Duruflé’s Requiem and other 20th-century French-language works

    T he Sixteen turn 45 this year, marking nearly half a century of bar-raisingly good choral singing under their founder and conductor Harry Christophers . They’re a group to banish memories of hymns mumbled at school assemblies, massed wobbling in parish halls and the megawattage of a professional operatic chorus with a single exquisitely shaped phrase. Their brand of choral sound is lean (the clue’s in the name, though don’t count too obsessively), bold, polished to an exceptional sheen, blended as if alchemically distilled.

    Or at least it can be. There were flashes of that unequivocally world-class quality in their performance of 20th-century French-language choral works, all haunted by the musical past. Opening the programme, the bare octaves and fifths of Frank Martin ’s Cantate pour le 1er août were harsh in their brightness. What followed was practically translucent, the tone of 20 voices absolutely unified, every word audible. In the first of Maurice Duruflé ’s unaccompanied Four Motets on Gregorian Themes, phrases were beguilingly long, then longer, then seemingly infinite – presumably through staggered breathing, albeit imperceptible from my spot in the fifth row. The beauty of such moments, of human voices drawn out in astonishingly long skeins, cannot be overstated.

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      On my radar: Frank Tallis’s cultural highlights

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 6 days ago - 15:00

    The author and psychologist on an intimate performance of MR James’s ghost stories, a brilliant debut novel and an impossibly good pianist

    Frank Tallis is a clinical psychologist and writer of fiction and nonfiction . He was born in Stoke Newington, London in 1958 and trained at St George’s Hospital Medical School and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience. His series of psychoanalytic detective novels, The Liebermann Papers , has been adapted for television as Vienna Blood , which can be viewed on BBC iPlayer. His new nonfiction book is Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Discovery of the Modern Mind . He lives in London.

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      Classical home listening: Elisabeth Lutyens Piano Works; Tchaikovsky and Korngold string sextets and more

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 6 days ago - 12:00

    Martin Jones makes a persuasive case for an unfashionable British composer; Antonio Oyarzabal continues to champion forgotten female composers; and the Nash Ensemble hit 60 in style

    • One of a kind, the composer Elisabeth Lutyens (1906-83) eludes fashion for several reasons. So many aspects of her life now look dated: she was a British aristocrat (daughter of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens) who moved in elite social circles, cared little about the opinions of others, embraced European modernism ahead of her time, smoked and drank heavily and had a reputation for being fierce musically, and verbally prickly to lesser mortals. Her Piano Works Volume 3 (Resonus), performed by Martin Jones , includes short works dating back to 1944, the oddly touching Holiday Diary (1949) – tiny pieces with narrated text – as well as three sets of Bagatelles. Having regarded her music as quite resistible in the past, I found this album engaging, serious, stimulating.

    Also highly recommended: La Muse Oubliée II (IBS Classical), in which Antonio Oyarzábal continues his travels through little-known repertoire by women, an example to all his fellow pianists.

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      The Guardian view on opera and circus: a populist pairing that scales the heights | Editorial

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 7 days ago - 18:25 · 1 minute

    Featuring awe-inspiring aerial antics, Welsh National Opera’s Death In Venice shows how innovative the art form can still be

    Conversation about opera has become an increasingly cronky merry-go-round over the last few years, revolving not around art and imagination so much as money, elitism and whether or not the repertoire is refreshing itself at a rate that makes any significant contribution to a modern creative environment. Much of the latest discontent has focused on the forced move of the English National Opera (ENO) from its London redoubt – the Coliseum – to Manchester where, until its new home is built, it will do the rounds of existing venues.

    So it is refreshing to find Welsh National Opera (WNO) out on the road with a revival that stares down many of the resulting anxieties, while reframing the underlying debates in a way that detractors of the art form would do well to heed. After opening its new season with an old repertory staple, Così fan Tutte, it is touring Benjamin Britten’s more challenging Death in Venice , about the fixation of an ageing writer for a beautiful young boy he spots in a Venice that is succumbing to a cholera epidemic. The opera itself is obviously not new. Based on a novella by Thomas Mann, it premiered just two years after Visconti’s famous 1971 film. But half a century on, social attitudes to the themes it addresses – gay love, obsessive desire, and the morally hazy relationship of artist to muse – have changed, giving a fresh resonance to its meditations.

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      Our Mother review – reimagination of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater has a timeless directness and simplicity

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 7 days ago - 08:04 · 1 minute

    Stone Nest, London
    Historical ensemble Figure and an excellent cast explore grief, compassion and hope through five women representing multiple generations

    Performed by Figure , and the brainchild of the ensemble’s founder and musical director Frederick Waxman, Our Mother in some ways resists classification, though in essence it is a music theatre piece that takes Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater as its starting point for an exploration of the nature of grief. It’s not for purists. Pergolesi’s 1736 masterpiece is frequently considered contemplative and serene, and indeed some of it is. But in depicting Christ’s crucifixion, it is also, as Waxman puts it, “an evolving reflection on a mother watching her child die”, and a fierce anguish consequently offsets its moments of calm. Along with director Sophie Daneman, Waxman’s aim has been to reimagine it in terms of a communal exploration of bereavement and compassion, beyond its immediate theological context.

    The piece itself has been expanded with a prelude and interludes by Welsh-born composer Alex Mills , in which rhythmic and melodic fragments from the original morph into passacaglias and threnodies that have a timeless directness and simplicity. Pergolesi’s two singers have become five, representing multiple generations of women, who shuttle the vocal lines between them, both within arias and ensembles: the great Emma Kirkby, now in her seventies, is the eldest; the youngest, Nadya Pickup, is in her teens.

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