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Charlotte Smith Editor

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS

Amanda Holloway Jeremy Pound Femke Colborne

Music writer and editor
‘What a privilege to be in King’s
College, Cambridge’s magnificent
15th-century chapel, hearing
the choristers run through works
by John Rutter under director Daniel Hyde, my
interviewee for the cover feature.’ Page 26
Deputy Editor, BBC Music
‘Every year, I plan to be one of
those types who grump joylessly
throughout Christmas. But all it
takes is for me to hear a snatch of,
say, “Once in Royal” or “O Holy night” and I’m utterly
smitten by all things festive once again.’ Page 40
Journalist
‘When I first watched A Woman of
Paris earlier this year, I was struck
by the film’s drama and pathos.
It was fascinating to learn how a
new soundtrack helped bring out Charlie Chaplin’s
more serious side.’ Page 48

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 3

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very latest from the music world as Radio
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Contents
CHRISTMAS 2023
See p103

FEATURES
26 Cover: King’s College Choir
Amanda Holloway heads to Cambridge, home of the
famous Nine Lessons and Carols radio broadcast
36 A King of King’s
Andrew Green remembers Boris Ord, the choirmaster
who did so much to make King’s what it is today
40 15 Christmas Music Essentials
The seasonal must-haves, from Handel to harrumphs
44 Guiding Lights
The gentle flicker of flames entices Rebecca Franks to
experience the magic of Concerts by Candlelight
48 Settling the Score
Femke Colborne reports on how a classic Charlie
Chaplin film has been adorned with brand new music
54 A Steady Hand
French conductor Roger Désormière, by Roger Nichols

EVERY MONTH
8 Letters
12 The Full Score
The latest news and interviews from the music world 26
King’s College Choir
25 Richard Morrison
32 The BBC Music Magazine Interview
Tasmin Little on the joys of hanging up her violin
58 Musical Destinations Art editor Dav Ludford
Jeremy Pound enjoys Grieg aplenty in Bergen, Norway Cliff Richard’s The Millennium Prayer
COVER: JOHN MILLAR THIS PAGE: JOHN MILLAR, RICHARD CANNON, FEVER, ASH MILLS

Listings editor Paul Riley

60 Composer of the Month
Subscriptions £64.87 (UK); £65 (Europe);
Bernard Herrmann, cinematic genius, by Michael Beek £74 (Rest of World) ABC Reg No. 3122
64 Building a Library EDITORIAL
Plus the Christmas music we could happily
Clare Stevens explores Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols live without (Bah! Humbug!)…
Editor Charlotte Smith
100 Live concert and opera highlights Silent Night
Deputy editor Jeremy Pound
103 Christmas Radio & TV Tavener’s The Lamb
Reviews editor Michael Beek
104 Crossword and Quiz The 12 Days of Christmas
106 Music that Changed Me Multi-platform content producer
Steve Wright
Tenor Russell Watson We wish you a merry Christmas
Cover CD editor Alice Pearson
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
While shepherds watched
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Christmas reviews
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 Letters
Have your say…
Write to: The editor, BBC Music Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol, BS1 4ST
Email: music@classical-music.com Social media: contact us on Facebook and Twitter
L ET
Sliding place:
T
of theER A word to the wise
Glenn Miller in his
MON Among the many things I
1940s heyday
TH enjoy every month in BBC
Music Magazine, a high point
has to be the crossword (and
I am proud to have won the
prize a few months back). I
have recently completed the
crossword in the December
issue. There are some very
clever clues in there from Paul
Henderson, but I fear he has
made a mistake. Clue 28 Across
starts ‘Violinist’ (the definition
part) and is followed by the
cryptic components – ‘fellows’
(MEN) ‘call for attention’
(AHEM) ‘and crowd’ (PRESS)
Miller memories ‘the French’ (LE) ‘player at last’
Terry Blain’s admirable Timepiece feature (December) sent (R). The only answer which
me back to June 1944 when I was an enthusiastic radio fits with these components
listener to that great Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band (and the rest of the grid!) is
when they were in London. (They were known here as the Menahem Pressler, who was in
American Band of the AEF, alongside their British and fact a pianist, not a violinist. I
Canadian counterparts.) Unfortunately, Hitler’s ‘Secret would be grateful if you could
Weapon’, the VI Flying Bombs, were aimed at London, let Paul know, and if somehow
forcing the band to evacuate – just in time, too, as their I have missed the point of the
headquarters were destroyed by a Doodlebug the day after clue, do say!
they relocated to Bedford. There they were joined by the Jeremy Holmes, via email
BBC Symphony Orchestra The editor replies:
WIN! £50 VOUCHER as the Proms were shifted Paul and me are confused
FOR PRESTO MUSIC to the same place. Both had about a clue’s opening, leading
to share the Corn Exchange to admission of error (3, 5)
Every month we will award for their broadcasts until
the best letter with a £50 the band moved to Paris. Lenny’s antics
voucher for Presto Music,
How did these two very With regards to ‘Play as you
the UK’s leading e-commerce
site for classical and jazz different crack outfits get gurn’ (Letters, December issue),
recordings, printed music, on, I wonder? Did the BBC not all conductors can be as
music books and musical SO’s trombones have a undemonstrative as Adrian
instruments. Please note: the surreptitious go at ‘Tuxedo Boult (who still got wonderful
editor reserves the right to
shorten letters for publication.
Junction’, for example? results), but Simon Rattle is far
Maybe there’s someone out from the worst. That ‘accolade’
there who could tell us. must surely go to Leonard
Dan Zerdin, London Bernstein, whose grotesque
GETTY
contortions were unbelievably
8 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
distracting, whether seen
from in front or from behind.
Bernstein’s school of thought
was clearly ‘look at me, look at
me, I’m working so hard’.
Patrick Hoyte, Minehead
Same old faces
I have been a regular listener
to Radio 3 for over 60 years,
and by and large have loved the
variety and balance on offer.
When Classic FM started up
I dallied, thinking that I could
easily listen to either of the two
stations, but it soon became
apparent that I probably had
more music available to me
in my own collection than
Classic FM seemed to have,
and definitely a wider breadth
of genre: e.g. how many times
does one want to listen to
Vaughan Williams’s Lark
Ascending, Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ or
Gorecki’s Third Symphony
before you tire of them? It is
this very trap of ubiquity that
I worry about on Radio 3. Not
in the choice of music, which
remains varied – sometimes
challenging and sometimes
comfortingly familiar. No, it
is the omnipresence of some
of the performers. If there
is a flute piece, it will more
than likely be Emmanuel
Pahud playing. Similarly,
almost all cello pieces on
Radio 3 seem to feature Sheku
Kanneh-Mason. A guitar
piece? Miloš Karadaglić.
I could go on. These are
world class performers
without question, but being

a professional musician is a
highly competitive business.
There must be hundreds,
if not thousands of other
performers who would merit
the prominence some of the
BBC favourites receive.
Peter Barber,
Princes Risborough
Scratchy vinyl
Michele Chatwin’s letter
(November) took me back to
my teens in the 1970s, when I
fell in love with classical music
and embarked upon a parallel
interest in HiFi. Mine was not
a particularly musical family,
and we did not possess a record
player until my father bought a
colleague’s stereogram, which
came with a handful of records,
one of which was a collection of
classical music. The first stereo
of my own was bought with
the proceeds of a newspaper
round, as was a ten-record set
called Gateway to the Classics,
each disc exploring a different
area of classical music. The joy
of discovering Bach, Mozart
and Beethoven, among others,
was quickly blunted by some
records in the set arriving
scratched, a regular frustration
over the years as, despite the
equipment being upgraded
regularly, the anticipation
of each new purchase was
replaced by disappointment
when the needle hit the groove.
The hiss, rumble, distortion,
crackle on every disc – and the
skip on many – came close to
killing my love of music. CDs
arrived just in time. Oh, the joy
of hearing nothing apart from
the music! I attend live concerts
regularly and never have I put
on a CD and thought, ‘That
piano/guitar/violin doesn’t
sound right.’ When I hear the
sound of vinyl being described
as ‘warm’, I think ‘blurred’ as in
analogue television as opposed
to HD. I am glad Michele
www.classical-music.com
enjoys her vinyl, and wish her
well, but I won’t be going back
to the dark ages in a hurry!
Barry Smith, Worcester
Forgotten talents
A recent issue of BBC Music
Magazine featured an article
on female composers forgotten
by history. Thank you for this
– the greater attention being
paid to women composers and
their music in recent years has
been grievously overdue. That
said, the fact remains that the
overwhelming majority of
composers throughout musical
history have been forgotten.
Google ‘Chronological Lists
of Classical Composers’ and
prepare to have your ears
pinned back by the abundance.
GETTY, ROBIN CLEWLEY, MAT HENNEK, ANDY GOTTS, SATOSHI AOYAGI
Life is too short for me to have
counted all of them, but I did
take the time to count the
number of composers whose
surnames begin with the
letter ‘A’. There were over 400
of them! (Yes, alas, they were
mostly male.) And this omitted
the ones who were too obscure
to have made an imprint on
the historical record, even
by name only. Pretty much
every morning, I click on the
‘On This Day’ website and
scroll down the long list of The BBC Music Magazine newsletter
luminaries who were born on Stay up to date!
that date. I jot down the names
of one or two of the more Sign up for the weekly BBC Music Magazine
obscure composers. I then go newsletter, which is delivered to you direct via
to YouTube and find examples
of their music (if they exist, email every Tuesday. Each week, we give you
which is more often than not), the latest classical music news, a free download
and post them on my Facebook of a new recording, reviews of great new album
page so my friends can hear releases, exclusive features from the BBC Music
them. It’s my small attempt
to chip away at the massive
Magazine team – and much more!
edifice of obscurity. And never
once have I encountered a
composer in this fashion whose
music makes me shake my
head and say ‘What drivel!
No wonder this composer has
been forgotten!’
David English, Acton, MA, US
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 Thefullscore
Our pick of the month’s news, views and interviews
Albert Hall celebrates its past as archive is revamped
Million-pound ‘rescue operation’ brings together thousands of historic artefacts
From Wagner wielding the baton to knock
out blows from Muhammad Ali, or chords
at the hands of Rachmaninov to words of
wisdom from Albert Einstein, the Royal
Albert Hall (RAH) has a spectacular 152-
year track record of hosting famous names
and events. And now, visitors to the iconic
South Kensington building can enjoy
delving into its history thanks to a £1m
‘rescue operation’ to display its archive in
one single, safe place.
Until recently, the hall’s many artefacts
had been kept in four separate locations,
with regular flooding of the basement
proving a constant threat to their survival.
Thanks to the redevelopment, they will
be now stored in a climate controlled
area where historians, researchers and
ANDY PARADISE
members of the general public can book
an appointment to view them – among the
12 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Albert Hall antiquities:
the costumes from Hiawatha
in the 1930s; (above right)
the trumpet played at the
opening ceremony; (right) a
1920s organ console
tens of thousands of items are the trumpet
played at the opening ceremony in March
1871, a programme designed by Picasso
and costumes from the performances of
Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha that were a
major hit in the 1930s.
‘This famous building has
been a place of cultural
and social transformation’
‘The archive contains priceless assets
of national and international cultural
significance,’ says RAH chief executive
James Ainscough. ‘This famous building
has been a crucible of debate, a place of
cultural and social transformation, and
a prism through which to see a changing
Britain. No other venue on earth has
played host to the Suffragettes, Albert
Einstein and Muhammed Ali, as well as
Ella Fitzgerald, The Beatles and Adele.’
And of course, there are the legions of
composers, conductors and performers
who – though strangely missing from
Ainscough’s list – read almost like a who’s
who of classical music, not least since the
BBC Proms moved there in 1941.
The RAH archivists say the collection
is not quite as complete as they would
like, and have issued a ‘Most Wanted’ list
of artefacts that they are keen to bring
home. These include a gold trowel used by
Queen Victoria when the foundation stone
was laid in 1867 and any programmes,
handbills or newspaper clippings relating
to the inaugural performance on the organ,
given by Bruckner in August 1871. Maybe
time to have a hunt in the attic…?

A trip to Disney grand:
Lang Lang plays a
limited edition Steinway
Lang Lang presents buyers with the keys to a new mouse
No, we’re not taking the mickey. The
instrument being played by Lang Lang
(above) is indeed a Steinway. The pianist,
who last year released an album called
The Disney Book, was at Steinway Hall in
New York to launch the Steinway x Disney:
Mickey Mouse Limited Edition and came
THE MONTH IN NUMBERS
48
…bells preserved for the future, as
the Bournville Carillon (above) near
Birmingham enjoys an £86,000
programme of maintenance work.
with a message for the occasion. ‘When
you’re a performing artist you play a lot of
different works from different parts of the
world, and it’s almost like a bridge, bridging
the cultures,’ he said. ‘I think every musician
has the responsibilities to share the different
heritage through their music.’
3
…years of concerts in Barrow, as the
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
announces a new partnership.
12,000
…pounds raised for Unicef by 17-year-
old violinist Anthony Knight by playing
recitals in hotel lobbies across Europe.
17.5
…per cent more people listening
KIUR KAASIK, GETTY
to Radio 3 than this time last year,
according to figures released by RAJAR
(Radio Joint Audience Research).
Thefullscore
SoundBites
Steps to success: conductor Maria Seletskaja
From bourrée to baton
English National Ballet has announced
that Maria Seletskaja is to be its next music
director. The Estonian, 39, holds the rare
distinction of having enjoyed a career as a
ballet dancer before turning her attention to
conducting – something that, it would seem,
would make her the ideal person for the post.
She herself says the appointment ‘marks
the beginning of an exciting chapter in my
professional life, which I am thrilled about’.
Dartington derailed
The future of the Dartington Music School
and Festival appears to be in serious doubt,
with plans for next summer’s instalment
having been put on hold and artistic
director Sara Mohr-Pietsch handing in her
resignation. Founded in 1948 and held at
Dartington Hall near Exeter, the event has
become a much-loved pillar of the summer
music scene, where young performers enjoy
the chance to learn from those at the top.
Barbican boss
In these pages last month, we wittily (or so we
thought – our apologies to those who didn’t
enjoy the joke) celebrated the new ‘Scotland
Unwrapped’ season at Kings Place with a
depiction of artistic director Helen Wallace
as her namesake William ‘Braveheart’
Wallace. Ironically, one person who won’t be
there for it is Wallace herself, as she has since
been named as the new head of music down
the road at the Barbican. That’ll learn us.
Cherchez la femme…
Research carried out in Germany has shown
that boys aged 16-19 sing better when there
are girls around. When a panel of 2,247
volunteers listened to two recordings of a
boys choir singing Bach – one with females
in the audience, the other without – the
verdict was that the lower voices sounded
‘more brilliant’ in the former than the latter.
Whether they also smelt nicer and brushed
their hair more carefully is not revealed.
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 13
Thefullscore
RisingStars TIMEPIECE This month in history
Three to look out for…
Niamh O’Sullivan Mezzo-soprano
Born: Cork, Ireland
Career highlights:
Singing my dream role,
Charlotte in Massenet’s
Werther, at home in
Ireland this season.
Musical heroes: Veronica
Dunne, my singing
teacher, who prepared me in every way for
this difficult career; mezzo Elīna Garanča,
for her sheer beauty of tone, technique,
elegance and electrifying stage presence; and
Gustav Mahler, for writing so perfectly – for
the mezzo voice in particular.
Dream concert: Playing Octavian in
Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, conducted by
Antonio Pappano at the Royal Albert Hall;
and, in concert, singing Mahler’s Rückert
Lieder at Carnegie Hall with the New York
Philharmonic, conducted by Simon Rattle!

Ingmar Lazar Pianist

Born: Paris, France
Career highlights:
One special memory was
my first Paris recital, at
the Salle Cortot at the
age of 12. I performed
Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy Serving Berlin:
and Fugue, Beethoven’s Leonard Bernstein takes
‘Appassionata’ Sonata and Musorgsky’s his bow at the end of
Pictures at an Exhibition. Beethoven’s NInth
Musical heroes: Liszt is a true inspiration
for me. He had immense knowledge in many
varied fields and was also a truly generous
person, helping to advance the careers of CHRISTMAS 1989
many of his fellow composers.
Dream concert: To perform all of Chopin’s
etudes in his birthplace in Żelazowa Wola. Bernstein celebrates festive
Camille Thomas Cellist
Born: Paris, France
Career highlights:
freedom in East Berlin
Many, from first hearing

the cello aged four
and knowing that this
was what I wanted to
do, to recording The
Chopin Project – based
on the incredible story of the ‘Feuermann’
Stradivari played by Chopin’s close friend,
the cellist Auguste Franchomme.
Musical heroes: Leonard Bernstein, who
said ‘Love two things: music and people. I do
music because I love people’; violinist Janine
Jansen, whose playing takes me to another
dimension; and cellist Jacqueline du Pré, in
whom every single note speaks, sings, cries.
Dream concert: American singer Alicia
Keys’s Times Square concert in 2016 united
millions, live and on television. I want
classical music to do the same.
‘I
am experiencing a historical
moment, incomparable with
others in my long, long life.’
Leonard Bernstein was 71 when he
spoke those words, six weeks after
elated crowds began tearing down the
Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989.
For 28 years the wall had split the
city in two, preventing those living
in communist-controlled East Berlin
crossing to West Berlin, where the
democratic values of the Federal
Republic of Germany held sway. But
communism in eastern Europe had
begun to crumble, and the convulsive
shockwaves were causing the long-
impregnable barriers between the
two parts of a divided Germany, both
ideological and physical, to crumble too.
Ever a master of the dramatic
moment, Bernstein instinctively
grasped that he, an elder statesman
of international music, had a unique
contribution to make at this historic
juncture. So when asked to conduct two
concerts celebrating the fall of the Berlin
Wall, he jumped at the opportunity.
The concerts were scheduled for 23
and 25 December 1989, and would
be uniquely symbolic in nature.
Three choirs would assemble from
different parts of Germany, and the

14 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


orchestra would be international,
drawing players from New York, Paris,
London, Leningrad and both East and
West Germany. They would perform
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a work
whose transition from oppressive
darkness into brilliant, joy-filled light
seemed perfectly suited to the occasion.
When Bernstein arrived in Berlin,
however, he was far from being in prime
physical condition. While in London
to record his Candide, he had caught a
virulent strain of flu. Though still weak
from its side-effects, he summoned
the energy to conduct not one but
two performances of the Ninth on 23
December – the first a run-through for
an afternoon audience in East Berlin,
the other in the West in the evening.
It was a gruelling day, and Bernstein
was reportedly ‘dazed, shrunken
and ashen-faced’ after the evening
performance. In typical fashion, though,
he quickly bounced back. While in
Berlin he mingled with residents in
the streets, lit Hannukah candles at
Berlin’s oldest synagogue and borrowed
a hammer to chip a piece of the Berlin
Wall off for himself.
By Christmas day, the stage was set
for the East Berlin performance of the
Ninth in the historic Schauspielhaus,
where in 1821 Weber’s Der Freischütz
had its premiere. Outside, on the
Gendarmenmarkt, thousands milled
in cold but sunny weather, watching on
GETTY, UWE ARENS, JEAN-MARC GOURDON
Riding high:
West Berliners look down
at East German soldiers,
November 1989
a big-screen relay. Millions more saw
it by satellite, with viewers in over 20
countries. It was, Bernstein’s biographer
Humphrey Burton later recorded, ‘the
highest point in Leonard Bernstein’s
public life as a citizen of the world’.
The concerts were, however, not
without controversy. Moved by the
symbolism of the occasion, Bernstein
had substituted ‘Freiheit’ (’freedom’)
for ‘Freude’ (‘joy’) in the Schiller poem
used for the choral finale. This created
minor ructions among the traditionalist
faction. How dare an upstart American
tinker with Schiller’s sacred text? How
‘I believe that Beethoven
would have given us his
blessing. Let freedom live!’
dare he alter Beethoven’s original
intentions? For a moment the sound of
cultural feathers being ruffled was the
dominant impression.
However, the majestic sweep of
Bernstein’s performance swept all
before it. And his personal response to
the mini-furore was characteristically
unflappable: ‘If there ever were a
historical moment in which one can
neglect the theoretical discussions
of academics in the name of human
freedom, this is it. And I believe that
Beethoven would have given us his
blessing. Let freedom live!’ Terry Blain
Thefullscore
Up in flames:
Nicolae Ceauşescu’s
rule comes to an end
Also in December 1989…
5th: Backbencher Anthony Meyer, the MP for
Clwyd North West, stands against Margaret
Thatcher in a contest for the leadership for
the Conservative Party, the first time Thatcher
has faced such a challenge since becoming
prime minister in 1979. Though 90 per cent
of Tory MPs vote in her favour, the underlying
discontent within the party will eventually lead
to her downfall the following November.
17th: The first ever full-length episode of The
Simpsons is broadcast on Fox. Until now,
Matt Groening’s dysfunctional family from
Springfield has appeared only as a series of
animated shorts on the Tracey Ullman Show,
but now gets its own regular half-hour slot.
Called ‘Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire’,
the first show sees Bart getting a tattoo and
Homer taking a job as a shopping mall Santa.
25th: Overthrown in the Romanian Revolution,
president Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife
Elena are tried by a military tribunal. They are
found guilty of genocide and subversion of
state power, among other charges. At 4pm the
same day, they are executed by firing squad at
a military base just outside Bucharest.
26th: The British composer Lennox Berkeley
dies in London, aged 86. A pupil of Nadia
Boulanger and Ravel, Berkeley’s best known
works included four symphonies, a Horn Trio
and a suite of Catalan dances called Mont
Juic, written in collaboration with Britten.
His own students included Richard Rodney
Bennett and John Tavener and his eldest son,
Michael, is also a well-known composer.
31st: The restoration of the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel in Vatican City is completed.
Begun in the early 1980s, the job has seen
chief restorer Gianluigi Colalucci and his team
address the effects of factors including rain
damage and smoke from burning incense –
not to mention the work of previous restorers
– as they have sought to bring Michelangelo’s
famous frescoes back to their original glory.
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 15
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 Thefullscore
MEET THE COMPOSER
Patrick Hawes
Wash and learn:
‘I was like a sponge,
ready to be soaked
in counterpoint
and harmony’

It don’t mean a thing, if it don’t break a string

Things are getting competitive
in the cello world. Back in 2000,
Guy Johnston famously won
BBC Young Musician of the
Year despite breaking a string
during Shostakovich’s First Cello
Concerto. Clearly keen to go one
better, fellow BBC Young Musician
winner Sheku Kanneh-Mason
recently snapped two strings
playing the same work in Paris. Cue
the re-entry of Johnston into the
fray. ‘Dear @ShekuKM, what’s this
I hear about you breaking not 1 but
2 strings during the Shostakovich
concerto last night??’ he tweets.
‘That’s it, I’m going for 3…!!!’ This
one could run and run…

With an ear for melody and a gift for breathing musical life into
the written word, the Lincolnshire-born Patrick Hawes became a
familiar voice thanks to popular hits such as Blue in Blue for choir
‘Surprise’ exit:
Martyn Brabbins and harp. A composer of much seasonal music, his The Nativity has
took exception to been recorded by Voce Chamber Choir for Signum Classics.
major ENO cuts

I write a lot of Christmas music. I would not be here without a

The very first tracks I wrote for
Boosey & Hawkes back in 1986
were Christmas tracks and since
then I must have written over 100
commercial Christmas pieces.
I’ve done six different versions of
Jingle Bells and Deck the Halls, and
three different versions of Carol
of the Bells.
When I was at school I wrote a
carol called Winter is Here. It’s
not on my new album, because it’s
so basic, but it had words by my
brother Andrew who has written
many of my words since. He’s a
big part of The Nativity.
ENO hunts for new conductor as Brabbins quits The most vital formative
musical element in my life was
Christmas may be honing into the whole of ENO… while also a pub pianist. My parents ran a
view, but the days at English singularly failing to protect our pub and we had a big room where
BILL SMITH, S. PERRY ILLUSTRATION: JONTY CLARK
wonderful man called Philip
Ainsworth. I studied O-Level
music with him and he taught me
everything. I was like a sponge,
ready to be soaked in harmony
and counterpoint.
In 2002 I had the crazy idea to
form my own choir and record
an album. This became a choir
called Conventus, which featured
on quite a few of my earlier
albums, and I wrote Blue in Blue.
It wasn’t released until 2004,
when Classic FM called to ask if
they could make it their ‘Album of
the Week’.
I love setting words. I explain
to my students that it is like
having a coat hanger on which to
hang the garment. If I am writing

National Opera are looking
anything but merry and bright. At
the time of writing, the company
is leaderless after music director
Martyn Brabbins resigned in
protest at cuts to the orchestra and
chorus for the 2024/25 season,
stating that ‘the proposed changes
would drive a coach and horses
through the artistic integrity of
musicians’ livelihoods.’ In response
to the departure of its conductor,
who had been in post at the
Coliseum since 2016, ENO released
a statement expressing its ‘surprise’
and adding that Brabbins had ‘been
party to all key discussions at all
stages’. Meanwhile, who might
be next to be urged into the ENO
hotseat remains anyone’s guess.
my Dad used to lead sing-songs,
and we had a pianist. My Dad
explained that the best-paid
member of staff in the pub wasn’t
at the bar, but at the piano! So
he sent me for lessons with him,
because I’d always be able to
earn a quid or two. I learned to
play pub songs, but also Mozart
sonatas, Beethoven and Schubert.
a purely instrumental piece, I
still find a hanger – that might
be a person or a feeling; or, in the
case of the Highgrove Suite which
I wrote for the (then) Prince of
Wales, I had the different parts
of his garden. I have rarely had
writer’s block; I have always felt
that my creative tank is full to
the brim.

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 17

Thefullscore
StudioSecrets

Transcriptions: Nikolai Lugansky records Wagner

We reveal who’s recording

what and where...
The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
and conductor Nicholas Collon are working
on premiere recordings of pieces by Magnus
Lindberg. The Finnish composer’s Absence
is already in the can, with Serenades due to
be recorded at the Helsinki Music Centre in
December. Lawrence Power will then join
them in February for the Viola Concerto.
Their efforts will be released on Ondine in
the Spring/Summer.
Music by Gerard Schurmann has very
recently been recorded by Ben Gernon and
the BBC Philharmonic at the orchestra’s
home base in Salford. The late composer
(1924-2020) straddled the worlds of film and
concert music and it is his Piano Concerto,
performed by Xiayin Wang, and orchestral
work Gaudiana (inspired by the architecture
of Antoni Gaudí) which are the main focus of
REWIND
Great artists talk about their past recordings
the new album to be released by Chandos in
2024 as part of Schurmann’s centenary year.
Harmonia Mundi has had a busy slate This month: BERTRAND CHAMAYOU Pianist
of recordings, with two notable albums
in the works. Raphaël Pichon and his
Pygmalion ensemble took on Mozart’s
MY FINEST MOMENT engineer not to be there, and so he taught
Requiem at Namur’s Grand Manège concert Messiaen me how to manage the computers and
hall in September, a month which also saw Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus place the microphones. I wanted to be
Russian pianist Nikolai Lugansky record Bertrand Chamayou (piano) alone with the music and my piano – the
transcriptions of Wagner opera items at the Erato 9029619666 (2022) only person there was the tuner.
Scuola della Carità in Padova, Italy. That is This was maybe I had to postpone the recording twice;
due out in the Spring, with the Mozart to
follow at the end of the coming year.
more important to the first time because it was getting too
Baritone Roderick Williams and pianist me than anything cold and it was impossible to continue
Susie Allan gathered at Menuhin Hall at else I’ve done, – my fingers were like ice! The second
MARCO BORGGREVE, GEOFFREY ARGENT, GETTY

the end of October to record a selection of because I had been time was because I injured my left hand
works by Vaughan Williams and a host carrying the idea trying to play No. 11, which is unique
of composers associated with him. The of playing it since I because you play with the fist. I was
album, supported by the Vaughan Williams
was a kid; it was a dream come true to doing so many takes and I had to stop –
Foundation, features pieces by Gipps, Boyle,
Finzi, Butterworth and Holst, among others, record it. I tried so very much to reach my hand was black and blue.
plus a new song cycle called Square and something transcendent – I don’t know Finally I made it. It took ten days;
Candle-lighted Boat by Sarah Cattley. SOMM if I managed to, but I decided to record it it could have been shorter, but I was
will release the album in the Spring. in a very special way. I asked my sound trying so hard and working very late.

18 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


In his comfort zone:
Bertrand Chamayou
recorded Ravel in his
hometown of Toulouse
The complete cycle was 1,000 takes,
which is crazy, but I kept thinking, ‘This
is good, but it’s not enough.’ I really
wanted it to be something very special.
In the end I reached something I am
proud of, because it was like running a
marathon… two marathons!
MY FONDEST MEMORY
Ravel Complete Piano Works
Bertrand Chamayou (piano)
Erato 2564602681 (2016)
Ravel was someone I also developed
a passion for when I was a young kid,
maybe eight or
nine years old.
I have so many
memories from
my former teacher
(Jean François
Hessier) and Vlado
Perlemuter – a Polish pianist who
actually played for Ravel when he was
younger and whom I heard in recital.
I grew up in Toulouse, so all my first
memories of Ravel are connected to the
city, my teacher, this pianist that came
and all the concerts I’d listen to with the
orchestra. So it was something very dear
to me and I decided to record this album
there. It was recorded in a wonderful
church that had been transformed
into an auditorium with a lovely name
– Saint-Pierre des Cuisines – and
actually a glorious acoustic. The whole
experience was very nice because I was,
in a way, behaving like a kid again; I was
staying at my parents’ house, sleeping in
my childhood bedroom and playing this
music every day. Then when I arrived
home my mother would cook for me.
It’s a very comforting memory and the
complete opposite of the Messiaen,
which was such a difficult experience;
this was really like being back in the
comfort zone of your childhood.
I’D LIKE ANOTHER GO AT…
Liszt Transcendental Études
Bertrand Chamayou (piano)
Sony Classical 88697007082 (2006)
This was the very first recording
I did and I like it very much, but it
wasn’t actually planned. It was a live
recording; the promoter said there was
the opportunity to
record it and that
Sony Classical (my
label at the time)
would be interested
in releasing it. This
was just three days
before the concert; it was a very difficult
programme and it was more or less one
take, though we had a morning to do
some little extra things. At first I thought
it was totally silly and too dangerous,
and he said not to feel obliged but that
it would be nice to try it and if I didn’t
accept it he would lose a bit of money,
but it wouldn’t be tragic. So he pressured
me to do it and I took it as a challenge.
I’m pretty proud of it, but I would be
interested now, with almost 20 years
having passed, to do it again; this time in
a studio and with different experience
in life, having grown up a little bit, and
seeing what the difference is. It would
probably be something more powerful,
but I’m not sure. I would be interested
to try a version with more structure and
more weight, but at the same time more
craziniess; I could go much wilder.
Bertrand Chamayou’s ‘Letters to Erik
Satie’ is out now on Erato
Thefullscore
A true original:
Delius was a
unique composer
MyHero
Howard Blake, the
British composer of
seasonal favourite
The Snowman, on the
magic of Frederick Delius
I did my studies at the Royal Academy of
Music in the late 1950s. Back then, the
Academy was a fairly stiff and starchy
place. They were always talking about
Beethoven and Bach, and didn’t really want
to venture into new musical worlds.
One day I heard a piece of music on the
radio and it was the most marvellous music
I had ever heard. It turned out to be Delius’s
On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring.
I thought, ‘Here is an English composer
with a totally original style and harmonic
language. Why isn’t this incredible music
being taught to us at the Academy?’
I have been a fan of Delius’s music ever
since. I think his harmonic structures are
very original: his music contains some very
‘way out’ harmonies for the time. Some of
them are creeping over into jazz – you can
definitely hear echoes of jazz in Delius, and
vice versa. He also has a passion for the
countryside, which he conveys beautifully
in his music.
Why isn’t Delius better recognised?
He doesn’t fit into the canon – he is his
own man. It may have something to do
with the fact that he came from up north,
and nobody took a particular interest in
him early on – so he went his own way.
Luckily for us, Thomas Beecham – another
Northerner – heard his music and decided
that he had to perform it.
Without Beecham, I think it’s quite
possible that Delius’s music would never
have been heard. Which would have been a
tragedy, as he is definitely one of the great
English composers.
‘Orchestral Music by Howard Blake’ is
out now on SOMM Recordings.
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 19
Thefullscore
THE LISTENING SERVICE

With a cherry on top

Despite its ostensibly festive
sounds, Brahms’s Fourth
Symphony presents a vortex
of despair, writes Tom
Service. Perfect, then, for
the Christmas season!

ILLUSTRATION: MARIA CORTE MAIDAGAN

I
t’s Christmas. And Johannes
Brahms has the best beard in
the business, so what gifts does
he bear this festive season? Cherries!
But cherries that don’t ripen – in fact,
cherries whose musical putrefaction
heralds the end of an era of hope. Merry
humbugging Brahmsmas with his
Fourth Symphony!
The irony is that the Fourth
Symphony – composed in 1884-5 in
Mürzzuschlag, where Brahms said the
cherries never ripen, and he worried his
symphony might not either – is also a
piece that makes the most superficially
festive sounds that Brahms ever created
in a symphony. The scherzo even
includes a tinkling, twangling triangle, There is no relief in this movement for what we’ve just heard. Have we
so surely it’s a cavalcade of joy? from its ouroboros-like ascent and understood anything at all? Brahms’s
But this scherzo isn’t a joke: it’s a descent. Brahms’s compositional feat in symphonic gift is an anti-present,
manically concentrated movement this music is to disguise that repetitive an exquisitely but devastatingly
in which Brahms’s sonic whims – regularity, but the trajectory of the piece expressed abandonment of hope. Are
including the triangle – are held in a is never in doubt: a tragic, exhausted we applauding Brahms’s transcendent
vice-like grip of compositional cunning, oblivion in E minor, as the theme is craft? Or are we clapping because we
in music that distils the harmonic want to save ourselves from the abyss
and motivic essence of the previous 7KHV\PSKRQ\łVğQDOH this symphony opens up? Perhaps we
two movements, and whose climax
is a scream across the whole gamut VRXQGVDGHDWKNQHOOIRUWKH can only face this by denying what has
just happened.
of the orchestra, prefiguring the final XWRSLDVRIWKHWKFHQWXU\ That’s a riddle for any Christmas
movement’s main theme. cracker this season: after the mistletoe
The finale makes a symphonic warped and wracked by a fractal, and the brandy, put on Brahms’s
terminus on the rubble of the musical self-referential storm of energy in its Fourth Symphony and enter its tragic
history that Brahms knew uniquely final bars, a black hole that consumes labyrinth, a place that seduces you with
well. His theme is a version of a bass not only this symphony, but Brahms’s its compositional virtuosity, but a vortex
line that Bach had used in the final vision of musical history. The end of the from which there is no escape… So here
movement of his Cantata BWV 150. Fourth Symphony sounds a death-knell it is: Merry Brahmsmas!
Here, Bach’s ‘days of sorrow’ becomes for the utopias of the 19th century, from
the basis of a symphonic chaconne: 30 Beethoven onwards. Tom Service explores how
variations and a coda, all based on the And yet, at the end of a performance music works in The Listening
same chromatically churning theme. of this music, we clap, thunderously Service on Sundays at 5pm

20 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

 AVAILABLE NOW ON NONESUCH RECORDS
FAREWELL TO…
THOMAS ADÈS,
LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC,
Hands-on approach: GUSTAVO DUDAMEL & LOS
Yuri Temirkanov ANGELES MASTER CHORALE
preferred to conduct
without a baton Dante
‘Superb. Dudamel pushes the LA Phil
upwards, to climb the ladder and
emerge blinking into white light.’
– BBC Music Magazine

AMBROSE AKINMUSIRE
Owl Song
‘A soloist who can shift gear from the warm
and heart-tugging to the abstract and freaky
within the same bar, and a composer whose
extended song suites show a healthy stylistic
restlessness.’ – Guardian

JULIA BULLOCK
Walking In The Dark
‘American soprano Bullock has a glittering
reputation for both her astonishing
Yuri Temirkanov Born 1938 Conductor performances and her ongoing mission to
The Russian conductor played a big part in the re-emergence of the centre Black composers in her work. This
St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra after communist rule came to excellent album, blending orchestral works
an end in the Soviet Union – the ensemble reclaimed its original name with more intimate, often jazz-infused
in 1991. Temirkanov had joined as music director in 1988, following numbers, focuses on music of personal
tenures with the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra and at the Kirov significance to her. Outstanding.’
Opera. Born in Nalchik, his father was a culture minister and the – BBC Music Magazine
young musician took to the violin and viola, studying locally and then
at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he would go on to be a prize-
winning conducting student. The Russian repertoire was of course in DARCY JAMES ARGUE’S
his blood and very much his passion as a conductor, which he shared SECRET SOCIETY
with orchestras around the world, including the Baltimore Symphony
Dynamic Maximum Tension
where he served as music director from 2000-06. He also enjoyed
lasting creative relationships with the Dresden Philharmonie, Danish ‘Railing against authoritarianism and
National Radio Symphony (both of which he served as principal guest disinformation, this music has an edge. A
conductor), the Royal Philharmonic and ensembles in Italy and Japan. heady elixir of the past, the present and an
imagined future. A strong and vital voice,
Carla Bley Born 1936 Jazz pianist, Composer music of enduring value.’ – Jazzwise
Bley (born Lovella May Borg) took to the piano as a child and cut her
teeth in the jazz clubs in an around her native Oakland. The Bay Area
couldn’t contain her musical curiosity, though, and she moved to New BRAD MEHLDAU
York while still in her teens. It was in the Big Apple that she got a higher Your Mother Should Know:
education in jazz, witnessing the likes of Count Basie and Miles Davis
Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles
while at work selling cigarettes in the clubs. Her music often defied
categorisation, leaping as it did from solo works to big band, the tuneful ‘Few jazz artists have worked as hard
to the avant-garde. She worked regularly with her two husbands, as Mehldau at bringing modern pop into
pianist Paul Bley and trumpeter Michael Mantler, and collaborated the standard repertoire. An interpreter
closely with New York’s Jazz Composers’ Orchestra and Liberation of genius, he digs into the tunes and
Music Orchestra. Her rock opera Escalator Over The Hill, which took transforms them.’ – The Times
some five years to realise, featured a host of recognisable voices,
including Paul Jones (Manfred Mann) and Linda Ronstadt.
CÉCILE McLORIN SALVANT
Also remembered… Mélusine
Zdeněk Mácal (born 1936), was a Czech conductor who enjoyed tenures
with many orchestras across the globe, including the New Jersey ‘Salvant, who combines a beautiful voice
Symphony. He was chief conductor of the Czech Phil from 2003-07. with a reputation for being a free spirit and
taking creative risks, returns with another
French musician Maurice Bourgue (born 1939), was principal oboist daring, boundary-breaking opus. Full of
with the Orchestre de Paris from 1967-79, where he would go on to surprises, it’s an unalloyed delight from start
GET T Y

premiere works by Berio and Dutilleux. to finish.’ – Record Collector

NONESUCH.COM
Thefullscore
Rocket woman:
Marianna Shirinyan
flies high in Chopin's
Ballades and Scherzos
Music to my ears
What the classical world has been listening to this month
Kathryn Stott Pianist
I’ve recently given
two of my students
Bernstein’s
Symphonic Dances to
learn, and thought I
would remind
myself of the original version with
the composer conducting. There’s
a performance available on CD,
but I went to YouTube to find him
conducting the Israel
Philharmonic. Watching his
expressions simply added to the
drama and heartache of this
incredible score. To write music
that was conceived to set scenes for
actors and vocalists, and then to
remove all those elements and let
the music stand alone, is nothing
short of genius. Lenny was visibly
moved at the end; I was in a heap.
Not too long ago, I went to hear
the Hallé perform works including
22 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
One of my favourite pianists
is Marianna Shirinyan, and I’ve
been listening to her recording of
Chopin’s Ballades and Scherzos
since its release a few months ago.
This is a revelatory interpretation,
completely fresh, as if the ink were
still wet on the page. Wonderful!
And also…
I’m often asked what I listen to
when I’m out and about walking
Archie, my working cocker
spaniel. The answer? Nature. This
is the soundtrack that keeps me
related to the land and to reality.
Kathryn Stott joins Manchester
Collective at Kings Place, London
on 2 December
Michael Berkeley
Composer and Radio 3 presenter
I enjoyed Nicholas
Daniel and Huw
Watkins at
Wigmore Hall
recently, not just
because they were
playing a piece of mine, which
they did very beautifully, but
because Nicholas must be about
the best oboist in the world. The
Mozart (Sonata, K376) was just
full of the humour that the
composer would have loved.
A recent ENO production of
CRITIC’S CHOICE Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony Peter Grimes at the Coliseum was
at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall. also enormously enjoyable. I’ve
Martin Cotton
I’m not sure I’ve actually heard been steeped in Britten, one way
When I was growing
up, a constant element it in concert before, but what an or another, from childhood, and
in my life was my absolutely fizzing treat this was! it was just wonderful to hear that
father’s collection of Beethoven’s sheer energy astounds music done with such verve and
jazz records. They me more and more, whether he’s strength by the ENO orchestra and
still resonate, and
top of the pile at the
chorus – reaffirming the whole
moment are Louis Beethoven’s sheer reason for their existence after the
Armstrong and Ella organisation’s recent difficulties.
Fitzgerald’s albums energy astounds me, And what was wonderful was all
from the 1950s, with
Armstrong’s gravelly whether he’s creating the young people in the audience.
I’m quite selective about what
vocals a perfect
counterpoint to a dark or joyful mood I go and see, but I thought Antonio
Fitzgerald’s beautifully Pappano brought exquisite
imaginative music- creating a dark and mysterious playing from the orchestra in the
making: her solo take opening mood, or an overflowing, Royal Opera’s latest Wagner Das
on ‘These Foolish
Things’ confirms her joyful ebullience. In a world full Rheingold; and, again, the chorus
as one of the greatest of anxiety and sadness, it can take was very strong. It reminds us of
singers of the century a lot to be swept along by music the importance in our profession
in any genre. that is simply happy. Conductor of freelance singers and players,
Anja Bihlmaier drove the who really enrich the music-
orchestra at breakneck speed and making in this country, but
it was thrilling. whose lives are very tricky at the

moment, especially those who
aren’t salaried members.
And also…
I’ve got a small farm in mid-
Wales and I go there to work, but I
absolutely love getting out on the
farm in the afternoon and helping
Steven, my farming partner,
whether it’s just shifting bales or
helping with fencing. I find that
is wonderfully relaxing and in a
funny way, after the rather rarefied
life one leads in London, it’s very
refreshing to get down to nature,
red in tooth and claw. Walking is
my great hobby – I play tennis, too,
but I absolutely love walking.
Michael Berkeley presents
Private Passions on Radio 3
every Sunday at 12pm
Maria Włoszczowska
Violinist
I’ve been obsessed
with late Fauré for
a couple of years,
and recently have
been listening to
Domus’s 1994
recording of his Second Piano
Quintet (with violinist Anthony
Marwood on the Hyperion label).
Fauré’s later works have a
reputation for being difficult to
listen to, but I think that’s
Thefullscore
nonsense. Every time I listen to CRITIC’S CHOICE now want to explore it more. It's
this piece I hear something new – inspiring when that happens.
there’s a hidden beauty that takes a And also…
while to reveal itself. It’s incredibly I’ve been getting into dancing,
modern, but also very touching. especially salsa. It makes me feel
My dad used to listen to a lot like a kid again – it’s pure joy and
of jazz, soul, old R&B and rock all worries stop existing when I
and roll, so I grew up with a lot dance. Whenever I have spare time
of that music. I’ve recently come I’ll go somewhere to dance with
back to Donny Hathaway, a soul Ashutosh Khandekar friends. I’ve also been to Medellín
legend, and in particular his ‘Take Stepping down after in Colombia where the dancing
25 years as editor of an
a love song’. I can’t get over how opera magazine has
scene was a bit of a wake-up call –
incredible and unusual it is – it given me more time to they are so natural that it is almost
is a soul ballad that experiments explore other musical as if they learn it by osmosis!
with irregular pulse and has a genres. Rediscovering Maria Włoszczowska co-directs
harmonic structure that is not at choral music has been the Royal Northern Sinfonia by
a particular delight,
all obvious – and yet the end result and I’ve been spending
Candlelight tour, 1-7 December
is still so simple, beautiful, warm contemplative
and raw. late-afternoons at
Over the summer, I had the Evensong in Wells
pleasure of meeting and listening Cathedral and Bath
Abbey, immersed
to the phenomenal Belgian in the glories of
accordionist Philippe Thuriot. Byrd, Tallis, Britten,
I’ve heard him play all sorts of MacMillan et al. Back
things, as he can do just about home in Frome, I’ve
downloaded all the
everything! Witnessing him
albums from The
improvising on Bach’s Goldberg Sixteen’s ongoing
Variations was one of those Choral Pilgrimage.
life-changing moments – he was The singing positively
so at ease with himself and the glows in this treasure
trove of polyphony
music – there was a fearlessness from across the ages,
that I really admire. Hearing his both soothing and
skill and how he made it seem so uplifting.
natural made me realise I miss
that in my own musical life and Push and pull: accordionist Philippe Thuriot

Our Choices The BBC Music Magazine team’s current favourites

Charlotte Smith Editor
A quick dash up to Edinburgh provided the perfect
opportunity to attend a concert by the Royal
Scottish National Orchestra at Usher Hall. On the
GETTY, KAUPO KIKKAS, BBC, NIKOLAJ LUND, JACQUI FERRY, EDUARDUS LEE, JEAN SCOUBS
opportunity to display my professional expertise. Steve Wright Content producer
‘It’s almost certainly Tchaikovsky,’ father sagely I’ve been returning to one of my favourite sets
informed son, ‘though there are glimpses of of Mahler symphonies, featuring the Tonhalle
Dvořák and even Wagner.’ Way wide of the Orchestra Zürich and conductor David Zinman.

programme were Copland’s Appalachian Spring
and Sibelius’s First Symphony, both sumptuously
performed by an impeccably balanced band
under the baton of Kristiina Poska (pictured
below). But it was soloist Rachel Barton Pine who
provided the showstopping moment in her encore,
coolly dispatching Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1,
in a ridiculously difficult arrangement
by Nathan Milstein, without breaking
a sweat.
Jeremy Pound Deputy editor
While driving my son to athletics
training, hearing a lushly Romantic
– but not instantly identifiable –
symphonic work on Radio 3’s
In Tune gave me the ideal
mark, of course – it was Romeo und Julia by the
Norwegian Johan Svendsen. The music was so
enticing, however, that I have listened to it a lot
since, and will definitely recognise it next time.
Michael Beek Reviews editor
I was delighted to attend a special event in
celebration of composer John Williams’s London
connections over the years. Organised by The
Legacy of John Williams, a wonderful fan
resource (and podcast), we heard memories
from former LSO principals Eric Crees
(trombone) and Hugh Seenan (horn), plus rare
recording session snippets and unheard takes
from film scores, courtesy of producer
Mike Matessino, who dialled in from LA.
A thrilling afternoon for this nerd.
Some of my favourite symphonies in the cycle
– Nos 1, 3, 4 and 7 – rely more on colour and
atmosphere than on bombast and bluster, and the
Tonhalle scores particularly well here.
Alice Pearson Cover CD editor
Hely-Hutchinson’s A Carol Symphony is a pleasant
deviation from the usual festive fare. Its first
performance was by the BBC Symphony Orchestra
(then known as ‘The Wireless Orchestra’) in
1927. The four movements cleverly weave old
favourites such as ‘O Come, all ye faithful’ into
a symphonic structure – a highlight is the third
movement, where ‘Coventry Carol’ blends into
‘The First Nowell’. The City of Prague Philharmonic
Orchestra’s recording also delights with other
symphonic treats based on Christmas music.

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 23


Richard Morrison
Today’s musicians shouldn’t be
afraid to take on political causes
N
o sooner has the classical
music world stopped arguing
about Cate Blanchett’s savage
portrayal of a fictional conductor in the
movie Tár than along comes another
Hollywood epic about a conductor
– this time a real one. As someone
who interviewed Leonard Bernstein
a few times, I was astonished by how
accurately Bradley Cooper portrays his
mannerisms, voice, conducting gestures,
crazy and fickle private life and, most
of all, his charisma in this new film
Maestro (to be profiled in the Jan 2024
issue). And there are some brilliant
music scenes. The 1973 performance
of Mahler’s Second Symphony in Ely
Cathedral is so perfectly evoked that
you feel as if you have been whisked
backwards in a time-machine.
In one respect, though, the film
doesn’t do justice to Bernstein’s
multifaceted life and protean energy.
Away from music, it’s nearly all about
his marriage and its disintegration.
Fair enough – that’s what interests the
director. But the millions of people
learning about Bernstein for the first
time through this film will glean
nothing about one crucial facet of his
life. He was not just a prominent cultural
icon of post-war America; he was also a
tremendously political figure. In word
and deed, he was forever championing
causes boldly and bravely.
In 1948, for instance, when the new-
born Israel was fighting for its life, he
went into the Sinai Desert to play Mozart
in the open air for thousands of soldiers.
In the 1960s he got into hot water for
supporting American civil rights and
attending a reception organised by his
wife for the radical Black Panthers.
When the Berlin Wall came down in
1989, he was the one marking its demise
with a triumphant performance of
Beethoven’s Ninth (see p14). And so on.
None of this is in the movie. And
that’s a pity because we could really do
with more top musicians bold enough
to speak out in public about injustices.
It’s not so much that they would, by
themselves, bring about change. It’s
more that if leading conductors and
soloists can be seen contributing to
mainstream debates about political,
social and of course cultural matters,
that’s good for classical music generally.
Where are the fearless
musicians of today,
speaking about wrongs
that need addressing?
It undoubtedly takes courage to
speak out against violence or injustice.
Nevertheless, I can immediately think of
five notable examples from the classical
music world. Dame Ethel Smyth ended
up in Holloway Prison, conducting
her March of the Women with her
toothbrush, because she hurled a stone
through the front window of a Cabinet
minister’s house during a suffragette
protest. A later English composer,
Michael Tippett, also went to prison
because he refused to compromise on
his pacifism during World War II.
The great Italian conductor Arturo
Toscanini was beaten up by Blackshirt
thugs because he refused to conduct
the fascist anthem at a concert in
Mussolini’s Italy. The Russian cellist
Mstislav Rostropovich, before he
Opinion
defected to the West, invited the
ostracised Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
to live in his dacha, and also fired
off a letter to Pravda to denounce the
harassment of the scientist Andrei
Sakharov – acts of unbelievably reckless
bravery in the Soviet Union. And more
recently Daniel Barenboim incurred the
wrath of many fellow Jews, particularly
in Israel, by leading his West-Eastern
Divan Orchestra of young Arabs and
Jews in a concert in the Palestinian city
of Ramallah and taking out joint Israeli-
Palestinian citizenship, all to affirm his
belief that Israelis and Palestinians must
learn to live together in peace.
Clearly, none of these acts of
individual defiance changed the course
of events. But they did have an impact.
You can’t help noticing, however, that
they were all initiated by musicians
who (with the exception of the 81-year-
old Barenboim) are no longer with us.
Where are the fearless conductors and
soloists of today, speaking out about
wrongs that need addressing? Are they
all so worried about jeopardising their
organisations’ sponsorship that they
judge discretion to be the better part of
valour? Or is the world so perfect now
that nobody needs to complain?
Well, you judge. Either way, the result
is that whereas visual artists, authors
and actors are often in the headlines
opining about this or that, classical
music’s leading lights rarely are. They
should be. It would help to counter
the (still prevalent) idea that classical
musicians are a breed apart, living in a
bubble that is of little relevance to the
‘real world’. We know that’s not the case.
But we need to prove it.
Richard Morrison is chief music critic
and a columnist of The Times
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 25
The Choir of King’s College

SingingLessons
As the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge
celebrates the 95th anniversary of its Nine
Lessons and Carols broadcasts, Amanda
Holloway meets music director Daniel Hyde
PHOTOGRAPHY: JOHN MILLAR

veryone has their own Christmas ritual.

For one musician friend, Christmas
begins at 3pm on 24 December, when she
pours herself a glass of champagne, turns
on BBC Radio 4 and settles down to listen
to the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge singing
A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.
King’s director of music Daniel Hyde is not
remotely offended by this secular approach to his
choir’s religious celebration. In fact, during Covid he
had a chance to do exactly the same thing (minus the
champagne!) ‘It was December 2020 and we were all
shut down, but we had recorded a couple of rehearsals
earlier in the month so we were able to produce a carol service without being in
the chapel. I did rather enjoy sitting on the sofa at home and I would encourage
anyone who’s not here in Cambridge to do it too.’ People write in to say that they
are listening on the top of a mountain on a tinny little radio, or in the middle
of the desert in the baking heat. ‘That’s the secret of its success – you don’t have
to be here. It’s the idea that this is going on, and people can visualise where it is
and the atmosphere of the place.’ The longest-established annual broadcast in
history, A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols is now 95 years old. Additionally,
Carols from King’s, a televised Christmas service recorded in early December
and also broadcast on Christmas Eve, celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2024.
We’re sitting in Hyde’s score-filled study, with its view of the Backs (Cambridge
meadows and riverside), talking about today’s recording session with the Britten
Sinfonia. Hyde is conducting the orchestra and choir in seven carols by John
Fit for a king:
Rutter (known to choirs all over the world as the ‘father’ of the Christmas carol), as current choristers; (left)
well as Rutter’s 20-minute piece Visions, to be released around Easter 2024. music director Daniel Hyde

26 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 27
The Choir of King’s College

Old hat: (clockwise from

left) mid-20th-century
King’s College choristers;
Hyde conducts the choir
at a recent recording
session; former music
director David Willcocks

HYDE EXPLAINS THAT

the chapel’s own recording
label is trying a new way of
streaming this Christmas
offering. ‘For the first time
we’re not producing a
Christmas CD; we’re trying
to reach people in the
formats they actually use.’
Three of the carols will be
released as digital singles as a teaser to the
EP, Rutter Orchestral Carols, which will be
available through Apple Music and other
streaming platforms from 24 November.
‘I can’t remember the last time I put on a
CD,’ Hyde says. ‘The recording model has
changed and I want to embrace the change
rather than compete with it. We are all
having to learn how our brand sits in
the marketplace.’ ‘It’s harder for colleges and cathedrals
I ask him if the commercial imperative
to market their activities may one day to recruit choristers and choral scholars’
impinge on their work in the chapel. But
he insists that the primary duty of the stretches back more than half a century explains Hyde. ‘The next big project will
choir is still to sing daily services six days and a dedicated King’s College, Cambridge be conservation work on the windows.’ He
a week during term time, according to label was created in 2012. ‘It gives us is confident that these external alterations
the statutes laid down by Henry VI in freedom to control and curate what we do, will not affect the golden acoustic of the
1441. ‘Our job is to adorn the liturgy of and how we promote it,’ says Hyde. chapel. ‘People come to the chapel for its
the chapel and we wouldn’t reduce what Utilising the King’s brand surely beauty and the beauty of the sound,’ says
we do in that context to do potentially helps towards the maintenance costs of Hyde. ‘It’s about the building as much as
more commercial activity.’ Since the first a massive ancient monument, with its the choir; woodwork, stained glass, they’re
broadcast of A Festival of Nine Lessons and gigantic roof, soaring fan-vaulted ceilings, all part of the fabric. If we lost one of those
Carols, the college has built an enviable stained glass and stone carvings. Part things, we would be the poorer for it.’
profile through broadcasting, recordings of the chapel is currently encased in For Hyde, the educational remit of the
and international tours. Their discography scaffolding, ‘so they can replace the lead chapel has not changed. But making these
on labels such as Argo, Decca and EMI on the roof and fit discreet solar panels,’ educational opportunities more widely

28 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


known is the new challenge. ‘We want to
reach people who wouldn’t know about the
benefits of a chorister education for their
musical children,’ says Hyde. ‘We know
it’s a huge commitment for choristers and
parents as we sing six days a week in term
time. One of the points I make about King’s
Choir when people ask why they have to
board, is that it gives opportunities for
children who aren’t local to Cambridge.
And unlike 1960s boarding schools, it’s
not grim; it’s a very happy place!’ There
are travel opportunities too – in 2024, the
JOHN MILLAR, GETTY, HUGH WARWICK
choir tours Australia for three weeks.
I had assumed that King’s would be
oversubscribed with applicants for the
choir, given its reputation. But apparently
not. ‘It’s harder for all colleges and
cathedrals to recruit choristers and choral
scholars now,’ says Hyde. ‘We’re seeing
the effect of the drop in music in primary
and secondary education settings – music
is pinched in the school system. It’s a
fantastic opportunity to be a chorister
here. We develop them musically and they
get music scholarships to good schools.’
Previous music directors Boris Ord,
David Willcocks, Philip Ledger and
Stephen Cleobury have shaped the sound
and style of the choir in spite of its shifting
personnel – choral scholars rarely serve for
more than three years and the choristers
leave at the end of their prep school years.
Hyde succeeded Cleobury as director of
music in 2019, taking over rather sooner
than he expected when Cleobury’s health
declined. Hyde has experienced high-
quality church music from every
Girl power: singing at St George’s, Hanover Square
Parallel opportunities
The search for equality at King’s
Daniel Hyde explains how girls are being
introduced to the musical traditions of
King’s College School and Chapel: ‘We
wanted to support further opportunities for
girls to experience a formal choral training
tradition; girls and boys rehearse in school
at the same time, in the same building. It’s
been very successful and we’re looking at
how to develop it.’
He says it wouldn’t have worked simply
to throw girls into the current setup: ‘It’s
not a case of just giving them a top hat
and then job
done. We have
a clear vision
of these two
groups running
in parallel and
the educational
approach is
proving itself
to be quite
different. It
might be that
the girls in the
Schola Cantorum do more varied types
of music; they are already performing in
various places around Cambridge.’ King’s
Voices, the College’s mixed-voice choir,
now sings in the chapel on Mondays.
Hyde says he is very aware of trying to
lead the way for the Cambridge choral
ecosystem and not just for King’s College.
‘Some of our girls in the Schola are
also choristers in Pembroke, with Anna
Lapwood (pictured above), or in Saint
Catherine’s with Edward Wickham. They’re
able to choose the commitment level that
suits them. For a parent with a musical
child, I think Cambridge is probably one of,
if not the, best places in the country to be.’
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 29
The Choir of King’s College
angle – starting as a choirboy at Durham
Cathedral, he became an organ scholar at
King’s and later director of music at Jesus
College, Cambridge and then Magdalen
College, Oxford. Most recently he was
organist and director of music at St
Thomas Church in New York City, and he
has maintained a career as an organist and
a conductor with leading ensembles such
as the BBC Singers, Britten Sinfonia and
the Academy of Ancient Music.
Hyde has fitted smoothly into the
structure of King’s College, recognising
the conflicting demands of tradition
and progress. ‘I have to keep up the core
repertoire – each new set of choristers
needs to know the basic King’s repertoire
– but I programme different music as well.
I do always try and feed something new in
each week, but of course the structure of
chapel services means that the majority of
what we do is Evensong. At any one time
30 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
‘If I commission
something, it’s not
acceptable for it to
be a one-hit wonder’
we have 80 different settings of the Mag
and Nunc (Magnificat and Nunc dimittis) in
our repertoire. We look for opportunities
to commission new work – for example,
we recently sang a commission from
King’s alumna Errollyn Wallen in an event
to celebrate 50 years of the admission
of women to King’s College. That’s
something to celebrate but it’s also slightly
embarrassing that it took so long!’
Featured in every Nine Lessons is a
specially commissioned carol – Rutter’s
popular What Sweeter Music was
premiered in 1987 and composers from
Lennox Berkeley to Harrison Birtwistle
and Judith Weir have written for King’s.
Hyde is getting better at giving specific
briefs to composers so he gets something
suitable for the choir and the occasion. ‘If I
commission something, it’s not acceptable
for it to be a one-hit wonder. It has to be
something which we can actively promote,
and I also keep an eye on what colleagues
in other places are doing.’
Some of the music would stretch even
the most experienced singers, but Hyde
is confident in the choristers’ abilities.
‘The only reason we can do some pretty
taxing commissions is because we do that
core work, so we have the musical skills.
The children can sight-read at a level way
beyond their years.’ All that hard work
has its rewards. ‘The thing I love the most
about it is that when I put a piece of music

in front of the kids for the first time, I’ve
got the best seat in the house to watch their
reactions to it.’ Every summer he loses his
oldest and most experienced trebles and
has to bring on the next group of leaders
as soon as services resume in September.
‘Stephen Cleobury described running the
choir as like juggling saucepans all coming
to the boil at different times. I can only do
my best, but I can’t be responsible if we
occasionally have a duff day.’
Hyde tries to bring different ensembles
into the chapel – orchestras such as
the Academy of Ancient Music or the
Philharmonia – so choristers get the
chance to sing the big choral and orchestral
pieces that they may not have come across.
A very successful performance of Elgar’s
JOHN MILLAR, NICK RUTTER
Dream of Gerontius with the BBC Concert
Orchestra was broadcast in the summer
by BBC Radio 3. They’ve just appeared
with the choir of New College, Oxford in
Sing, choir of angels: (left) Daniel Hyde conducts
the King’s College Choir and Britten Sinfonia at the
recording session for Rutter’s Visions earlier in 2023
a performance of Haydn’s Creation. Hyde
waves away any suggestions of rivalry
between the two much-admired choirs. ‘I
think it’s healthy to team up. I don’t like the
way the classical music industry promotes
itself on one-upmanship.’
After our interview I’m invited to watch
some of the recording session for John
Rutter’s Visions for orchestra, solo violin
and a chorus of trebles. The boys, ranging
from eight to 13 years old, are treated as
professional musicians. Hyde gets them to
repeat a phrase until it rings with energy
and purpose – there’s no tailing off or
losing focus. Kind, firm, conscientious,
Hyde is popular with the boys without
being their best friend. ‘It’s important
there are boundaries,’ he says. ‘It’s a
small group and I liaise with staff in the
boarding house and the head of the school,
and we talk daily about their welfare and
development.’ Hyde gives his full backing
to the girls’ Schola Cantorum at the King’s
College School which has been in existence
now for several years. With his colleagues,
he is supporting the search for a pathway
for girls to claim their place in Cambridge’s
college music structure (see box, p29).
Rutter is among the industry stalwarts
who appreciate the efforts that King’s
has made over the years to keep up
the standard of excellence in choral
singing (see box, right). ‘They act as a
role model for choirs of every standard
– not in an arrogant way, but just a
demonstration of what can be done with
a handful of children and a back row of
undergraduates,’ he says. Hyde reveals he
gets letters from church choir members
saying, ‘We’re singing this carol because
we heard you do it last year.’ ‘That’s always
very humbling to know that people will
follow what we do,’ he says, ‘but it also
comes with a huge responsibility to
maintain the standard.’
There are those who would label the
tradition ‘elitist’, but Hyde prefers the other
‘E’ word: excellence. ‘My view is that every
day there will be some people who come to
the chapel and it’s their once-in-a-lifetime
chance to hear us. The same goes for
people who only ever tune in on Christmas
Eve. We have to deliver the very best of
what we can do, and that ties in with being
an example that others can emulate –
there’s nothing elitist about that.’
Father Christmas:
John Rutter
A lifetime of carols
John Rutter’s new EP
John Rutter has had a long association
with Cambridge, first as a student, then
as director of music at Clare College,
one of the first colleges to admit women
to its choir. He also assisted Sir David
Willcocks with the iconic series Carols for
Choirs, working in the same study that
Hyde inhabits today. Rutter is inextricably
associated with choral compositions and
particularly carols, performed by choirs all
over the world, and he is in demand to give
workshops and performances with his own
ensemble, Cambridge Singers.
He started writing carols in his teens
at Highgate School, where he sang in the
chapel choir next to his great friend John
Tavener. ‘He would write a carol and I would
write one and we would show them to
each other,’ says Rutter. ‘There was some
friendly rivalry – I knew he stood far above
me, but he inspired me to have a go!’
Rutter is delighted that King’s College
Choir is releasing this selection of his
carols, including two world premiere
recordings, because ‘they represent the
ultimate in refinement, for how you would
hope a Christmas carol might be sung by
your church choir if only they were good
enough!’ The chapel, of course, provides
that extra magic. As the oldest surviving
building within the College site, it’s among
the most iconic venues in Cambridge.
‘It’s a gift of a building to record in and
the sound engineers are in awe when they
come in. Of course, you have to deliver
something terrific, but the building gives
you a real plus with its soft stone creating
that warm, five-second reverb.’
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 31
Tasmin Little
When I make a
speech, I have a message
to deliver – just as
with my violin I had
a message to deliver
through the music
THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
Tasmin Little
As 2020 drew to a close, the
British violinist stepped
back from a highly successful
performing career. But, as she
tells Charlotte Smith, she is
now busier than ever before
PHOTOGRAPHY: RICHARD CANNON
T
asmin Little has not retired.
Despite announcing in 2019 to
supporters that she would be
stepping away from the concert platform
– and not placing bow to string since
her farewell Southbank Centre concert
at the end of 2020 – the much-loved
British violinist is busier than ever. Yet,
she no longer owns a violin, having sent
her cherished instrument to a new home
following that final performance. So, no
practice in the privacy of her house, nor
playing with friends and family, and no
practical demonstrations for students
during masterclasses.
You might consider this a rather stark
decision, particularly for someone whose
life was intimately bound with the
instrument since attending the Yehudi
32 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Menuhin School from the age of eight. But
for Little, the decision makes perfect sense
– and surprisingly, is one that she came to
during her twenties. ‘I think the long and
short of it is that I’m a communicator,’ she
explains, ‘and for the majority of my life
I’ve used my violin for this purpose. But I’m
just as comfortable using my voice and my
vocabulary. And I never said I was going to
retire – I’m a long way off retirement.’
As the daughter of theatre and screen
actor George Little, young Tasmin may
have shown prodigious skill as a violinist,
but, encouraged by her father, honing
her skills as an orator and writer also
formed a crucial aspect of her upbringing.
Both parents were cultural enthusiasts,
attending museums and galleries in
addition to concerts, and ‘watching people
perform’ in myriad ways ‘other than
musically’ was a common family activity.
It’s unsurprising, then, that in her fifties,
Little was increasingly feeling the lack of
‘other things in my life’ following decades
of dedication to performing. ‘Because I’d
always been interested in new works and
broadening the repertoire, I’d be preparing
and performing a huge number of
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 33
pieces throughout the year. There were
no holidays and certainly no weekends,
and I felt culturally undernourished,’ she
says. ‘I know that sounds peculiar, but I
really had no time to go to the theatre or to
see an exhibition.’
The other side of the equation was a very
practical desire not to see her technical
skills deteriorate as she became older. ‘I
never wanted to go downhill,’ she says
matter-of-factly. ‘I never wanted people to
say, “She used to be good.” And although
my playing was still sound as I entered my
fifties, I had to ask myself, did I want to put
on a ball gown to perform in my sixties?
Plenty of people do it successfully, but it
wasn’t for me.’
Sealing the deal was a finger injury
in 2019 – the only major injury of the
violinist’s intensely busy career – that
forced her to stop playing for eight weeks.
How would she cope psychologically with
being away for her instrument for such a
lengthy amount of time? It turns out very
well – a realisation that was strengthened
as the pandemic hit in early 2020. ‘At that
34 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
‘I had to ask myself,
did I want to put on a
ball gown to perform
in my sixties?’
point I was using my voice a lot,’ she says.
‘I did an enormous number of interviews
talking about the plight of musicians, and
wrote articles on the impact of both Covid
and Brexit. Because I wasn’t attached to an
institution or orchestra, I felt able to speak
up on behalf of others. It felt natural.’
As well it might, for Little, even at
her busiest as a performer, was never a
musician to shy away from using her voice.
Alongside a career that encompassed
45 commercial recordings, multiple
international tours, and no less than 20
performances at the BBC Proms, she could
also be found on television and radio
sharing her love of music, in the House
of Commons advocating the importance
of music education and acting as an
ambassador for charities such as Help
Musicians UK and Youth Music. As far
back as the early ’90s she was speaking to
audiences from the stage in her pioneering
verbal introductions to concerts – an
impulse that found particular success
in 2008’s ‘Naked Violin’ project, which
offered free downloads and introductions
to performances on her website, leading
to workshops in non-traditional concert
venues such as hospitals and prisons.
Snap forward to that life-changing
decision to part ways with the violin,
and Little has grabbed the opportunity
to develop her other passions with both
hands. She continues to give masterclasses
for young musicians, expanding her
involvement to incorporate all the major
London colleges, in addition to specialist
music schools like Chetham’s and the
Purcell School. She’s also been joint
director of the Menuhin School with
Daniel Barenboim since 2019, though
she’s at pains to point out that this unpaid
post is more about shaping an ethos for

the school than taking part in its day-
to-day activities: ‘I knew Yehudi and the
types of things he supported quite well, so
providing that personal guidance is a big
part of what I do.’ She adjudicates for select
competitions, too – last year she sat on
the jury of the Carl Nielsen International
Competition and next year she will head to
Norway for the Princess Astrid contest.
But more than this, she’s built on
the work she has done previously for
BBC Radio 3 and developed an eight-
part ‘flexible conversation’ series with
the station’s New Generation Artists,
providing an insight into ‘who these people
are outside their amazing musicianship’.
Called Backstage Pass, the series takes as its
premise the idea of ‘two musicians having
a discussion in their dressing room’.
So far, so standard, as such activities fall
firmly within the musical sphere. More
intriguing, however, are Little’s activities
outside this realm. Her contributions to
the China Current, a relatively new English-
language website with an enormous global
audience dedicated to all things Chinese,
have taken her into decidedly journalistic
territory. As the website’s Cultural
Correspondent, Little is responsible for
conceiving, writing and recording two
programmes per month on topics of
cultural significance – from the Butterfly
Lovers Concerto to caterpillar silk and its
RICHARD CANNON, GETTY, ALAMY
uses, to the development of the Chinese
hotpot. Some of her recent programmes
have generated a whopping 1.2m views.
She’s also built on the qualification in
mentoring and coaching she earned from
the Guildhall in January 2021 to join a
Plucky performer: (far left) Little is embracing
the stage… without a violin; (left) practising hard
in 1973, shortly before she joined the Menuhin
School; (right) in concert in around 2000
company called Mentore as an advisor
for people from the business world. The
more Little talks about her transferable
skills, the easier it is to see how she is
such an asset to the roster. ‘I’ve always
been interested in people and how we
can get in our own way psychologically,
whether on stage or in any number of
areas. Business – presenting to clients and
so on – can be a performance. But more
than that, gathering a team is like working
with an orchestra or a chamber group. The
cooperative skills are identical. It’s about
how you use language to its best effect –
and moulding that language to the group
of people you’re addressing.’
But, of course, Little is still, at heart,
a performer and as much as coaching
and mentoring behind the scenes can
be fulfilling, she will always relish the
opportunity to be on stage. ‘I do miss
audiences,’ she admits, ‘so I’m very glad
that I’m still standing in front of people
in different capacities. For instance, I
narrated Carnival of the Animals at the
Cambridge Festival this year, and was
also a speaker at the Benjamin Britten
Lowestoft Statue fundraiser at Wigmore
Hall in October.’ Does she experience the
same nerves she felt with a violin in hand?
‘Whenever you stand in front of people
you’re going to get a rush of excitement,’
she replies. ‘I’m not going to call it nerves.
But when I make a speech, I’m aware that I
have a message to deliver – just as with my
violin I had a message to deliver through
the music.’
As we finish our interview, news comes
through that Little’s CBE, awarded in the
King’s June 2023 Birthday Honours List,
will be presented to her at Windsor Palace
on 12 December. Perhaps there might be
a few nerves on the day, particularly if
Charles himself performs the investiture?
But as I formulate the question, I realise
how absurd that notion must be to this
strong, unflappable woman. After all, at
the presentation of her OBE in 2012, she
and the Queen chatted merrily about a
mutual love of Liverpool, where Little
had twice performed for the monarch.
For Little, such doubts are anathema
– how else could she have so resolutely
changed the path of her life and career,
and even more importantly, made such a
success of it?
Tasmin Little
A world of difference
Little on today’s performers
‘When I was a young musician,
performing a concert was a single,
distinct event – after the moment,
it was gone, and nobody would ever
hear it again,’ says Little. ‘Nowadays,
so much is broadcast and people
make surreptitious recordings on
their phones and share them online.
So, in a way, every note is under the
microscope. I think that can be quite
challenging for young musicians.
‘But on the other hand, the
advantage of today’s technology is
the wealth of amazing information
that is so easily accessible. The library
that we have online now is inspiring.
When I was younger, I would go to a
shop, choose a record and listen in
the booth for a certain amount of time
to check if I liked at least some of it
before buying. But now you can listen
to anything, and it’s fantastic. And you
don’t even have to hire an expensive
publicist anymore, as you can be your
own promoter. I remember when I
made my debut in New York, I threw
an awful lot of money at a publicist in
the US, and I’ve got no idea whether
she did anything at all!
‘So, nowadays you can be in control
of your life so much more, but that
does bring its own pressures. How
you choose to allow yourself to be
seen must be considered. You’ve
got to think about who you are and
whether in 50 years’ time you want to
look back on that and be proud of it.
Or whether you want your children or
grandchildren to see it and be proud.’
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 35
 Master of keys:
Boris Ord with his
collection of mechanical
toys; (opposite) King’s
College Chapel

36 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


Boris Ord was music director at King’s College, Cambridge from
1929 to 1957, but his contribution is often overlooked. It’s about
WLPHbZHJDYHKLPWKHUHFRJQLWLRQKHGHVHUYHVZULWHV Andrew Green
T
he profile of the Choir of King’s
College, Cambridge in terms of media,
recordings and international touring
shot ahead in the period from 1957-74,
when David Willcocks was director of music. Yet
when do we hear anything much of Willcocks’s
predecessor, Boris Ord? No excuses for that.
Many of those who sang under him remain
around to bear witness to his clearly remarkable
talents. Robin Morrish, who sang for both Ord
and Willcocks as a choral scholar, reckons that
‘David Willcocks was first class, but he didn’t
have Boris’s genius’.
Morrish sought a place in the King’s choir
precisely because of the magic transmitted over
the Christmas Eve airwaves. ‘At home we’d settle
down for the Nine Lessons and Carols, waiting in
silence for the first notes of Once in Royal David’s
City. King’s under Boris was the tops.’
Multiple cathedral organist and still an
in-demand choir trainer at the age of 89, Barry
Rose recalls attending Ord’s services at King’s.
‘I thought, “This is heaven.” Two recordings of
ANTONY BARRINGTON BROWN/KING’S COLLEGE ARCHIVE, GETTY
King’s under Boris represent everything one
could want to achieve in choral singing – the
carol The Infant King and Orlando Gibbons’s
Almighty and everlasting God. The music is
always at the service of the words.’
Ord was born in Bristol in 1897 and (his
mother being German) christened ‘Bernhard’
– ‘Boris’ was a nickname reflecting, apparently,
his adult passion for Musorgsky’s opera Boris
Godunov. He studied organ at the Royal College
of Music either side of World War I, during
Boris Ord
which he served in the Royal Flying Corps. Ord’s
connection to Cambridge began with an organ
scholarship to Corpus Christi College in 1920,
after which he became embedded in the city’s
musical life. He was appointed organist of King’s
College Chapel in 1929, succeeding AH ‘Daddy’
Mann, whose period in office began in 1876.
The live BBC radio broadcasts of the Christmas
Eve service began under Mann in 1928. They
resumed in 1930, after his death, as Ord was
finding his feet, and remain a yearly fixture.
Mann deserves far more recognition for his
own work in modernising King’s and its sound.
‘Boris Ord then elevated things to the level of
perfection,’ suggests Colin Brownlee, creator
of the online Archive of Recorded Church Music.
‘The breadth of expression was a revelation. Ord
could unleash his trebles to soaring heights or
Ord could bring them down to a spine-tingling pianissimo.’
Surviving choristers and choral scholars
unleash his convey a sense of mystification as to just how
Ord delivered that ‘perfection’. Sure, Ord was
trebles to soaring fanatical about tuning. He hated individual
heights or bring voices standing out. Copies were meticulously
marked up. But it was much more than all
them down to a that. ‘Boris communicated by having this very
powerful presence,’ one-time choral scholar
spine-tingling Nicholas Steinitz recalls, ‘rather like the
pianissimo conductor Otto Klemperer. In practices he didn’t
say anything much – you just knew 100 per cent
what you had to do. There was no overt attempt
to create a particular sound. It was just there.’
‘When it came to the service or performance
itself, Boris had the Midas touch,’ adds
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 37
Boris Ord
Record of a lifetime
Albums from Ord’s career
English Church Music:
Favourite Christmas Carols
A great taster, mixing the
Christmas music for which
King’s is famed and samples
of the Tudor repertoire close
to Boris Ord’s heart.
Testament SKU: SBT1121 (CD)
Tudor Church Music
Orlando Gibbons
Includes favourites Hosannah
to the Son of David and O
Clap Your Hands.
Argo RG80 (LP and streaming)
Evensong
The main body of a King’s
College Evensong including
a range of composers from
ages past and the British
music renaissance in the
20th century.
Belart 461 4532 (CD, download
and streaming)
A Festival of Lessons
and Carols
Recording made in December
1954 in a special session.
Traditional repertoire in
the main.
Argo RG39 (LP, download via The
Digital Gramophone Ltd or view
on YouTube)
Music for Three and Four
Harpsichords (Bach, Vivaldi)
Ord the orchestral conductor,
directing four distinguished
keyboard players and the Pro
Arte Orchestra.
Angel Records 45022
(LP and streaming)
The England of Elizabeth
British Transport Films
documentary featuring the
Choir of King’s College,
Cambridge and Boris Ord.
Available free via the website of
British Film Institute: https://
player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-
england-of-elizabeth-1957-online
38 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Morrish. ‘The music was somehow
transformed. He knew exactly how
to use the acoustic properties of the
chapel, generally setting relatively
slow speeds.’
However, as demonstrated in
the 1954 BBC film of A Festival of
Lessons and Carols, Ord made only
the most minimal of gestures when
directing in services. ‘Boris’s way of
beating was far better than you see
now in cathedrals, with directors of
music waving their hands around
energetically,’ reckons Keith Ross,
another Ord chorister. ‘It’s just not necessary.’
‘In this undemonstrative way Boris freed us
to express ourselves,’ adds Robert Hammersley,
likewise one of Ord’s choristers. ‘That meant
real drama could be instilled into a piece.’
Much stemmed from the mature colour of the
choral scholars’ voices, a good few of whom
had done National Service. And little was more
colourful than Ord’s way with psalm-singing.
Here, tempos quickened markedly. ‘You never
heard the psalms sung Boris’s way anywhere
else,’ reckons one-time choral scholar (and later
a government minister) Michael Mates. ‘It was
the sense of flow, the speech-inflected pointing,
the theatricality.’ Adds Peter Bingham, ‘It was
magical when Boris accompanied the psalms
on the organ. His extemporisations and ear
for registration were amazing. He might play
just a melody above us – high up, on a flute
stop. Wonderful!’
Ord’s near obsession with psalm-singing is
exemplified by a story told by then chorister
Leader of the pack:
Boris Ord with King’s
choristers, 1956; (below)
chorister Richard White
Richard White. ‘Boris became so
irritated with a woman singing
along – badly! – to one psalm that
he told her to “Shut up!” After the
service the woman confronted Boris
about his behaviour: “Dr Ord, I’m
sorry I annoyed you, but this is God’s
House.” To which Boris apparently
replied, “No, it’s not. It’s King’s
College Chapel!”’
The exploitation of the King’s
‘brand’ was under way in Ord’s day. A
four-country continental tour in 1936
was followed by trips to Switzerland
in the 1950s. The one in 1952 remains vivid
in Ross’s memory: ‘Venues were packed out –
they hadn’t heard anything like this, ever. The
reviews were very special.’
A small clutch of 1950s commercial recordings
conveys the calibre of the King’s choir under Ord
(see box out, left). Ross nonetheless reckons that
‘Boris didn’t really like making LPs. He felt that
people wanting to hear the choir should come to
a chapel service.’ Having said that, Ord agreed
to the choir singing in British Transport Films
(BTF) documentaries. In one the choir brings
alive The England of Elizabeth with snippets
of Ord’s beloved Tudor music. Hammersley
recalls another BTF documentary which at
one point ‘showed a train chugging through the
countryside while we – somewhat incongruously
– sang Thomas Weelkes’s anthem Alleluia, I
heard a voice.’
There were many radio broadcasts of King’s
services, of course, but also of concerts in the
chapel. Mates recalls singing in a Bach St John
 Read all about it: Ord photographed in the garden by
David Willcocks in the 1950s; (below) former government
minister and Ord-era chorister Michael Mates

Passion, with Ord conducting the Philharmonia

Orchestra. ‘I vividly remember Boris being so
moved by the singing of Peter Pears that the tears
simply streamed down his face. We knew he was
an emotional man but also felt he suppressed
that side of himself.’
Ord insisted every service in the chapel had
equal significance. ‘So I don’t remember any
extra rehearsals for the Festival of Nine Lessons
and Carols,’ says Christopher Keyte, one of
many King’s choral scholars to later enjoy a
professional singing career. ‘We were completely
aware of the worldwide interest in the broadcasts
of the service, but we just took it in our stride.’ In
fact, says White, ‘we basically sang traditional
carols that weren’t difficult to prepare. Things
changed under Boris’s successors, with
Stephen Cleobury in particular bringing in
commissioned carols.’
Twentieth-century repertoire nonetheless
firmly had its place under Ord. And a now
ubiquitous carol of his own emerged in the
1950s – Adam lay ybounden. However, says
Hammersley, ‘Boris insisted the Lessons and
Carols service booklet attributed it to “an
anonymous 20th-century composer”.’
Surprisingly, Ord possessed an ugly, growly
singing voice (‘like an angry bumblebee’ recalls
then chorister Alan Philpott). This stars in
one universal memory from the Nine Lessons
and Carols service. ‘Boris always growled – 1954 of the production of Vaughan Williams’s
indecipherably! – the first three notes of Once The Pilgrim’s Progress which so impressed the
in Royal David’s City to cue the boy singing the composer. Even more a tragedy, then, that what
solo,’ ex-chorister Paul Bridge remembers. you see described as a ‘degenerative illness’
‘Thankfully, the organ scholar improvising forced Ord to retire early, in 1957. He had
beforehand was sure to finish in the right key!’ struggled for some time, as Bingham recalls:
Ord chorister John Marks’s keenest memories ‘Boris couldn’t control the finger with which
of those Christmas services is simply the look of he directed the choir, so we watched his face
the chapel. ‘Back in those days the lighting was instead. We tried to make the music so beautiful
very poor – just candles in the stalls and on the that there’d be tears in his eyes.’ ‘There was
walls. But, of course, that made the Nine Lessons always this feeling that you wanted to do your
and Carols more Christmassy, so atmospheric.’ best for Boris,’ adds Philpott.
Yes, the perfectionist Ord was a demanding Ord continued to inhabit the environs of
taskmaster, but most singers experienced his King’s College, eventually wheelchair bound. A
generous, even humorous, alter ego. Afternoon His style of CBE was granted in 1958. After he died, just after
tea was bought for choral scholars across the road conducting was Christmas in 1961, his ashes were interred in the
SIR DAVID WILLCOCKS/KING’S COLLEGE ARCHIVES, GETTY

in The Copper Kettle. As for choristers, Richard
Podger remembers how ‘at Christmas everyone’s
favourite party to go to was Boris’s. That was
because we were allowed to play with his large
collection of mechanical toys!’
Ord had a musical life away from King’s
– witness, for example, his distinguished
keyboard continuo playing or his long-lasting
conductorship of the Cambridge University
Musical Society which included his direction in
chapel. A memorial service there was ‘absolutely
undemonstrative, packed out’, remembers Marks. ‘So many choral
scholars came back to sing that choristers were
but Boris freed shipped in from Eton to balance them.’
us to express ‘Boris’s successors have owed him so much,’ is
White’s verdict. ‘Without him, King’s wouldn’t
ourselves with have risen to the status they were able to build
on.’ Ord’s singers owe a similar debt. Says Robert
real drama Hammersley: ‘Boris impressed upon me a way of
looking at music which has lasted a lifetime.’

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 39

FIFTEEN OF NOTE
15 Christmas Music Essentials
It’s time to make a few notes, please, as Jeremy Pound sets out
his musical must-have list for the festive season that lies ahead
ILLUSTRATION: DAVID LYTTLETON
D
id you know that this month
marks 50 years since Slade
released ‘Merry Christmas
Everybody’, instantly carving
their own little place in our collective
festive psyches? Half a century on, the song
that singer Noddy Holder has referred to as
his ‘pension scheme’ remains a mainstay
on the radio and in shops, pubs and parties
from the beginning of December onwards
– so much so that some say Christmas
wouldn’t be Christmas if it wasn’t there.
However, much as we at BBC Music enjoy
joining Noddy and crew in a raucous
sing-along about hanging stockings on the
wall and fairies keeping Santa sober for a
day, we crave more musical satisfaction
at Christmas than just that. A lot more.
So, what ear-tickling treats could we as
classical music lovers not imagine the
festive season without? Here are our 15
Christmas Music Essentials…
1 O come now…
Though the Advent season runs for
around four weeks up to Christmas Eve,
Advent music’s moment in the limelight
tends to get squeezed into the space of
just a few days. A shame, as the themes of
darkness to light and the coming of Christ
and have inspired some gems over the
centuries – from the likes of Byrd’s Ecce
virgo concipiet (1605) to James MacMillan’s
contemporary Advent Antiphon – while
big-boned hymns such as O come, O
come, Emmanuel and Lo! He comes with
clouds descending stir the soul like few
others. So, set the season in motion by
40 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
heading to an Advent carol service near
you or, alternatively, tune into the annual
Radio 3 broadcast from St John’s College,
Cambridge on 3 December.
2 Get a Handel on it
Performances of the Messiah pop up
all over the place over the festive period,
from local choral societies to the world’s
great orchestras and choirs. Don’t be the
pedant who points out that only a third-
or-so of Handel’s oratorio actually has
anything to do with Christmas; do join
in the enjoyment of ‘For unto us a child is
born’, the Hallelujah chorus and all.
3 A bit of wrap music
At some point, you’ll probably need
to sit down and wrap presents. By its very
nature, this is a solitary occupation, so you
can indulge yourself by listening to your
own favourite Christmas playlist as you
go. Some like to create a sense of ritual by
playing exactly the same music every year
which, depending on how many times
you find yourself repeating it, has the
added bonus of telling you whether you are
getting slower or quicker at wrapping, or
have bought too many or too few presents
and so on.
4 So sweet of you
Christmas trees, midnight battles
with the Mouse King, waltzing flowers
and a reindeer-drawn sleigh – what’s not to
like? Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker
continues to work its charms even on those
of us who have racked up more decades
than we like to admit. Best of all would
be to immerse oneself in the magic of the
Land of Sweets in a live show, though
tickets, if you can get hold of them at all,
rarely come cheap. So, an evening in front
of a performance on screen or simply
listening to the music it probably is, then.
It’s still wonderful.
5 Merry organs
‘The playing of the merry organ, sweet
singing in the choir’ goes the refrain in
The Holly and the Ivy. We pretty much take
singing for granted at Christmas but what
about the organ? Heading into a cold, dark
church or chapel in the depths of winter to
practise can be a tough ask, so it’s only fair
we repay the organists with some quality
listening time. Hardcore enthusiasts like
to plunge in to the mysteries and thrills
of Messiaen’s nine-movement La Nativité
du Seigneur, but there are smaller-scale
marvels aplenty out there for those dipping
just a toe into the festive organ water. For
instance, JS Bach’s In dulci jubilo BWV 729
chorale prelude is a classic end-of-carol-
service spirit lifter, while Brahms’s Es ist
ein Ros entsprungen is the very model of
reflective calm.
6 High and mighty
Talking of sweet singing in the
choir, what would Christmas be without
descants? Though they do occasionally
crop up at other times of the year, it’s
during carol services that we can most
expect to hear these added top lines
floating ethereally above the main
Fifteen Christmas music essentials

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 41

Fifteen Christmas music essentials
tune in the final verse of a hymn. Quite
often, clever-clogs choirmasters like to
write their own new descants and then
show them off on the big occasion, but one
or two of the more established ones have
become almost as familiar as the hymns
they adorn. Probably the best known is
David Willcocks’s for the ‘Sing, Choirs of
Angels’ verse of O Come, All Ye Faithful.
It’s so popular, in fact, that – especially at
Midnight Mass after a few sherries – much
of the congregation gives up chugging
away along their allotted line and joins in
with it instead, thus slightly defeating the
whole purpose.
7 Totally streetwise
Not all carol-singers are the same.
Some are part of immaculately honed
outfits who serenade passers-by on street
corners with delightful four-part harmony.
And at the other end of the spectrum, there
are the rowdy mobs who head house-to-
house belting out any old gumph in the
hope of earning a few quid. To be fair, it’s
the latter group who are probably closer
to the tradition’s centuries-old origins,
when groups of ‘wassailers’ headed out on
Twelfth Night either to a local orchard or
round town, getting steadily merrier on
mulled cider. By all accounts, they were
not very melodious.
8 Bah! Humbug!
As we reach the half-way stage in
our list, let’s not forget to include those
who thoroughly dislike Christmas music
and make a point each year of saying so.
They will almost certainly not be reading
this feature, but if they are, we can only
apologise for its inclusion.
9 Pop goes the opera singer
Most of us like to let our hair down
and have a little fun at Christmas. For
classical musicians, doing just that very
often seems to involve performing stuff
that lies way outside their usual territory –
jazz, easy listening and, notoriously, pop.
Head onto YouTube and you’ll find all
sorts of unlikely but enjoyable mash-ups
of ‘I wish it could be Christmas every day’,
‘All I want for Christmas is you’ and the
like, but the prize pudding surely goes to
Bulgarian mezzo Vesselina Kasarova and
her operatic friends for their version of
42 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Indulge yourself by
listening to your own
favourite Christmas
playlist as you wrap
Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ with the Vienna
Philharmonic in 2014. Go on, Google it.
10 Lake to the party
Heading in the other direction was
Greg Lake who, as one third of prog rockers
Emerson, Lake and Palmer, regularly
liked to incorporate all manner of classical
music in his group’s songs. Make sure you
play Lake’s solo 1975 hit ‘I believe in Father
Christmas’ whenever you are among
friends, as it gives you the opportunity to
inform everyone that the catchy little tune
between verses is in fact the Troika from
Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé.
11 You really Auty know…
Actually, you can also do a similar
trick with The Snowman, the much-loved
animated film from 1982. The score by
Howard Blake is every bit as gorgeous as
Raymond Briggs’s book on which the fim
is based, but when you hear the famous
‘Walking in the air’, do make sure that you
point out to everyone else watching that
the treble singing it is not Aled Jones, as is
commonly believed, but Peter Auty.
12 A touch of brass
In the minds of greetings card
designers, the lead up to Christmas is a
time of picturesque frosty mornings and
skating care-free on frozen lakes. Alas, for
many of us the mundane reality involves
trudging gloomily in the rain to work,
and then trudging gloomily in the rain
back again several hours later. Thank
heavens, then, for brass bands playing
festive music. Whether you hear them
in a nearby shopping centre as you walk
past or, indeed, on a station platform as
you wait for the delayed 6.35 to grind into
view, there’s something so uplifting about
hearing these talented types braving the
wretched weather to bring us all some
much-needed seasonal cheer. Most are
doing so for charity, so dig deep if you can.
13 Heavenly Holst
We’re nearly there now. Work is
finished, the tree’s looking lovely and a
favourite armchair, glass (OK, bottle) of
red and some quality ‘me time’ beckons.
For music, how about beginning with the
seasonal medley that is the Fantasia on
Christmas Carols by the yuletide-loving
Vaughan Williams? You may then want to
follow it with the similar Christmas Day by
his good friend Holst. And relax.
14 King’s for a day
Regular readers of BBC Music
Magazine will already be well aware of
our fondness for the annual Festival of
Nine Lessons and Carols from the Chapel
of King’s College, Cambridge. And if so,
you’ll probably also already know the drill:
Christmas Eve, 3pm, BBC Radio 4. Cue
Once in Royal David’s City…
15 On the pull
Finally, when (or, indeed, if) you
buy your crackers for the Christmas
dinner table, why settle for just a paper hat,
joke and plastic toy when you can have
those ones that come with a natty set of
whistles, horns or bells, plus festive tunes
you can play together? After a prosecco
or several, you may well start convincing
yourself that you sound really rather
good, and that maybe 2024 will be the
year to resume those oboe lessons you
abandoned way back when. Or possibly
not. Whatever… Happy Christmas!
RUTTER
ORCHESTRAL
CAROLS
Britten Sinfonia
Available 24 November
Stream | Download
Daniel Hyde kingscollegerecordings.com

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Candlelight Concerts
Guidinglights
In recent years, the Candlelight Concerts brand has
become a phenomenon, helped in no small part by
social media. Rebecca Franks finds out more
I
t was a few years ago now, back in 2020,
that I first noticed my Instagram feed
filling up with eye-catching images of
dark churches filled with seas of glowing
candles. They were adverts promising an
evening of Chopin’s piano music or Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons, although no musicians’ names
were given. At first, as it was the height of the
pandemic (albeit between lockdowns), I’ll
confess I thought it was a scam. But then I saw
posts from friends who had actually been and
loved them. What’s more, it was often people
who had never been particularly interested
in classical music before. Three years later,
and I’m still getting lots of candlelit adverts.
And, according to Fever, the company behind
Candlelight Concerts, the series is now in over
100 cities around the world and has had more
than three million attendees. It’s a success story
that few people in the classical music world are
talking about.
In a bid to find out more about the Candlelight
Concerts phenomenon, I recently joined an
audience in All Saints Church in Bristol for an
evening of Hans Zimmer’s music, played by a
string quartet from the local Bristol Ensemble.
The musicians were raised up on a platform,
in front of which were hundreds of candles
– perhaps not quite as many as in some of the
most dramatic publicity images, but a sizeable
number nonetheless. Up close it was clear they
were LED-powered rather than flickering live
FEVER, GETTY
flames. Their warm glow created a welcoming
atmosphere. The pews were packed, and the
44 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
evening was a sell-out. Over the next hour,
the musicians played extracts from Zimmer’s
soundtracks, with spoken introductions and
interludes. The concert was exactly as the adverts
promise: an enjoyable hour of music played in
an atmospheric setting. ‘It was amazing,’ one
concertgoer, Caleb, told me afterwards. ‘It’s been
many years since I’ve come and seen something
like this.’
In an age when ‘reaching new audiences’ has
become a mantra for many arts organisations,
Candlelight Concerts has found something
Glow with the flow:
‘The candles create the Siegfried Quintet
performs The Four
Seasons in Milan, 2021
this enchanting
magical ambience’
of a winning formula. Several years ago, its
parent company, Fever – a global entertainment
platform, founded in Spain in 2011, which now
offers tickets for everything from puppy yoga
to zombie pub crawls, bottomless brunches to
bingo nights – noticed a gap in the market. ‘How
Fever works is that we use data in order to create
original experiences for people based on what
they’re already interested in,’ explains Arielle
Hutchinson, a project manager for Candlelight
Brighton. ‘Our marketplace already had other
events, some of which involved classical music.
We saw there was an appetite for it.’ The team
set out to create an accessible concert format,
marketed to a younger audience. It launched

in Madrid in 2019, then rapidly expanded
internationally (despite the pandemic) in the rest
of Spain, the US and the UK.
Candlelight Concerts became a brand. Its
ingredients were simple: pick an unusual venue
(not a traditional concert hall) in a city; select
one of its single-composer programmes; hire
local musicians; fill the place with LED candles.
‘We like venues that are culturally significant:
monumental churches, cathedrals and
museums. Bringing new audiences into these
venues is important for us,’ says Hutchinson.
‘And the approach is that we support local artists
too.’ A group of curators employed by Fever
works to set up the concerts and find the right
musicians. Anecdotally, it seems to be hitting
the mark. ‘This setting was very fitting,’ another
concertgoer, Amelia, tells me in All Saints, much
of which was rebuilt after the Second World War
and has unusual painted glass windows by John
Piper. Venues in London include Southwark
Cathedral and Sea Life; elsewhere across the UK,
audiences can hear music in the Royal Pavilion
Pillars of the community:
accessible concerts open
up venues such as Ateneu
Comercial do Porto in Portugal
in Brighton, Ripon and Chester cathedrals, and
Titanic Belfast.
And, of course, the candles are crucial. ‘They
create this enchanting, magical ambience,’ says
Hutchinson. ‘It’s very social media friendly.
People want to take pictures with the candles
to post on Instagram.’ Amelia is a case in point.
‘To be honest, the concerts always pop up on my
Instagram. It’s my birthday on Monday so that’s
why we’re here,’ she says. Take a scroll through
Instagram and TikTok, and there are countless
posts tagged by satisfied customers, often
going for a date night, anniversary, birthday
or celebration: ‘What an amazing experience’;
‘Unforgettable evening’; ‘Family night out
on the town!’; ‘Beautiful performance by the
Havenwood Quartet playing Vivaldi The
Four Seasons’.
I’m willing to bet there will be many people
who dislike the thought of a concert being
boiled down to being good social media content,
but it also feels like a savvy move to embrace
a powerful marketing tool. On Instagram,
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 45
Candlelight Concerts
André Rieu: waltzing to the bank
A wider appeal
Classical music for all
BBC Proms
The first BBC Proms season,
‘Mr Robert Newman’s
Promenade Concerts’,
took place in 1895.
Masterminded by Newman
and conducted by Henry
Wood, the concerts were
designed to widen and
‘improve’ public taste.
André Rieu
‘My dream is to make the
whole of classical music
accessible for everyone,’
writes the Dutch violinist and
conductor, whose concert
extravaganzas with his own
Johann Strauss Orchestra
are regular sell-outs. He’s
been dubbed ‘King of Waltz’
for his programmes, which
feature elaborate costumes
– and, of course, waltzes.
Raymond Gubbay
In 1989 the British
impresario put on ‘Classical
Spectacular’, a show that
went on to become a
staple at the Royal Albert
Hall, played by the Royal
Philharmonic Orchestra.
The Multi-Story Orchestra
‘We perform in car parks.’
Back in 2011, this USP
made the ensemble stand
out. The brainchild of
composer Kate Whitley and
conductor Christopher Stark,
The Multi-Story Orchestra
can now often be found at
Bold Tendencies – a car-
JULIE LIMONT/FEVER, GETTY
park-turned-arts-venue – in
Peckham. ‘Our goal is to
create ways that orchestral
music can be inclusive and
accessible for everyone.’
46 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
The light fantastic:
concerts often feature
ballet, such as this
event at the Théâtre-
Mogador in Paris, 2021
Candlelight Concerts has 1.3m followers, while
on TikTok the number is at 379,500. As Richard
Morrison wrote in his column in this magazine
(September 2023), ‘The real prize is to be noticed
by people in the fourth ring [of marketing music]:
the general public. Why? Because there are
millions of them … At its best, social media has a
colossal power to reach millions, cutting through
the usual boundaries of cost, geography and
cultural barriers that stop people entering the
concert hall.’
Plus, the musical aspect hasn’t been
forgotten, says Amanda Turchiari Boucault, a
spokesperson for Fever. ‘All the arrangements
are newly created for string quartet or piano and
violin. We’ve made Christmas movies and a
Nutcracker one too. This is a way to democratise
access to classical music.’
Browse the Candlelight Concerts event listings
on Fever’s website, and it soon becomes clear
that the definition of ‘classical music’ is, with the
best will, fairly broad. Vivaldi and Chopin are
still on the menu, along with nights at the opera
and Viennese spectaculars – but so are Taylor
Swift, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran. ‘That’s how we
started, right, doing those core composers like
Vivaldi and Chopin. And we’re still doing that,’
says Hutchinson. ‘But we’ve been able to branch
out to do contemporary music as well and I
think our call will always be to do a bit of both.’
The ‘classical’ aspect here, she argues, is the use
of classical instruments to play pop music as
well as the concert format. And it’s true there is
a wider fashion recently for classical covers of
contemporary pop songs, sparked by the music
for the hit Netflix show Bridgerton. Back in 2021,
the Vitamin String Quartet, which featured on
the soundtrack, reported a 350 per cent increase
in the number of people streaming its music.
Candlelight Concerts is unlikely to be for
regular concertgoers. Wigmore Hall can breathe
easy. The performance I heard was enjoyable
but not exceptional. And its story has not run
entirely smoothly. At All Saints Church, another
audience member, Fabian, explains to me
that while he enjoyed the concert, right at the
back of the church he couldn’t see the candles
and the music was rather quiet. Amid all the
positive social media posts, there’s also the odd
disgruntled or amused concertgoer who found
that reality didn’t live up to expectation, most
often when a concert had started before nightfall
and there was light flooding through the
windows, making the candlelight redundant.
But, rather like André Rieu carving out a
niche for himself as King of Waltz, and the (now
retired) impresario Raymond Gubbay attracting
mass audiences for his Classical Spectaculars,
Candlelight Concerts has found a space in the
market. Most of Fever’s concerts have tickets
starting round the £20 mark, going up to £45-
£50 for ‘premium’ tickets, so they are no cheaper
than many concert halls – but its popularity
continues to grow. And its ambitions are global.
‘In Mexico, we’re launching a Día de los Muertos
(Day of the Dead) concert with music specific to
this country, and we’ve just launched an iconic
Arabic music programme, which has been really
successful in Dubai. The data is not only to see
what people are interested in, what’s selling
better, but also to adapt locally to each audience’s
preferences,’ says Boucault. ‘The idea was to
make classical music more accessible to younger
audiences, and we’ve seen that’s happened.’
 Signed, sealed, serious:
Charles ‘Charlie’ Chaplin
prepares fans for a change
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in direction; (opposite)
a poster for the recent
centenary screening

48 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


Settling the score
Charlie Chaplin’s film A Woman of Paris has
a complicated musical past – now a new score,
orchestrated by Timothy Brock, is available for its
100th anniversary, as Femke Colborne reports
I
t was the roaring twenties when Charlie
Chaplin’s first serious drama, A Woman
of Paris, had its premiere in Los Angeles.
The women wore pearls and flapper
dresses, the men crisp suits and Panama hats
as they strolled along the bustling pavements
of Hollywood in its golden age. Chaplin had
a string of comedy triumphs behind him,
including Easy Street (1917), The Immigrant (1917)
and The Kid (1921), and the stage was set for his
ambitious next project.
But things did not go quite to plan. Though
it was a hit with the critics, A Woman of Paris
left audiences in Los Angeles
feeling somewhat bemused
on its 1923 debut. They had
expected another comedy, a film
with Chaplin as the star, and
instead they got a rather dark
drama where he appears only
in a cameo role. Chaplin had,
to some extent, anticipated this
response and arranged for flyers
to be distributed at the premiere
to warn the audience that
this work diverged somewhat
from his previous films. But
he was still stung by the cool
reception. Although the film
eventually made a decent profit,
it was not nearly as popular as
his comedies.
A Woman of Paris
Chaplin put the setback behind him and
went on to make comedy greats such as City
Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936) and The Great
Dictator (1940), but he never gave up on
A Woman of Paris. In 1976, just a year before his
death, he reissued an edited version of the film
with a new musical score that turned out to be
the last work he would ever complete.
Chaplin, who was not a trained musician
but composed the music for his films with the
help of professional arrangers, had never been
happy with scores for A Woman of Paris before
composing his own. Working with Chaplin,
Louis F Gottschalk compiled two different
scores in 1923. The second was later revised by
composer Fritz Stahlberg, but Chaplin remained
unconvinced. Even the 1976 version, composed
with Eric James, had shortcomings – Chaplin’s
health was deteriorating at the time and he was
able to contribute only a handful of new ideas.
However, as the film’s 100th anniversary
approached this year, a plan was hatched for
another new score. This time, Timothy Brock,
the US composer who has been working with
the Chaplin family for many years to restore
the director’s film scores, was commissioned to
create a completely new soundtrack based on
previously unheard Chaplin compositions, as
well as the 1976 score. This new soundtrack was
used in a remastered version of A Woman of Paris
that received its world premiere at the Berlinale
film festival in February.
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 49
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According to Brock, the 1976 score drew
heavily on music Chaplin had written for his
comedies. But a darker, more serious work
required a different approach. ‘The music
sounds a lot like the music from The Kid,’ he
says. ‘It’s quite simple, quite nostalgic, quite
sentimental. But it’s such a different film,
because it’s heavy and dark, so the music was
not quite as effective as it should have been.
The 1976 score is essentially a nostalgic view of
1920s light comedy music. And it is the wrong
kind of approach.’
Much of the music for Brock’s new score
comes from previously unheard home and
studio recordings that were transferred to CD in
2003. These recordings are of Chaplin trying out
musical ideas on the piano – mostly music that
he was composing for Limelight, his only other
serious drama. In fact, Chaplin had composed so
much music for Limelight that plenty had been
left out of the final cut. So Brock decided to
use the discarded parts to create a new score
for A Woman of Paris.
‘The idea was to use Chaplin’s music, and
hopefully a lot that people had not heard before.
To use all the other music for his only other
drama, Limelight, just seemed to make sense,’
ROY EXPORT CO. LTD, GETTY, NICOLA VINCENZO RINALDI
he says. ‘If somebody had commissioned a new
score from me for that film, I would have done it
differently. But I didn’t want the score to sound
anything like me.’
At the film’s climax, where protagonist Jean
is loading a gun and about to shoot himself,
Brock decided to use music with a rich string
sound reminiscent of Chaplin’s soundtrack
to City Lights – the gold standard in terms
A Woman of Paris
Sax appeal:
Chaplin plays on the
A Woman of Paris set;
(left) City Lights is the gold
standard when it comes to
the Chaplin sound; (below)
composer Timothy Brock
of a ‘Chaplinesque’ sound, according to the
composer: ‘He tended to write a lot of ethereal
string music, especially from the 1940s onwards,
and I wanted to achieve the same effect there.
There was a passage where Chaplin played on
the piano – very slow music that reminded me a
great deal of City Lights.’
In another iconic scene, the character Marie
attends a debauched party where the guests
are treated to a rather scandalous burlesque
performance by one of the female guests – one of
the few moments of humour in the film. ‘There,
I tried to create an Arabian burlesque type of
Chaplin’s music sound,’ Brock says.
Though he taught himself the violin and
has a humanistic cello, Chaplin never had any formal music
lessons. He played the violin left-handed, with
quality – it’s very the strings and bridge reversed. He was unable
melody driven, to read music and described the process of
composing as ‘la-la-ing’ to the composers he
but with odd worked with. Perhaps for this reason, Chaplin’s
music has a ‘humanistic quality’, Brock says. ‘It
rhythms. He is very melody driven, but with odd rhythms.
makes a lot of He makes a lot of time signature changes, too,
but he probably didn’t realise it, because he just
time-signature played what he thought sounded right and got
somebody to write it down.’ For the same reason,
changes, too his music is also often in rather odd chromatic
minor keys.
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 51
A Woman of Paris

Pair of Charlies: Marie and Pierre

Breaking the mould

A film of firsts
A Woman of Paris follows
the fortunes of star-crossed
lovers Jean and Marie, who
want to leave their parents
in rural France and elope to
Paris. In a cruel twist of fate,
Marie is forced to get on the
train without her beau and
ends up in Paris alone. She
quickly becomes swept up
in a life of glitz and glamour,
and begins having an
affair with the city’s richest
bachelor, Pierre. Months
later, she encounters Jean
by chance, and he proposes
to her. She accepts, but
Jean’s mother disavows
their love because of Marie’s
debauched reputation, and
so she leaves him. Jean
is devastated, with fatal
consequences.
If the story itself
was unremarkable, the
characters broke with all the
stereotypes of the day: the
heroine had questionable
morals, the villain was
charming and considerate,
and the hero was weak-
willed and under the thumb
of his mother.
But most revolutionary
was the acting style. Chaplin
worked to achieve an acting
style more understated –
and yet more expressive
– than the screen had seen.
So, for example, when a
girlfriend maliciously shows
Marie a magazine report
of her lover’s intended
marriage, her shock and
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Other comedians from the same era, such
as Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or Laurel and
Hardy, tended to use somewhat comical music in
a bid to enhance the humour in their work. ‘It has
a sort of coo-coo approach,’ Brock says. ‘That is
definitely not what Chaplin had. Chaplin’s music
is not particularly funny. The humour in his
work is strictly visual, and the music is what it is.
It complements the humour but doesn’t try to be
funny in its own right.’
‘The humour in
Chaplin’s work is
strictly visual – the
music is what it is’
Before he began working in film, Chaplin
worked as a comedian on stage with the Fred
Karno Company. ‘The music he wanted
to accompany him on stage was elegant,
sophisticated music that would counteract the
humour,’ Brock says. ‘I think he did the same
thing musically in his own films. City Lights has
a very traditional and unfunny score, but with a
lot of pathos.’
The score was recorded with an exact
duplication of the forces used for City Lights, with
Undress to impress:
Paulette (Malvina Polo)
unravels in A Woman of
Paris’s burlesque scene
percussion, harp, piano (celesta) and strings.
Only the original banjo was substituted with
an accordion.
At the first rehearsal, Brock turned up with a
suitcase full of mutes that modern brass players
no longer use. ‘It’s my job to get the orchestra to
sound like it’s playing 100 years ago,’ he says. ‘It’s
a unique Hollywood sound – in many ways, it’s
a period performance.’ That means an intense,
burnished vibrato in the strings, particularly the
violins; the brass always playing with vibrato;
the saxophones playing with a jaw vibrato where
they have to bite down on the mouthpiece; a
Musser M55 vibraphone or older; and drums
with real skin, tuned lower than usual.
Brock watched A Woman of Paris for the first
time almost 25 years ago, not long after he had
started working with the Chaplin family. ‘I
remember turning down the sound after half an
hour, because I thought, “this is not helping”,’ he
says. ‘I thought the film was beautiful and very
profound, but I always had a problem with the
music.’ He hopes his score will help bring new
life to work that, despite its initial lacklustre
reception, was hailed by German film director
Ernst Lubitsch as ‘a great step forward’ and went
on to have a significant influence on the next
generation of filmmakers.
A Woman of Paris – with the new soundtrack – is
now available in France, distributed by Potemkine

agitation is expressed only just 29 players: flute (piccolo), oboe (cor anglais), Films and mk2 Films: https://bit.ly/46vR0sB.
by the nervous way she three clarinets, three saxophones, bassoon, two The Criterion Collection will announce UK and
stubs out her cigarette. horns, three trumpets, two trombones, tuba, US release dates in due course.

52 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE

 THE KIRKER MUSIC FESTIVAL ON LAKE COMO
A SIX NIGHT HOLIDAY | 21 APRIL 2024
We will be returning to the romantic and beautiful shores of Lake Como for another Kirker
Music Festival at the lakeside Hotel Imperiale in Moltrasio. The low-arching mountains
encircle the lake forming a dramatic and mysterious backdrop which has inspired
writers, poets and composers for centuries. Goethe’s Mignon spent her life yearning to
be back in the beautiful place where the citrus trees blossom, Cosimo Liszt was born
in Bellagio and Vincenzo Bellini spent much time in Moltrasio meeting his mistress, the
opera singer Giuditta Pasta, in Torno across the lake. A statue of him reclining languidly
and gazing over to Torno seems to sum up the romantic spirit. Hotel Imperiale
The music programme will be provided by one of Italy’s leading ensembles, the Indaco String Quartet, pianist Tim Horton, and
violist and composer Simon Rowland-Jones, who will gives five concerts including works by Mozart, Haydn and Puccini.We stay
at the 4* Grand Hotel Imperiale in Moltrasio, which has a lakeside terrace, garden and a spa with an indoor plunge pool. during
the day we include a series of excursions, with highlights including a private boat to the Villa Balbianello and its beautiful garden,
a tour of Bellagio, and a special visit to the Villa Medici Giulini, where Fernanda Giulini introduces her collection of historic
keyboard instruments. Tim Horton will give a recital in the lovely Teatrino here. We will also make a visit to a private villa in Velate
to see the landscaped park full of fine specimen shrubs and trees, and there will be free time to explore the lake using the ferries
that stop very close to the hotel.
Price from £3,598 (single supp. £690) which includes return flights, six nights’ accommodation with breakfast,
three dinners, three lunches and five concerts
Speak to an expert:
020 7593 2284
www.kirkerholidays.com

Death in Venice
Britten

Così fan tutte

Mozart

Spring 2024 Season

24 February – 11 May
Touring to Caerdydd | Cardiff, Llandudno,
Southampton, Oxford, Bristol, Birmingham

WNO productions are generously supported by

Book now wno.org.uk/operas Colwinston Charitable Trust
New WNO productions and commissions are supported
Rhif Elusen Gofrestredig | Registered Charity No 221538
by the John Ellerman Foundation
Roger Désormière
A steady hand
The venerable French conductor Roger Désormière
died 60 years ago, in October 1963. Roger Nichols
recalls a musician of impeccable timing and taste
T
he month of January 1933 might well
qualify as what the Chinese proverb
calls ‘an interesting time’. On the 1st,
Japan rejected the non-aggression
pact signed with the USSR the previous July;
on the 10th, martial law was imposed in Spain
as a Communist revolt spread in the southern
provinces; and on the 30th, Adolf Hitler became
Chancellor of Germany. If nothing quite so
disruptive happened that month in Paris (an
attempted coup d’état had to wait until February
1934), on the musical front there was at least a
modicum of anxiety about one, long-awaited
first performance.
Ravel had completed his Piano Concerto
for the Left Hand, commissioned by Paul
Wittgenstein, a brother of the philosopher, in
1930, but the world premiere did not take place
until 5 January 1932, while the Paris premiere
was booked for 17 January 1933. An all-Ravel
concert was to be conducted by its organiser
Roger Désormière with the exception of the
concerto, which Ravel decided to conduct
himself. It would have been difficult to argue
with a musician of Ravel’s standing, but there
were doubts. It was known by now that a brain
disease, which would lead to the composer’s
death nearly five years later, was already making
itself felt, added to which there was the question
of his conducting credentials. The first waltz
ROGER-VIOLLET/ARENAPAL, GETTY
in his Valses nobles et sentimentales contains
interplay between bars of 3/4 and 6/8, which he
insisted must be accentuated. But when someone
asked him how he conducted the orchestral
version, he said, ‘Oh, I just go round and round’.
So, it was decided that Désormière (or Déso as
54 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
he was generally known) would rehearse the
Orchestre symphonique de Paris, hopefully
bringing it to such a pitch of perfection that even
Ravel couldn’t discombobulate it. And, despite a
less than perfect contribution from the pianist,
the performance was a success. So, who was this
conducting paragon?
He was born in Vichy on 13 September 1898.
For musicians born in the French provinces luck,
or the lack of it, played a large part. Back in the
mid-19th century, Berlioz had rude things to say
When asked how to
conduct the waltz,
Ravel said, ‘I just go
round and round’
about the musical life in many of them, and, in
some, nothing had changed in those 50 years.
Vichy, though, was an exception. As a spa, it
attracted the nobility and the rich, notably to the
Grand Casino, a splendid theatre holding 1,400
people. In that year of 1898, open from May to
October, it boasted an orchestra conducted by
Jules Danbé from the Opéra Comique in Paris.
The repertoire was of the best: Faust, Carmen,
Werther, Manon, Samson et Dalila etc, and the
city described itself with some justice as ‘the
summer capital of music’. The young Déso began
his musical life by taking flute lessons from the
orchestra’s principal flautist Georges Laurent,
who went on to take the same position in the
Boston Symphony Orchestra, and from 1912
 Perfect score: (clockwise from far left) Roger
‘Déso’ Désormière; Ravel, whose music
Désormière championed; the critic Henri
Sauguet, one of the conductor’s close friends

Déso could see as conductor the flute

professor at the Paris Conservatoire,
Philippe Gaubert, whose flute class
he entered when he moved to Paris in
1914. He also studied conducting with
composer Vincent d’Indy in a class
where discipline was surprisingly loose,
but where he no doubt learned the basics,
and, like so many young musicians, took
private lessons in counterpoint and fugue
from Charles Koechlin.
After seeing action in the army from
1917, in 1920 he began in a small way his
career as a conductor, but his name began
to be mentioned in 1923 when he joined Henri
Sauguet and three other young men to form,
under Milhaud’s aegis, the group of composers
known as the École d’Arcueil: the name was
taken from the district of Paris where Satie lived,
the joke being that Satie had no intention of
forming a school of any kind, being determined
to go his own way. This group really marked
the end of Déso’s ambition to be a composer,
although he went on to write from time to time,
including eight film scores in the 1930s and ’40s.
According to one of these friends, the Déso
of those days ‘imposed quite naturally thanks
to his charisma’, and ‘had the figure of a young
page, almost too pretty, and was a brilliant hit
with the ladies’. He was small and not therefore
one of those conductors who sweep you along by
their sheer energy and commanding presence.
Sauguet added that he could be ‘impertinent
and inhuman, as well as sure of himself’ and,
much later, that Déso was the only man who’d
ever made him cry, when they disagreed over
a piece by Sauguet that Déso was rehearsing.
Nonetheless, Sauguet was to remain one of
Déso’s closest friends until the latter’s death.
But Déso’s real arrival in the limelight came
with the performance on 25 October 1923 by
the Ballets suédois of Milhaud’s La Création
du Monde, for many of us one of his outright
masterpieces. Both of the group’s usual
conductors being otherwise engaged, the task
was entrusted to the 25-year-old Déso. After the
second performance, Milhaud wrote to a friend,
‘Yesterday it all went well. Koussevitzky, who
was with me, absolutely bowled over (emballé)
by Déso. The press is unspeakable. I’m jubilant.’
Any conductor, who, at 25, can bowl over
Koussevitzky is surely going places. And the next
place he went to was the Ballets Russes, between
1925 and Diaghilev’s death in ’29. In those five
years he conducted premieres of some of the
most interesting ballets of the 20th century:

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 55

Roger Désormière
Master sounds
Déso on disc
Debussy Pelléas et Mélisande
Déso’s recording of
Debussy’s Pelléas et
Mélisande has been available
without a break since it
appeared in 1942. Toscanini
called it ‘unequalled’.
Pristine Classical PACO063
Debussy La Mer
In October 1950, Déso
recorded Debussy’s La Mer
with the Czech Philharmonic
Orchestra, described by
Sviatoslav Richter as the best
recording of anything, ever.
Supraphon LPM-14
Poulenc Les Biches
In June 1951, John Culshaw
was the producer for Déso’s
recording of Poulenc’s Les
Biches. Poulenc wrote of it,
‘His recording captures the
whole flavour of it in all its
cynical freshness.’
Eloquence 484 0416
Delibes Coppélia and Sylvia
In February 1950, Déso
recorded Delibes’s two
ballets Coppélia and Sylvia,
which have been praised
as ‘unsurpassed for their
rhythmic sensibility and
for their mastery of style’.
Eloquence 484 0416
Messiaen
Trois petites Liturgies de la
Présence divine
On 21 April 1945, Déso
conducted the premiere of
Messiaen’s Trois petites
Liturgies de la Présence
ROGER-VIOLLET/ARENAPAL, GETTY
divine and, according to the
composer, was ‘marvellous,
unforgettable’. The critics,
however, ‘emptied their
dustbins over my head’.
Dante Lys 310
56 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Musical resistance: Parade of
the Front national du spectacle
during a Paris 1944 event to
commemorate the victims of
Nazism – Jean-Paul Sartre is on
the left, Désormière behind the
woman in the black hat
Satie’s Jack-in-the-Box, Prokofiev’s Le Pas d’Acier,
Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète and, just three
months before Diaghilev’s death, Prokofiev’s Le
Fils prodigue.
The 1930s and ’40s saw him not only writing
and conducting for films, but working with
orchestras outside Paris, including Monte
Carlo, La Scala and Covent Garden. But much
of his energy during the German occupation
was as a ‘résistant’, fed by his early espousal of
communism, from which he never deviated.
He was a moving spirit in the Front national
des musiciens, where he was joined by Henri
Dutilleux, Charles Munch, Francis Poulenc,
Georges Auric and many others, and an
anonymous anti-Nazi manifesto doing the Paris
rounds in 1941 may have been partly his work.
After the war, he replaced Henri Büsser as
music director of Radio France, and from here
on his distinctly curious taste in music was
accentuated: namely, that he favoured early
French music (that is, pre-Bach) and modern
music – not just Messiaen (he conducted the
very loudly contested premiere of Turangalîla in
Aix in 1950, at which Poulenc and Auric almost
came to blows), but Shostakovich (he conducted
the French premiere of the ‘Leningrad’
Symphony) and Boulez. When he left Radio
France in October 1944 to become music
director of the Opéra, his second-in-command
Henry Barraud took over, and they organised
between them the first performance of Boulez’s
Soleil des eaux in 1950. As well as favouring early
and modern music, the most noticeable facet
of Déso’s taste is that he never recorded any
German music – none, from Bach to Hindemith.
We must make of that what we can…
Every now and then in the early 1950s, Déso
would complain of being unusually tired. But
advice to take things more easily fell on deaf
ears, even though in 1946 doubts had already
been expressed as to his stamina. In March
1952, again against friendly advice, he went to
give a series of concerts in Italy, driving his own
car with his wife Colette next to him, and the
composer Goffredo Petrassi in the back. On
8 March, on the outskirts of Rome, he stopped
at a red light. But when it turned green, he
found he couldn’t move: a stroke had attacked
his left hemisphere, paralysing him down the
right side and rendering him unable to speak.
Petrassi, whose native Italian must have
been invaluable in the terrible aftermath of this
disaster, reported on the 26th that Déso was
recovering, but this proved to be either wishful
thinking or just a temporary improvement,
because for months after this the only word
he could say was ‘Non’. He did eventually
regain some speech, he could write very
laboriously with his left hand and his musical
gifts were unimpaired: he could still react to
wrong notes and what he considered wrong
tempos. But there was never any thought of him
conducting again. He lived for another 11 years,
dying from lung cancer on 25 October 1963.
Nevertheless, the impact of his conducting
lived for another 50 years, incarnate, despite
the lack of a baton, in Pierre Boulez, who
inherited his dislike of flashy conductors –
in Déso’s words ‘good dancers who put on a
dance routine’ – and who absorbed Déso’s
prescription for conducting that ‘The goal to
aim at is extreme sobriety, the gradual shedding
of everything superfluous.’
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MUSICAL DESTINATIONS

Bergen Norway
With an acclaimed local orchestra, music is everywhere in this city –
and its most famous composer is never far away, finds Jeremy Pound

Mass appeal:
Lise Davidsen and Edward
Gardner perform Verdi’s
Requiem with the Bergen
Philharmonic Orchestra

B
efore he raises his baton for Verdi’s
Requiem, Edward Gardner,
chief conductor of the Bergen
Philharmonic Orchestra, is keen to point
out the number of gifted schoolchildren
who are performing at the Grieghallen this
evening, not just in the vast chorus at the
back of the stage, but also playing alongside
the professionals in the orchestral seats, no
less. ‘Not bad for a city with a population
smaller than Northampton!’ he enthuses.
Half of me is impressed that so many of
this Norwegian audience seem to know
where Northampton is; another part wants
to leap to the East Midlands town’s defence
– with composers such as Malcolm Arnold
and Edmund Rubbra among its famous
sons, it is no musical desert.
But then, Bergen can see Northampton’s
Arnold and Rubbra and raise it Edvard
Grieg. Norway’s most famous composer
was born here in 1843, died here in 1907
and spent the majority of his life and career
here, including two years as music director
of the Bergen Philharmonic in the early
1880s. You’ll find cultural references to
him everywhere you go, including Gunnar
Torvund’s sculpture in the university
district and two life-size statues by
Ingebrigt Vik: one in the central Byparken;
another outside Troldhaugen (Troll Hill),
Grieg’s home for the last 22 years of his life
and today a museum dedicated to him.
And yes, they are life-size: Grieg stood at
just under five foot (1.52m) tall.
Home to Grieg’s Steinway grand among
various other artefacts, Troldhaugen,
located on a hillside a few minutes’ drive
from the city centre, is not just a museum

58 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


Standing small: (above) Ingebrigt Vik’s life-size
statue of Grieg in Bergen’s Byparken; (right)
Troldhaugen, the composer’s home; (below) the
Grieghalle, named after the city’s iconic export
– since its centenary in 1985, it has also
been home to the adjacent Troldsalen
concert hall. Performers and listeners
alike enthuse about this chamber venue’s
excellent acoustic, but it is the location
that really sets it apart. Directly behind
the stage are large windows that provide
the 200-or-so seats with a view of Grieg’s
composing hut further down the garden
and, beyond that, Nordåsvannet bay. It
is stunning.
Similarly exquisite is the mastery
displayed on that stage by Nobuyuki Tsujii,
who during my visit treats us to Beethoven,
Liszt and, of course, Grieg. The Japanese
pianist is here for two performances at the
Bergen International Festival, of which
the Bergen Phil’s Verdi Requiem is also
a part. Taking place in late May to early
June each year, the festival is the highlight
of Bergen’s musical calendar, comprising
classical and folk music concerts big and
small, as well as all manner of fringe
and free events – I find myself happily
whiling away an hour or so listening to
the superlative Rong Brass entertain
passers-by on the harbourside. The big-
name soloists in the Verdi, including tenor
Freddie De Tommaso and Norwegian
SYNNE SOFI BAARDSDATTER BOENES, ALAMY
soprano superstar Lise Davidsen, are
indicative of a festival that likes to set the
bar high. However, local heroes – from
Verdi-singing schoolchildren to pianist
Leif Ove Andsnes, born in nearby Karmøy
and graduating here in Bergen itself – are
also an essential part of the mix.
Musical life here isn’t limited to the
festival. One of Europe’s oldest symphony
orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic,
performs a regular season at the 1,500-
seat Grieghallen, its well-appointed 1970s
home that, from above, is shaped like a
grand piano. The same venue also hosts
You’ll find cultural
references to Grieg
everywhere you
wander in Bergen
Bergen National Opera (though there is
talk of a new bespoke opera house being
built, finances permitting) and chamber
concerts continue throughout the year
at the Troldsalen and elsewhere. In
August, the Grieg in Bergen festival at the
13th-century Håkonshallen – directed
MUSICAL DESTINATIONS
Nurtured by nature:
Sæverud and his
wife Marie lived
in out-of-town Bergen
Local Hero
Harald Sæverud
Like Grieg, composer and conductor
Harald Sæverud was both born (in
1897) and died (in 1992) in Bergen.
Over his long life, he wrote a large
number of works – often doleful, but
rarely dull and, as conductor John
Barbirolli once observed, always
distinctive – including incidental
music for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, nine
symphonies and a handful of
concertos. Siljustøl, his woodland
house in Ytrebygda, has been
preserved as a museum, complete
with grand piano and studio.
by violinist Michael Süssmann since the
inaugural concert in 1993 – does pretty
much what it says on the tin.
Do, though, leave plenty of time to
explore. A short ride on the funicular up
to Mount Fløyen gives fantastic views
of the city and its glorious west coast
surroundings (the inspiration for Disney’s
2013 hit Frozen) plus some peaceful
woodland trails. And once you’re back
down, a wander around takes in the
statues of violinist Ole Bull (elegant) and
playwright Henrik Ibsen (scary), while
the Rasmus Meyer Collection in the Kode
Museums is a fine way to learn about
artist Edvard Munch beyond The Scream.
I also take a short walk up to the small,
but perfectly formed, Bergen Aquarium.
There, as well as admiring sealions and
crocodiles, I am delighted to learn that one
of the penguins (‘pingvin’ in Norwegian)
is called Ping Floyd. Music really is
everywhere here.
Further info: fib.no; harmonien.no
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 59
 Composer of the month
Composer of the Week
is broadcast on Radio 3
at 12pm, Monday to
Friday. Programmes in December are:
27 November – 1 December Rorem
4-8 December Christmas in the
Middle Ages
11-15 December Humperdinck
18-22 December
A Vaughan Williams Christmas
25-29 December Greatest Showstoppers
Herrmann’s style
Unusual combos Herrmann was a
great experimenter, eschewing the
orchestral norms for films as he saw
fit. He employed, for example, 12
flutes for the opening of Citizen Kane
(1941, poster pictured below), two
theremins and electric bass for The
Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), nine
harps for Beneath the 12-Mile Reef
(1953) and five organs for Journey to
the Center of the Earth (1959).
Ostinatos You don’t find so many
melodies in Herrmann’s music, the
composer tending towards brief motifs
and repeating patterns to create
drama and energy, often underlining
the more psychological aspects of the
characters for which he is writing.
Falling to nowhere Herrmann has
a way of drawing the listener in by
regularly utilising series of descending
notes (sometimes with a concurrent
set of rising ones). This somewhat
hypnotic device is altogether
unnerving as they generally go
nowhere, ever-spiralling downwards.
The ‘Madhouse’ motif A favourite
device was an ominous three-note
motif first appearing in his 1935
Sinfonietta, which
itself inspired a portion
of his 1960 Psycho
score (where it plays a
notable role). He also
uses it at the end of
both his Moby Dick
cantata and his final
film score, Taxi Driver.
John Williams paid
tribute to Herrmann
by adding the motif
into his 1977 score for
GETTY
Star Wars.
Bernard Herrmann
This complex and irascible man was plagued
by frustration, but remains one of cinema’s
most iconic musical voices, says Michael Beek
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
A
young woman steps into a motel
shower; she smiles, the water
seemingly washing away her sins
– she stole a lot of money, but has decided
to return it. Beyond the shower curtain the
door opens and a dark figure approaches
slowly before ripping back the curtain;
with it comes a torrent of shrieking strings,
the musicians’ slashes and stabs working
in unison with those of the faceless, knife-
wielding maniac. When it’s done, as the
sounds of the cellos ebb away, so too does
the woman’s life.
Marion Crane’s demise at the hands
of (spoiler alert) Norman Bates is one
of the most famous scenes in cinema
For Welles’s film he created an orchestral
atmosphere and textures unheard on screen
history. But this shocking moment from
early in director Alfred Hitchock’s 1960
masterpiece Psycho could have been very
different. Hitchcock didn’t want music
in the scene, but composer Bernard
Herrmann felt he knew better (as he often
did) and wrote some anyway. Herrmann
was almost 20 years into his film career
by this point, so knew his craft; Hitchcock
was quickly convinced, but they wouldn’t
always see eye to eye, famously going their
separate ways a few years later.
Herrmann’s first music for the big screen
was as groundbreaking as the film it was
written for: Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane
(1941). He had composed and conducted
music for Welles’s famous ‘Mercury
Theatre on Air’ at CBS Radio in New
York, including the now infamous 1938
War of the Worlds episode that sent many
listening Americans into a spin thinking
the East Coast was under attack. Much of
Herrmann’s work for radio has been lost,
but it was a fertile training ground for a
film composer, requiring the writing and
conducting of a lot of narrative music week
after week. Ingenuity was the order of the
day, and that would serve Herrmann’s
vision of what a film score could, and
should, do. For Welles’s film he created
an orchestral atmosphere and textures
hitherto unheard on screen, deployed as
a series of short, transitionary cues and
utilising a bespoke palette of sounds where
required – as opposed to writing for the
standard symphony orchestra that was, by
then, the sound of Hollywood.
The son of a New York optometrist,
Herrmann played violin and piano as
a child and his passion (obsession) for
literature and music resulted in something
of an encycopaedic knowledge – thus
musical studies at Juilliard and NYU (the
former especially) proved to be something
of an annoying formality. Herrmann cast
himself as a sophisticate, never happier
than when sharing his knowledge and
opinions with others. He was famously
outspoken, his musical genius matched
only by his general tactlessness, fiery
temper and desire for perfection. He
was passionate to a fault and his own
worst enemy when it came to forming
relationships (professional and personal).
Herrmann’s dream of being a composer-
conductor didn’t take long to be realised;
following his early exploits with Copland’s
‘Young Composers’ group and first
COMPOSER OF THE MONTH

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 61

COMPOSER OF THE MONTH
steps onto the podium with his New
Chamber Orchestra, he found himself
working at CBS as an assistant to the
station’s music director, Johnny Green
(who would himself end up a Hollywood
legend). Though he had written, and
continued to write, concert pieces – such as
his first published work, 1935’s Sinfonietta
– Herrmann’s innate sense for drama
meant he was a perfect fit for composing
radio scores. The job also saw him conduct,
arrange and curate programmes and he
enjoyed a long tenure during the 1930s
and ’40s, one which would see him
become the CBS Symphony Orchestra’s
music director. Having an orchestra at his
disposal and a somewhat captive audience
at home meant Herrmann not only had
an outlet for his own music, but a means
to share his passion for new music. As
such, his American radio (and concert)
audiences heard a wealth of works by
homegrown composers such as Ives, and
music from across the Atlantic by the likes
of Vaughan Williams, Bax and Finzi. They
were all heroes to Herrmann, and he met
or got to know them all.
Herrmann’s love of England ran
deep and he made a first visit as a guest
conductor in 1937, followed by a second in
1946 – at the invitation of John Barbirolli,
with whom Herrmann had struck up an
unlikely friendship while the conductor
was with the New York Philharmonic.
The trip saw him conduct two concerts
with the Hallé in Manchester and one
GETTY
with the BBC Symphony in London for a
62 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
‘Klaatu barada nikto’:
1951’s The Day The Earth
Stood Still featured an
innovative score
Home Service
broadcast; he
also took the
opportunity
to soak up the atmosphere of Brontë
country and walk the Yorkshire
moors, the setting of his in-progress
opera of Wuthering Heights. That
work would occupy a large amount of
his time in the 1940s, the composer
obsessing over its creation in much
the same way that he had gone about
Herrmann considered
his opera of Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights the
best work of his career
setting Moby Dick in 1937/38. Herrmann’s
cantata based on Melville’s man-versus-
nature epic saw him living and breathing
the world of the novel as he adapted it
(with co-librettist Clark Harrington).
Melville and Brontë’s obsessive characters
and bleak landscapes suited Herrmann’s
melodramatic flair in the same way
Welles and Hitchcock’s did; Herrmann
matched them with his own idiosyncratic
emotional heft, brooding darkness and
moments of great beauty.
Despite the success of Citizen Kane and
his Oscar-winning score that same year
for All That Money Can Buy (aka The Devil
and Daniel Webster), Herrmann only
actually composed
seven complete
scores in the
1940s – including
1943’s Jane Eyre
and 1947’s The
Ghost and Mrs
Muir (the latter
incorporating his
main love theme
from the then-
unfinished opera). It’s almost as if he was
holding out to see which way his career
was going to go, travelling back and forth
to Los Angeles but maintaining his role at
CBS in New York, composing a handful of
concert works (including The Fantasticks
and For the Fallen) and holding out for
higher-profile conducting opportunities.
Whether it was the influx of European
talent due to the war with Germany, or
the fact that Herrmann usually ended up
on the wrong side of just about anyone he
worked with, he just wasn’t in demand in
the concert hall. It was a personal blow.
The 1950s saw Herrmann embrace
life as a film (and eventually television)
composer, moving to Los Angeles and
overseeing the music for 23 films that
decade. His opera, Wuthering Heights,
was finally completed in 1951 and he
considered it his very best work, though it
wouldn’t ever be staged in its original form
and was only recorded in full over a decade
later at the composer’s own expense. That
same year, he scored Robert Wise’s The
Day The Earth Stood Still, crafting typically
From radio roots to the final curtain: (far left)
Herrmann (with pipe) with members of the CBS
Radio ‘Columbia Workshop’; (left) Wuthering
Heights and Taxi Driver remain highlights
forward-thinking music for the sci-fi
thriller. While considered something of a
New York interloper during his first 1940s
forays into Hollywood music-making, in
the ’50s Herrmann settled into his role as
an innovative film composer with a truly
distinctive voice. 1955’s The Trouble With
Harry was his first film with Hitchcock;
they made magic on screen with the
likes of The Man Who Knew Too Much,
The Wrong Man, Vertigo and North by
Northwest in the second half of the ’50s.
He also found a fine niche as a fantasy
composer, scoring Columbia’s The Seventh
Voyage of Sinbad and Journey to the Center
of the Earth, followed in the 1960s by The
Three Worlds of Gulliver, Mysterious Island
and Jason and the Argonauts.
The ’60s began creatively with
Psycho, and personally with a partial
relocation to London in 1961. The move
became permanent in 1964 when his
second marriage broke down; this
was soon followed by the breakdown
of the Hitchcock partnership – the
director threw out Herrmann’s music
for 1966’s Torn Curtain (which would be
scored instead by John Addison) and
the composer became disillusioned by
Hollywood’s growing penchant for ‘pop’.
Life in London with a home beside
Regent’s Park suited Herrmann well
and gave him the chance to live out his
fantasy of becoming an English gent –
he joined the exclusive Savile Club and
walked his beloved dogs in the park.
The move profligated a second wind as
a conductor, Herrmann finding himself
before the London Symphony, London
Philharmonic, BBC Northern, Hallé and
Philharmonia orchestras for concerts and
broadcasts throughout the decade and into
the 1970s, not to mention a steady stream
of recordings of his own and others’ music.
The period also saw a return to composing
for the concert hall, not to mention a third
marriage and something of a cinema
renaissance thanks to collaborations
with bright young directors like François
Truffaut, Brian de Palma and Martin
Scorsese. Herrmann had received Oscar
nominations for his first two film scores,
so it was a fitting bookend that, after
his death in 1975, he was posthumously
nominated for his last two: De Palma’s
Obsession and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
HERRMANN Life&Times
1911
LIFE: Bernard Herrmann is born, known
affectionately as ‘Benny’, on 29 June in
New York. His father Abraham fosters his
love of music as a child and encourages
him to learn the violin.
TIMES: The first ever Indianapolis 500
motor race takes place, watched by
a crowd of 80,000. It is won by Ray
Harroun, driving a Marmon ‘Wasp’.
1933
LIFE: He co-founds and conducts 1941
the New Chamber Orchestra, which LIFE: In the same year,
focuses its attention on rarely heard Herrmann’s scores for
and contemporary music, not least his the films Citizen Kane
own and that of his peers. and The Devil and
TIMES: Following his inauguration in Daniel Webster (aka All
That Money Can Buy)
March, President Franklin D Roosevelt
are both nominated for
delivers a ‘New Deal’ to ease longterm
ecomonic hardship; this includes Academy Awards. It is
much-needed banking reform and all the latter that wins him
manner of relief programmes. his only Oscar.
TIMES: In December,
1948
LIFE: He and his wife Lucille Fletcher,
The Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service
attacks the US Navy at Pearl Harbor,
Hawaii, causing extensive losses. The
event draws the US into World War II.
the screenwriter and librettist of his
opera Wuthering
Heights, divorce
over his affair with
her cousin Lucy,
whom he marries the
following year.
TIMES: US president
Harry Truman signs
the European Recovery Program,
better known as the Marshall Plan,
which over four years will transfer
$17 billion in aid to 16 countries.
1975
LIFE: He dies in his sleep in a 1960
Hollywood hotel on 24 December, a LIFE: Scored solely for string ensemble
day after the recording for Taxi Driver, and including the famous shower scene,
his final film score, is completed. his music for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
wins widespread acclaim but is not even
TIMES: Communist forces
capture Saigon, bringing the nominated for an Oscar.
20-year Vietnam War to an end TIMES: Actor Clark Gable, star of Gone
and leading to the evacuation with the Wind and an Academy
of large numbers of South Award winner for It Happened
Vietnamese, Americans and One Night, dies of a heart attack
other foreign nationals. in Hollywood, aged 59.
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 63
 Building a library
Benjamin Britten
A Ceremony of Carols
Clare Stevens enjoys the finest recordings of a Christmas masterpiece
that came into this world in quite the most unlikely of circumstances
The composer
Britten was yet to turn 30 when he
began work on his A Ceremony of
Carols. However, as a notably early
starter, he already had plenty in the
bag. During his stay in the US from
1939-42 he composed important
works such as the Sinfonia da
Requiem and Les Illuminations, while
his return to Britain would be followed
by a veritable flurry of masterpieces:
in 1943, Peter Pears and Dennis
Brain gave the premiere of his
Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings,
while 1945 brought his Purcell-
inspired The Young Person’s Guide
to the Orchestra and, perhaps most
importantly, the opera Peter Grimes.
Building a Library
is broadcast on Radio 3
at 9.30am each Saturday
as part of Record Review. A highlights
podcast is available on BBC Sounds.
64 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
The work
Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols vividly
evokes the spirit of a traditional Christmas.
So vividly, in fact, that it comes as a
surprise to discover that it was inspired as
much by serendipity as by the composer’s
creative imagination, and that the initial
draft was made not in the depths of winter
but in early spring 1942, and under the
most difficult of circumstances.
Britten and his partner Peter Pears
were on their way back to England after
three years in the US and Canada, having
originally left the UK in frustration at
the lack of enthusiasm for Britten’s music
in his native country. On the outbreak
Britten’s Ceremony demands to be sung ‘with
all the vigour of a dormitory pillow fight’
of World War II they had tried to return
immediately, but their applications for
visas were delayed. Eventually they set off,
on a Swedish cargo vessel called the MS
Axel Johnson. After leaving New York it
called in at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the
passengers were allowed some time ashore.
Browsing in a bookshop, Britten picked
up a copy of The English Galaxy of Shorter
Poems, edited by Gerald Bullett; poems
from the anthology formed the basis of a
carol sequence written, as he later said, to
alleviate the boredom of the voyage.
‘Boring’ is probably not the word
most people would use to describe a
transatlantic crossing in which they were
running the gauntlet of German U-boats.
The ship’s funnel caught fire and they
were separated from their convoy. Pears
described the ‘miserable’ discomfort of
their cabin, situated ‘very near the huge
provisions Ice box … the smell & heat
were intolerable, & … people seemed to
whistle up and down the corridor all day’.
Despite these distractions, Britten was
able to complete the first draft of what
would become one of his most famous and
successful works.
The other element of serendipity
was that his reading material for the
voyage included two harp manuals,
intended to help him compose a concerto
for Edna Phillips, principal harpist
of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The
concerto never materialised, but the
manuals inspired the unusual harp
accompaniment of A Ceremony of Carols
and the beautiful solo interlude that forms
the centrepiece of the work. It is based on
the plainsong ‘Hodie Christus natus est’,
taken from the Magnificat Antiphon for
the second Vespers of the Nativity, which
Britten added on his return home to open
and close his new work.
The first version of A Ceremony of
Carols was premiered in Norwich Castle
on 5 December 1942. The women’s voices
of the Fleet Street Choir of London were
conducted by TB Lawrence, and the
harpist was Gwendolen Mason. The same
forces gave the London premiere a few
days later in one of the National Gallery’s
lunchtime concerts and also the first
broadcast, on 25 January 1943, on the
BBC Home Service.

During the summer of 1943, Britten
made a final revision of the score ready
for publication, adding another carol
(‘That yongë child’) and writing a piano
accompaniment for use in the absence of
a harp. He had originally conceived the
work for children’s voices in three equal
parts, with two soloists, and this intention
was confirmed by a series of performances
by 35 boys from the Morriston School
in Swansea which the composer himself
conducted that December.
He also oversaw a Decca recording
by the Morriston boys, conducted by
their director Ivor Sims. ‘I think the little
boys were enchanting – the occasional
roughness was easily overweighed by
their freshness and naivety – something
very special,’ he wrote to his patron Mary
Behrend. However, Britten was nothing if
not pragmatic, and he was evidently happy
to endorse Julius Harrison’s arrangement
of the Ceremony for sopranos, altos,
tenors and basses, commissioned by his
publishers Boosey & Hawkes.
The completed work consists of eleven
GETTY
short, characterful movements, with texts
Welcome home: Britten with Peter Pears, 1940s
in a mixture of Latin and archaic English.
Several of those texts are anonymous;
‘Balulalow’ is by James, John and Robert
Wedderburn; ‘This little babe’ and ‘In
Freezing Winter Night’ are by Robert
Southwell; and ‘Spring Carol’ is by
William Cornish.
BUILDING A LIBRARY
Winter wonderland:
Britten’s Ceremony combines
solemnity with the hurly-
burly of the playground
Some commentators believe the title
refers to the ceremonial aspect of the
processional and recessional movements,
where the ‘Alleluia’ added by Britten to the
plainsong theme can be repeated ad lib for
as long as it takes for the singers to get on
and off their performance ‘stage’. However,
in his Benjamin Britten: A Biography (1992),
Humphrey Carpenter sees the sequence as
a ‘ceremony of innocence’.
It is, Carpenter reasons, a musical
representation of life before the Fall that
portrays not the traditional Christmas
narrative but aspects of boyhood,
including the hurly-burly of the school
playground in ‘Wolcum Yule’, a child’s
relationship with his mother in ‘That
yongë Child’, ‘Balulalow’ and ‘As dew
in Aprille’, and loss of innocence in ‘In
Freezing Winter Night’. And ‘This little
babe’, he says, demands to be sung ‘with all
the vigour of a dormitory pillow fight’.
Turn the page to discover our
recommended recordings of
Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 65

The best
g Bright, clear and full of passion
recordin
The Choir of Trinity College,
Cambridge
Sally Pryce (harp); Stephen Layton (conductor)
Hyperion CDA67946
The combination of sacred and secular
appeal perhaps explains the enduring
popularity of A Ceremony of Carols and
the enormous number of recordings that
are currently available. Perhaps it is also
a measure of Britten’s skill in writing for
voices that they are all so good.
Immaculate recordings have been made
by the upper voices of many cathedral
and collegiate choirs, youth choirs and
professional ensembles such as The
66 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Harmonious harp:
Sally Pryce proves the
ideal accompanist
Sixteen and Tenebrae, but The Choir of
Trinity College, Cambridge’s is the one
that made the biggest initial impact,
still lingering in my mind after weeks of
listening to different interpretations.
Stephen Layton’s 2007-vintage
undergraduate choir includes a couple
The musical lines are very
distinct and each has real
length, shape and colour
of countertenors and has impressive
vocal strength; the musical lines are very
distinct and each has real length, shape
and colour. Warming up the very bright yet
flexible sound never affects the admirably
precise tuning, and harpist Sally Pryce,
who achieves such gentle, delicate effects
accompanying other choirs, plays quite
differently here to match their power.
Trinity’s outstanding achievement,
however, is their communication of the
Three other
great recordings
Copenhagen Boys
Choir
Though Britten was
present when the
Morriston Boys made
the premiere recording
of the Ceremony, this – recorded at the
Danish Radio Concert Hall, Copenhagen,
ten years later – is the only recording
conducted by the composer himself, and
so is worth listening to on that ground
alone. Some of Britten’s trebles use a lot
of vibrato and the tempo of ‘Balulalow’
is so slow that the soloist can’t easily
get to the end of his lines, but there is a
lot of contrast and drama, and individual
lines in the harp part, played by Enid
Simon, come across particularly clearly.
(Heritage HTGCD232)
The Choir of St John’s
College, Cambridge
Recorded in 1964
under choirmaster
George Guest and
with harpist Marisa
Robles, this vintage recording has a
magical atmosphere, beginning with
a wonderfully dramatic Procession in
which the boy choristers are heard from
a very great distance and get gradually
closer until they seem to be singing
right into the listener’s ear. ‘Balulalow’
is fabulous, with real warmth from the
choir and a fine soloist in Roger Parker.
The audible mix of younger and more
mature treble voices hints at that loss
text, which in the faster movements can
so often become completely incoherent,
sacrificed to musical effect by even the
best of choirs. Not so here – ‘This little
babe’ and ‘Deo gracias’ for example, are
thrilling, with fantastic diction. Layton
takes an unfussy approach to the archaic
vocabulary, ensuring that in every
movement the words are not just clear but
full of meaning.
‘In Freezing Winter Night’ is a real
highlight, wonderfully reflective and
musically chilly. Zoë Brown and Katherine
Watson are superb, beautifully balanced
yet contrasting soprano soloists – Brown’s

of innocence that inflects so much of
Britten’s music. (ARGO 4832434)
Crouch End Festival
Chorus
Forty women’s
voices from this
large North London
chorus recorded this
atmospheric performance released in
2020, with a very small semi-chorus
singing the Procession and Recession.
Condcuted by David Temple, the
choir has a lovely, bright, youthful
sound, especially in ‘This little babe’,
and phrases are beautifully shaped,
particularly in ‘There is no Rose’, which
has a vivid sense of awe. Sally Pryce
gives a gentle, wistful quality to the
harp interlude and accompaniments.
(Signum SIGCO649)
And one to avoid…
I really did have to
dig deep into the
streaming services
to find a version of A
Ceremony of Carols
that I would exclude
from my library, and it would be churlish
not to acknowledge the efforts that the
singers, and especially the soloists,
in this 1997 recording have made to
get to grips with the pronunciation of
the medieval English texts. However,
the awkward combination of The All-
American Boys Chorus and the women’s
voices of the William Hall Master Chorale
has a muddy effect that means this one
gets the wooden spoon.
change of mood in Verse 2 of ‘This Yongë
Child’ is captivating – and the end of
‘Spring Carol’, where the sounds of singers
and harp seem to splinter gently into the
ether, is magical. The recessional ‘Hodie’,
NICK RUTTER, KEVIN LEIGHTON/KING’S COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE
exquisitely shaped and blended as the
choir can be heard to process out of their
college chapel, is simply gorgeous.
Confidence is the hallmark of this
performance; it may lack the innocence
and vulnerability that children’s voices
bring to the piece, but it presents both
text and music with breathtaking clarity,
marvellously captured by Hyperion’s
recording engineers.
Rewarding recordings:
we recommend Britten
and Brahms conducted
by Stephen Cleobury and
(below) Susanne Rohn
Continue the journey…
We suggest five works to explore after Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols
C
omposing
seasonal music
in unlikely places
evidently came
naturally to Britten. Just as
his A Ceremony of Carols
was written on a cargo ship,
his Hymn to the Virgin was
the result of a spell in his
school sickroom in his teens.
Consisting of three verses in
which unaccompanied choir
and a group of soloists
sing antiphonally in Janáček deftly employs the the combination
English and Latin, harp to project an image
the work is a model
of simple, reflective
of blissful serenity
festive calm. (Choir of
King’s College, Cambridge/Stephen Cleobury
Decca 485 2504)
More than 30 years before Britten’s
Ceremony, Holst had turned to female
voices and harp for the Third Group of
his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda. The
words of the four hymns come from the
vedas, the oldest body of Hindu sacred
texts, in translations by the composer,
who studied Sanskrit so he could read
the originals. Touches of orientalism
aside, his setting is imbued with an
otherworldliness that foreshadows the
wordless female chorus heard at the end
of The Planets. (Holst Singers/Hilary Davan
Wetton Hyperion 4880461)
Brahms was not the biggest fan of the
harp, rarely including it in his orchestral
scores. He did, however, write the
delightful Four Songs for Female Chorus,
BUILDING A LIBRARY
Harp and Two Horns, dating
from when he was director of
the Hamburg Women’s Choir
in the 1860s. Including his
only setting of Shakespeare,
the cycle opens with
Ruperti’s ‘The full sound of
harps rings out’. (Chamber
Choir Bad Homburg/Susanne
Rohn Rondeau ROP6045)
In ‘Belvedere’, the third
of Janáček’s Songs of
Hradčany (1922),
of female chorus
and harp is deftly
employed by the
Czech composer to
project an image of blissful serenity. ‘Into
the garden sweetest sounding music
drifts to the lime trees’ silvery buds,’
we are told; ‘she who plucks the strings
of the harp with such feeling, she is a
daughter of Yagiello.’ Don’t settle in too
comfortably, however – heralded by a
solo soprano, a darker, dramatic twist
awaits. (Prague Philharmonic Choir/Josef
Veselka Supraphon SU32952)
But back to all things wintry with
Elgar’s 1895 The Snow, which sets
words by his wife, Alice, for three-part
female chorus, two violins and piano.
On first glance, the subject may seem
romantic but, being British, the Elgars
took a typically down-to-earth view – for
all its beauty, the snow will soon lose its
sparkle and will melt almost as quickly as
it came. (Les Sirènes Nimbus NI6249)
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 67
 Reviews
Recordings and books rated by expert critics
Welcome
Christmas music comes
in all shapes and sizes,
so this issue I’ve tried to
get a bit of everything
in. We kick off with
our usual round-up of
the very best seasonal
offerings, but there’s a festive vein
running throuout these pages. You’ll
find rarefied beauty thanks to the likes
of the Gesualdo Six and St Martin’s
Voices, Christmas oratorios old and new,
classic carols courtesy of King’s and
some magic and sparkle from Voces8
and Phoenix Chorale. There’s even some
peaceful festive piano music and a book
full of carol origin stories.
But it’s not all about Christmas; there’s
stunning Rachmaninov from Steven
Osborne, sumptuous Saint-Saëns
orchestral works from Les Siècles and
unmissable solo turns from guitarist
Sean Shibe and violinist Isabelle Faust.
Michael Beek Reviews editor
This month’s critics
John Allison, Nicholas Anderson, Terry Blain,
Garry Booth, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Geoff Brown,
Michael Church, Christopher Cook, Martin
Cotton, Christopher Dingle, Misha Donat, Jessica
Duchen, Rebecca Franks, George Hall, Alexandra
Hamilton, Malcolm Hayes, Claire Jackson, Erica
Jeal, Berta Joncus, John-Pierre Joyce, Nicholas
Kenyon, Ashutosh Khandekar, Erik Levi, Natasha
Loges, Andrew McGregor, David Nice, Roger
Nichols, Freya Parr, Steph Power, Anthony Pryer,
Paul Riley, Jan Smaczny, Anne Templer, Roger
Thomas, Sarah Urwin Jones, Kate Wakeling,
Alexandra Wilson
KEY TO STAR RATINGS
+++++ Outstanding
++++ Excellent
+++ Good
++ Disappointing
+ Poor
68 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
RECORDING OF THE MONTH
A set of luminous gifts
from The Gesualdo Six
Anthony Pryer finds himself engrossed in
this magical celebration of Epiphany from
Owain Park’s always exquisite vocal sextet
Morning Star
Works by Byrd, Cornelius,
Eccard, Handl, Howells,
Lassus, Manchicourt,
Judith Bingham, Joanna
Marsh, Owain Park, Adrian
Peacock, plus traditional
works (arr. Park)
The Gesualdo Six
Hyperion CDA68404
78:40 mins
The Gesualdo Six was founded
almost ten years ago and
since then it has produced
spectacular concerts around
the globe and a recording every
year since 2018. Their style of
singing – perfectly blended
vocal harmony, exquisite
tuning, inventive phrasing,
delicately poised textural
clarity – provides a magical
accompaniment to the warmth
of the Christmas season.
Perhaps problematically,
they had already produced
an impressive recording of
Christmas pieces in 2019, with
arrangements of some of the
old favourites such as Jingle
Bells, Away in a Manger, In dulci
jubilo etc. The solution? They
have turned instead to the
period just after Christmas (the
Epiphany, 6 January) when the
three wise men presented gifts
to the Christchild and brought
news of him to the world. So
the title of this recording refers
to the star that they followed
rather than a communist
newspaper, though 6 January
also happens to be Christmas
Eve in Russia.
Owain Park has threaded
these pieces together with
balance and ingenuity
by inserting between the
polyphonic works five
plainsongs taken from the Mass
on the Feast of the Epiphany.
Chant performances on
recordings tend to be somewhat
perfunctory and dull, but here
each item is performed with
marvelous attention to both
phrasing, style and message.
The strong Introit reflects the

ICE
CHO
Six wise men:
The Gesualdo Six
always offer perfectly
blended harmonies
coming of the ‘mighty Lord’,
the Gradual sparkles with
luminous joy at the gifts, the
Alleluia evokes praises from
the Three Kings, the darkly
glittering Offertory offers up its
cascading runs like clouds of
incense, and the downwardly
transposed Communion states
simply and quietly the purpose
of the visit of the wise men.
The singers are at their
brilliant best in pieces that
demand gentle, embracing
harmonic blending – for
example in Johannes Eccard’s
Maria wallt zum Heiligtum, in
Howells’s Here is the little door,
and in Mirabile Mysterium
where the Slovenian composer
Handl serves up exotic shifts
of chromatic colouring. Oddly,
ASH MILLS
the early pieces by Byrd,
Lassus and Manchicourt tend
to attract neat but slightly
matter-of-fact performances.
This can be a danger for groups
performing such repertoire.
Early music does not often
provide obvious, goal-directed
harmonic structures, or
patterns of intensity governed
Owain Park has
threaded these pieces
together with balance
and ingenuity
by vivid word setting or
expressive changes of texture.
Nor does it usually display
obvious signposts in the
shaping of forms that would
support our modern preference
for ‘structural listening’.
Consequently some quite
famous modern choral groups
Recording of the Month Reviews
(no names) often produce a
haphazard wash of pleasing
sounds full of effects without
discernible causes. Not so the
Gesualdo Six: in a work such
as Magi Veniunt by Clemens
non Papa they demonstrate
ingeniously and effectively how
to evoke a sense of direction
and climax by judicious
dynamic shading, varied
phrasing, alert patterns of
intensity and a growing sense
of profundity. Other qualities
can be heard in the haunting
atmosphere of Joanna Marsh’s
In Winter’s House, and the
enticing patterns of utterance
in Park’s O Send Out Thy
Light. There are many
engrossing and lovely
musical experiences here.
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++
Performer’s notes
Owain Park
What was your vision in curating
this album selection?
It really came together because of
the concerts we found ourselves
doing just after Christmas. There’s
some beautiful music written for
the Epiphany and the seasons
that follow, so we wanted to
celebrate that. I think the people
who came to our first Epiphany
concerts a few years ago will feel
like they are part of it, because
they will have heard some of this
repertoire as it developed.
Which of the contemporary
pieces stands out for you?
I actually sang at the first
performance of Joanna Marsh’s
piece, in fact even the first
rehearsal of it, and that was a
lovely process. I think it’s one of
her best; it celebrates the voices
of the group, with quite a high
tenor part. She actually took
that out of the score once we’d
rehearsed it for the first time, but
we put it back in; it’s a magical
note and it’s not really within most
singers’ ranges, but if you find a
way to create it, it kind of crowns
the whole thing.
The six of you must have a great
bond after almost ten years?
For sure. We’re on tour at the
moment and having a great time;
it’s such a pleasure to make
music together. Recordings are
interesting, because they’re such
intense patches of work; we had
to record this in September, which
felt very unseasonal!
Is there a pressure to always
deliver a Christmas album?
When we get to this time of year,
everyone wants Christmas CDs,
which is great, but I don’t feel that
we have to keep doing it. That’s
why we focused on the Epiphany-
plus region this time; there’s so
much wonderful repertoire to do.
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 69
 Christmas
Terry Blain has a listen to some of the very best of this year’s seasonal offerings

Christmas round-up from Humperdinck’s opera Hänsel

John Rutter’s name is synonymous
with Christmas, and Orchestral
Carols offers an EP-length selection
of his seasonal
compositions.
There are six
tracks in total
(seven if you
buy from Apple
Music), and three are Rutter
arrangements of popular carols. Of
these, Silent Night is given a dreamily
impressionistic interpretation, with
silken vocalism from the King’s
College Choir. In Rutter’s own All
Bells in Paradise vocal connoisseurs
will relish the immaculately
modulated phrasing of the King’s
trebles, and the easy flow of Daniel
Hyde’s conducting. (King’s College
KGS0069) ++++
Voktett Hannover’s Tidings of
Joy is a first-class example of small-
group a cappella singing. Founded
in 2012, the ensemble has eight
members, who blend mellifluously
together in Mendelssohn’s
‘Im Advent’, the programme
opener. Jan-Åke Hillerud’s ‘Veni,
Emmanuel’ spotlights Voktett’s
adept part-balancing, and its fine-
tuning of interpretations with
discreet dynamic shadings. Hugo
Distler’s ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’
is another highpoint, its poignant
harmonies underpinned by the
singers’ faultless
tuning, while
‘Have Yourself
a Merry Little
Christmas’
is touchingly
schmaltz-free. A richly enjoyable
programme. (Rondeau Production
ROP6220) +++++
Felix Klieser was born without
arms, and plays the French horn
with the toes of his left foot, the
instrument stabilized by a tripod. A
Golden Christmas offers Klieser’s
take on 16 vocal pieces specially
arranged for horn and orchestra,
highlighting the full range of
PETER MARSH/ASHMORE VISUALS
und Gretel Klieser distils a dreamy CHRISTMAS CHOICE
poetry, built on exceptional breath
control and a glowing tonal quality.
The Wiener A heartwarming Noël
Concert-Verein
provides warmly The Armonico Consort casts a spell with these
sympathetic
accompaniments.
intimate performances of fine festive works
(Berlin Classics
0303074BC) ++++
The Norwegian soprano Lise
Davidsen’s ascent to stardom has
been stellar, and she has looked to
Decca stablemates of the past for
inspiration in making her debut
Christmas album. Davidsen’s silky,
palpitating Gounod ‘Ave Maria’
pays tribute to Leontyne Price’s
classic version with Karajan, while
her Silent Night references Kiri Te
Kanawa’s recording. Davidsen also
taps evocatively into her Nordic
heritage. ‘Mitt hjerte alltid vanker’
resonates with the sounds of the
nyckelharpa (a Swedish bowed
instrument),
and Gustav
Nordqvist’s
carol ‘Jul, jul, Delicacy and nuance:
the Armonico Consort
strålande jul’ is is meticulous in its
a Scandinavian seasonal survey
staple. Davidsen’s luscious vocalism
is every bit as pleasurable here as it
is in Strauss or Wagner. (Decca 485
4358) ++++ Noël
The Hispanic influence is Works by Poston, Darke, Jonathan Dove,
strong in Phoenix Chorale’s The Toby Young, John Rutter et al
Christmas Album, the Mexican Armonico Consort
border being just hours away from Signum Classics SIGCD754 53:54 mins
the ensemble’s base in Arizona. Christmas is often treated as a time of
The Catalonian folk songs reveal extroverted celebration, but intimacy
the Chorale’s enviable smoothness is the keynote of Noël, the Armonico
and sumptuosity of tone, some of it Consort’s new seasonal collection. That’s partly because the choir
arguably bought at the expense of has just eleven members, lending an extra delicacy and nuance to
spontaneity and their delivery. The opening O Adonai, by the Consort’s composer-in-
vigour. A slightly residence Toby Young, is a good example, four sopranos weaving
careful quality elegant wisps of melody above a hummed accompaniment. Limpidity
also marks the of texture also distinguishes the Consort’s lambent account of
choir’s approach Elizabeth Poston’s Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, and ensures that Away
to Lassus’s in a Manger (the French traditional setting) has an appropriate tinge
‘Resonet in Laudibus’, although of vulnerability. On Christmas Night in theory requires a heartier, more
their relatively understated style full-voiced treatment, yet here the Consort’s springy attack and crisp
suits Guerrero’s mellifluous

enunciation make an exceptionally fresh impression. Similar qualities

his interpretive talents. Nimble
articulation and liquid trilling
distinguish Klieser’s take on ‘Großer
Herr, o starker König’ from Bach’s
Christmas Oratorio, and his ebullient
Deck the Halls. In the ‘Abendsegen’
‘Beata Dei Genitrix’ well. Best of
all is Cecilia McDowall’s Trinity
Triptych, a Phoenix commission
performed with a winning mixture
of enthusiasm and finesse. (Signum
SIGCD762) ++++
imbue their gleaming performance of Jonathan Dove’s The Star-
Song, the sopranos soaring in the piece’s hyper-charged choruses.
Emily Wenman’s crystalline solo in Darke’s In the Bleak Midwinter
is another highlight, as is the purposeful, sentient conducting of
Christopher Monks. All told, this is a meticulously executed, heart-
warming recital. +++++

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 71

Orchestral
ORCHESTRAL CHOICE

Saint-Saëns with sparkle and humour

Roger Nichols very much enjoys this elegant orchestral survey from Les Siècles

In Le Rouet d’Omphale the strings are

wonderfully elegant and, were such
a thing still needed these days, fully
Saint-Saëns justify the use of period instruments.
Le Carnaval des animaux; At the other extreme, the dynamic
Poèmes symphoniques etc climaxes, in the so-called
Les Siècles/François-Xavier Roth ‘Bacchanale’ from Samson et Dalila
Harmonia Mundi HMM 902614.15 and elsewhere, take the breath away –
110:58 mins (2-discs) as they should.
I can’t be sure how many versions Le Carnaval des animaux similarly
of the symphonic poem La Jeunesse sparkles with life: I particularly
d’Hercule I’ve heard over the last 60 enjoyed the movement called
years or so, but it’s been lodged in ‘Pianistes’, where the two pianists,
my brain for a long time as one of the playing a 1928 Érard double piano
composer’s less- with keyboards
inspired efforts, Roth feels free to be facing each other,
and overlong to wit.
But now, at last,
inventive – and does obey the composer’s
instruction ‘to
I’ve seen the light so with finesse imitate the playing
thanks to François- of a beginner and
Xavier Roth’s interpretation. One their clumsiness’ to hilarious effect.
of his many virtues is that he’s not The recording ends with Saint-
afraid of making his orchestra play Saëns’s music for the 1908 film
very, very quietly; another is that, L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, the
where a composer has not noted first-ever commissioned film score.
dynamics, Roth feels free to invent Roth admits it’s not Saint-Saëns’s A refreshing take:
them, and does so with finesse. greatest piece (the composer didn’t François-Xavier Roth’s
approach enlightens
This gives life not only to individual bother to attend the public showing),
phrases, but to long paragraphs, but, in the hands of Les Siècles, it has
so we can follow the composer’s some value as a curiosity.
You can access thousands of reviews from our extensive archive on
rhetoric. At 18’29”, this poem now PERFORMANCE +++++
the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
seems just as long as is necessary. RECORDING +++++

Ballard
The Four Moons; Devil’s
Promenade; Fantasy Aborigine,
No. 3 ‘Kokopelli’; Scenes from
Indian Life
Forth Smith Symphony/John Jeter
Naxos 8.559923 57:11 mins
Louis Wayne
Ballard (1931-
2007) has
become known
as ‘the father of
Native American
composers’, and with good reason.
Born to a Cherokee father and a
Quapaw mother, this composer,
teacher and administrator, a
graduate of the University of Tulsa,
filled his compositions with Native
American folklore, themes and
rhythms, while also finding room
for global modernist practices
whenever he felt the need. One of his
own teachers was Darius Milhaud,
and in pieces like Devil’s Promenade
(the name of his Oklahoma
birthplace) the listener may detect
echoes of Milhaud’s delight in
making busy and noisy merriment
by hurling multiple elements into
the same pot. Or, in a word, overkill.
Other works, all captured in
world-premiere recordings, include
a compact suite extracted from his
1967 ballet The Four Moons, the
more sprawling ‘Kokopelli’ (inspired
by Hopi culture) and Scenes of Indian
Life, three comic miniatures from
1963 unwisely partnered with a
more garrulous fourth written 30
years later. Throughout, restlessly
shifting time signatures, reflecting
a Native American musical habit,
may catch some listeners off-guard,
though everyone should be able
to relish the quantities of exotic
percussion, from the Seneca cow-
horn rattle to the Hopi rasp stick
resonator and Dakota drum.
Conductor John Jeter and his Fort
Smith Symphony sail through this
colourful fare with a professional
sparkle and good cheer. But it’s
often when the forces slim down to
a soulful cello, a clarinet-trombone
duet or a ringing bell that the heart
is most touched and the ear most
pleased. Geoff Brown
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING ++++
Mozart
Symphonies Nos 29, 40;
Oboe Concerto*
*Ivan Podyomov (oboe);
Il Pomo d’Oro/Maxim Emelyanychev
Aparté AP328 80:00 mins
This release is
part of an ongoing
complete series
of Mozart’s
symphonies,
programmed
alongside assorted other works of
his. While the music is presented
here in chronological order, what
seems to have happened is that
Maxim Emelyanychev and the
superb period-instrument players
of Il Pomo d’Oro have taken their
cue from the autumnal, minor-

72 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


key sensibility of the G minor
Symphony, and have reflected this
approach back onto the two earlier
works as well. The result is both
convincing and unusual. The
A major Symphony, K201 can often
come across as a trite creation, at
least by Mozart’s standards. Yet
from the very first moments of this
recording, a thoughtful musical
interplay is set in motion, conveying
a natural sense of depth without any
loss of bright major-key energy.
In the Oboe Concerto, the supple
and beautiful tone conjured by Ivan
Podyomov (from a modern copy of
a period instrument) is as appealing
as his poised musicianship. And
Emelyanychev’s swift choice of
tempo in the G minor Symphony’s
opening movement remarkably
brings out the music’s shadowy
quality, rather than any supposed
(and spurious) pre-Beethovenian
turbulence; paradoxically, the
finale’s broader-than-usual pace
has the same effect. An eyebrow
can be raised at Emelyanychev’s
over-insistent liking for including
repeated sections. These were
a convention at the time, not an
absolute artistic necessity either
now or then; and while this release
is generously filled, there’s no
escaping the feeling that the A major
Symphony’s finale, for instance,
goes on just too long.
Malcolm Hayes
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Penderecki
Symphony No. 6 ‘Chinese
Songs’; Trumpet Concertino*;
Concerto doppio**
*David Guerrier (trumpet);
Aleksandra Kuls (violin); **Hayoung
Choi (cello); Norrköping Symphony
Orchestra/Antoni Wit
Naxos 8.574050 60:54 mins
Krzysztof
Penderecki’s list
of numbered
symphonies
reached
eight – the
composer, who died in 2020, never
wrote an anticipated ninth – but
paradoxically the last to have been
completed was the Symphony No. 6.
Subtitled ‘Chinese Songs’, it had the
HOLGER TALINSKI, MARK ALLAN
longest gestation and was premiered
in Guangzhou in 2017. Whether or
not it was intended as something
valedictory – a tolling bell is heard
in the last movement, ‘The Flute
Song of Autumn’ – it’s hard not to
recall Mahler’s leave-taking with
Das Lied von der Erde, particularly
since Penderecki draws on the
same collection of ancient Chinese
poems, translated into German by
Hans Bethge.
A distinguished Penderecki
interpreter, Antoni Wit – who has
recorded more of the composer’s
music than anyone else – now adds
the Symphony No. 6 to his otherwise
complete set of the symphonies,
and makes a strong case for the
work. Continuing in the ‘song-
symphony’ form that Zemlinsky
and Shostakovich developed out of
Mahler, the haunting score sets eight
poems and introduces interludes
on the traditional Chinese two-
stringed erhu. The baritone Jarosław
Bręk is a solid soloist, bringing out
the melancholy tone of the texts.
The other two scores are less
significant, but they receive
excellent performances from Wit
and a tautly impressive Norrköping
Symphony Orchestra. Featuring
some dazzling playing from David
Guerrier, the perky Trumpet
Concertino (2015) sounds like
a throwback to Soviet socialist
realism, yet the lyrical Concerto
doppio (2012) for violin and cello
– Aleksandra Kuls and Hayoung
Choi well matched as soloists – finds
Penderecki in more personal voice.
John Allison
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Light and shade:
Maxim Emelyanychev
digs deep in Mozart
Ravel
Daphnis et Chloé
Sinfonia of London Chorus;
Sinfonia of London/John Wilson
Chandos CHSA5327 (CD/SACD)
54:09 mins
Few composers
were as
meticulous
as Ravel.
Consequently,
it is widely held
that playing nothing more or less
than what he wrote is the best policy
in performing his music. With
Daphnis et Chloé, though, numerous
amendments made by the composer
to the orchestral parts never made
it to the published score. Hearty
cheers, then, to John Wilson for
spending lockdown remedying
that with a new performing edition,
played here with typical panache
by his hand-picked ensembles the
Sinfonia of London and Sinfonia of
London Chorus.
This is, generally, a stunning
performance, whether the
kaleidoscopic wind colours of the
part-one dances or ravishing glories
of the part-three sunrise. Moreover,
Chandos certainly know how to
capture Ravel’s complex orchestral
score, with an ideal combination
of a warm glow and sense of space,
without losing any of the minutiae.
The Danse guerrière of part two is
full of vigour, each tiny, insistent
Orchestral Reviews
detail conveyed with unparalleled
clarity, while the seductive lurches
of Chloé’s Danse suppliante
are ravishingly teasing. Perhaps
most impressive is the precision
of the tricky passages for
unaccompanied voices.
On the surface, the end of the
ballet is the epitome of all these
things. Every note is there, with
every nuance of the score observed
with scrupulous fidelity. Except
one – the title. Whether or not
Ravel’s denials that it was orgiastic
are believed, Danse générale
(Bacchanale) implies some sense of
abandon. In particular, there should
be shaping of the voices’ wordless
sighing and panting gestures. Rather
than hair being let down, not a
strand is out of place. Frustratingly,
the performance’s formidable
strengths cause it not quite to hit
the mark of Ravel’s exhilarating
conclusion. Christopher Dingle
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING +++++
Tchaikovsky
The Nutcracker Suite (arr. Jeff
Tyzik, Ellington, Strayhorn)
Chineke! Orchestra et al
Decca 485 4870 16:39 mins
There’s much
to unpack
from this short
recording, which
is essentially a
reworking of a
reworking. This is Duke Ellington
and Billy Strayhorn’s 1960 big
band-jazz take on Tchaikovsky’s
1892 ballet suite in a version for full
orchestra plus a sax-and-trumpet
fronted jazz quartet (there’s notably
no piano part, not that there’d have
been anywhere useful to put one
in this instance), subsequently
created by jazz-pops arranger and
conductor Jeff Tyzik. The conductor
here is Andrew Grams and this is a
live performance from 2022.
This is the premiere recording of
Tyzik’s arrangement, which seems
odd given its listener-friendly
nature, not that Ellington’s original
ever had a huge presence in the racks
anyway. Happily, the music emerges
from this history of artistic pass-the-
parcel with all its vigour, excitement
and knowing capriciousness intact,
effectively returning Tchaikovsky’s
much-loved melodies to their
orchestral origins with added
Ellingtonian swing.
The performance isn’t faultless,
in that there are a few instances
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 73
Orchestral Reviews
where Grams doesn’t seem to have
the best grip on the work’s sectional
Warmth and verve:
balance and the timekeeping is Kellen Gray and
occasionally stiffer than it needs to the RSNO offer an
be, which the jazz musicians seem appealing programme
to find slightly constricting. The
recorded sound can occasionally fall
short on definition and detail, but
that’s more than offset by the in-the-
moment nature of the performance.
Taken all in all, it’s undoubtedly
a long overdue pleasure to have a
professional recording of this piece,
so all credit to the enterprising
Chineke! Orchestra for adding it to
the catalogue. Roger Thomas
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING +++

African American
Voices II
Bonds: Montgomery Variations;
Kay: Concerto for Orchestra;
Perkinson: Worship – A Concert
Overture
Royal Scottish National Orchestra/ Florence Price and went on to forge
Kellen Gray a powerful compositional voice that
Linn Records CKD731 47:48 mins blended African-American idioms
This album is a with Western classical forms. This
welcome follow- work takes the spiritual ‘I Want
up to the Royal Jesus to Walk with Me’ as its theme
Scottish National and charts events surrounding the
Orchestra Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-
(RSNO)’s well- 56 and 1963 Baptist Street Church
received African American Voices bombing in Birmingham, Alabama
of 2022. Once more under the across its seven programmatic
baton of Kellen Gray, the RSNO movements. By turns dramatic and
brings terrific warmth and verve to hopeful, this is a striking piece –
three appealing orchestral works Gray draws forth a performance of
that span the Harlem and Chicago subtlety and emotion.
Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s Ulysses Kay’s Concerto for
and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Orchestra (1948) is a crisply neo-
stirring concert overture of 2001. classical work with great appeal.
The album opens with Margaret Rather than focusing on individual
Bonds’s Montgomery Variations instruments in turn, Kay features
(1964), currently the only purely whole families of instruments. This
orchestral work by Bonds to survive. yields much imaginative use of
Born in 1913, Bonds studied with texture and timbre, and showcases
BACKGROUND TO…
Penderecki’s
Symphony No. 6
The Polish composer originally envisaged a
work about the world’s ailing forests, then trees
in general. That was in the 1990s, but it wasn’t
until 2003 that he set about composing what
would become his ‘Chinese Songs’ Symphony.
He actually parked it in order to finish his Seventh
MARTIN MCCREADY, GETTY
some exceptional playing from the
RSNO, notably in the woodwinds.
Named after the British-Sierra
Leonean composer Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor, Perkinson
trained both in classical and
jazz styles, and also cited black
church music as central to his
composition. Worship: A Concert
Overture traverses everything from
Baroque counterpoint to the blues
to modernist rhythmic complexity
in its exploration of the hymn
tune ‘Praise God From Whom All
Blessings Flow’. Triumphant, lyrical
and shot through with a certain
steely determination, this is a fitting
end to an assured and deeply felt
collection. Kate Wakeling
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Verismo
– Preludi e Intermezzi
Works by Ponchielli, Puccini,
Mascagni, Leoncavallo,
Wolf-Ferrari, Cilea
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic
Orchestra/Domingo Hindoyan
Onyx ONYX4242 69:06 mins
‘We are all sick of
the Intermezzo,
of course, but
that is the organ-
grinder’s fault, not
the composer’s’.
So wrote the critic RA Streatfeild
instrumental serenades, overtures
and preludes found on this album
– the non-vocal bits of what is
loosely termed verismo opera
– were the pop hits of their era,
played in restaurants and on street
corners. Mascagni’s theme remains
hyper-familiar today, but there are
numbers in this selection, from
works such as the same composer’s
Le maschere or Wolf-Ferrari’s Il
segreto di Susanna, that will be
novelties even to the seasoned
operagoer. Conductor Domingo
Hindoyan takes that ubiquitous
Mascagni intermezzo at a rather
laboured pace, but elsewhere he
and the Royal Liverpool
Philharmonic are on far more
vigorous form. In the Witches’
Sabbath from Le Villi, taut strings,
explosive brass and thundering
crescendos make the listener feel as
if they have been caught up in the
eye of a storm, while Ponchielli’s
Dance of the Hours (La Gioconda)
is played with the all the fun of the
fairground. It is in the heavyweight
emotional intermezzos that the
performing forces really come
into their own: L’Amico Fritz’s is
overwrought, Manon Lescaut’s
keening, Pagliacci’s expansive,
I gioielli della Madonna’s highly
spiced. An enjoyable introduction
to a generation of opera composers
who regarded the symphony as

and Eighth symphonies, only finishing the Sixth in in 1895 about the intermezzo from a vital source of inspiration, and
2017. Based on eight poems by Tang dynasty writers (reimagined in German Cavalleria rusticana, four years gave it an added dash of passion.
by Hans Bethge), it is written for relatively conservative orchestral forces and after Mascagni’s opera received Alexandra Wilson
the evocative erhu. The symphony was premiered in Guangzhou in 2017. its London premiere. The various PERFORMANCE ++++
intermezzos, balletic numbers, RECORDING ++++

74 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


a
CONCERTO CHOICE
Bavouzet’s eighth Mozart
set is full of zest and style
There is plenty of joy to be found in the pianist’s
latest instalment of concertos, says Rebecca Franks
On a five-star roll:
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s
cycle continues to
attract rave reviews
Mozart
Piano Concertos Nos 26 & 27; Overtures (Vol. 8)
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (piano);
Manchester Camerata/Gábor Takács-Nagy
Chandos CHAN20246 75:26 mins
Three opera overtures, two piano concertos, one
joyful album: that’s what
you’ll get from Jean-Efflam Pianist, orchestra and
Bavouzet’s latest Mozart
recording. It’s the eighth in a
conductor
series that’s been garlanded movement with life
with five-star reviews – and this
one deserves another, for its zest and style. Honours
go first to the livewire Manchester Camerata and its
conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy for the overtures, each
of which leaves you wanting to hear the whole opera.
The wind playing in the Così fan tutte overture is
particularly nifty, while the trombones bring stately
nobility to The Magic Flute’s opener. And the sense of
anticipation, with scurrying strings, for La Clemenza
BENJAMIN EALOVEGA
di Tito is scintillating.
Yet the main event here isn’t an opera, of course,
even if Mozart did bring vocal expressivity and
Concerto
theatrical flair into his piano concertos. Both Nos 26
and 27 date from his final years (as do the overtures).
Bavouzet writes in a performer’s note that for a long
time he found No. 26 only of modest interest, but
his view shifted as a result of this recording. ‘I now
regard it as among Mozart’s greatest achievements,’ he
writes. What sets this version
apart from others is Bavouzet’s
elaboration of the left-hand
infuse every part, left fairly empty in the
original manuscript. There
are some wonderful moments
in the opening Allegro where it sounds as if Mozart
has gone into a Bachian reverie. No. 27 breathes
Mozartian beauty through and through, whether
in the serene melodies of the Allegro, the simplicity
of the Larghetto or the sprightly charm of the finale.
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++
You can access thousands of reviews from our
extensive archive on the BBC Music Magazine
website at www.classical-music.com
Beethoven
Violin Concerto;
‘Kreutzer’ Sonata (Trans. Violin
& Orchestra)
Nemanja Radulović (violin);
Double Sens
Warner Classics 5419774339 83:41 mins
Nemanja
Radulović doesn’t
mention it in
his brief booklet
note, but his
transcription
of the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata for violin
and string orchestra may well have
been prompted by Beethoven’s own
description of the work as being
written ‘in a very concertante style,
almost like that of a concerto’. The
arrangement works quite well in
the more excitable moments of the
outer movements, particularly given
the stunning virtuosity not only of
Radulović himself, but also of the
members of his regular ensemble,
Double Sens. (Their break-neck
speed in the finale has to be heard
to be believed.) But when it comes
to the slow movement, the initial
theme is taken so slowly as to sound
mawkish, and although the tempo
increases exponentially in the first
two of the variations that follow
(the second of the pair actually
sounds almost comically fast), the
piece never really recovers. There
are some jarring tempo changes
in the first movement, too, where
the chorale-like second subject
again lingers unduly, impairing the
music’s momentum.
The Violin Concerto comes off
rather better, not least in the hushed
account of the slow movement,
where the delayed arrival of the
contrasting second theme is
effectively played by Radulović
with almost no vibrato. It’s hard to
know, though, why he allows the
oboe a miniature cadenza in the
Rondo finale: this isn’t, after all, the
opening movement of Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony, where there is
such a moment. Nevertheless, the
mastery of Radulović’s playing is
always a pleasure to listen to. It’s
refreshing, too, to hear a natural-
sounding recorded balance that
doesn’t place the soloist unduly
close, allowing him instead to
interact fully with the orchestral
players throughout.
Misha Donat
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING +++++
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 75
Concerto Reviews
Brahms • Dvořák • Viotti Symphonie Orchester under Paavo
Järvi. Christian Tetzlaff plays the
Brahms: Double Concerto; Viotti:
wild, gipsy-style finale of the Viotti
Violin Concerto No. 22; Dvořák:
with appropriate abandon and Tanja
Silent Woods
is an eloquent soloist in Dvořák’s
Christian Tetzlaff (violin),
hauntingly beautiful Silent Woods
Tanja Tetzlaff (cello);
– the composer’s own transcription
Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester
of the penultimate number from his
Berlin/Paavo Järvi
piano duet suite From the Bohemian
Ondine ODE 1423-2 60:43 mins
Forest. Misha Donat
Brahms and the PERFORMANCE +++++
late 18th-century RECORDING +++++
violinist and
composer Brescianello
Giovanni Unlocked –Concertos and
Battista Viotti Sinfonias etc
may seem like odd bedfellows, but La Serenissima/Adrian Chandler
there’s a good deal of logic in their Signum Classics SIGCD767 72:15 mins
juxtaposition here. Brahms openly Technical
admired Viotti’s Violin Concerto No. acrobatics, jaunty
22, and his own Double Concerto for melodies and
violin and cello, in the same key of shifting rhythms.
A minor, contains distant allusions This must be
to it. The Viotti was also in the Vivaldi, right?
repertoire of Joseph Joachim, who Wrong. The music on this album
made his own virtuosic edition of it comes from the Red Priest’s younger
(mercifully not used in this reading). – but no less gifted – contemporary,
Brahms’s concerto was designed Giuseppe Antonio Brescianello.
to mend his relationship with In the second volume of
Joachim: the two friends had fallen their exploration of Brescianello’s
out over the violinist’s bitter divorce 1727 Op. 1 set of sinfonias and
dispute, when Brahms sided with violin concertos, La Serenissima
Joachim’s wife. and its founding director-conductor
The opening pages of Brahms’s Adrian Chandler draw parallels
concerto have the two soloists between the two composers. The
rhapsodising in recitative style, Adagio of Brescianello’s Fourth
and the passage ends with them Violin Concerto, for example, is
sweeping passionately upwards clearly influenced by the slow
in parallel octaves, unleashing a movement of Vivaldi’s E major
lengthy and powerful tutti. The Concerto (‘Spring’) from The
octave writing heard near the Four Seasons – published, like
concerto’s beginning is typical of Brescianello’s collection, in
the work as a whole, and it’s one of Amsterdam two years earlier. But
its features that make it so awkward Chandler and La Serenissima
to play. Brother-and-sister team also advocate for a reappraisal
Christian and Tanja Tetzlaff are of the Bologna-born, Venetian-
ideal soloists, and they’re splendidly trained composer’s own distinctive
supported by the Deutsches compositional style.
BACKGROUND TO…
Brahms’s Double Concerto
The Double Concerto in A minor – Brahms’s
last work for orchestral forces – didn’t have the
easiest start. Born out of a breakdown in his
long-standing artistic collaboration with violinist
Joseph Joachim, Brahms used a commission
from cellist Robert Hausmann to get his attention.
The composer created a piece using both cello
and violin as soloists, and in unison, a move
that piqued Joachim’s interest. When the work was premiered at a private
performance in Baden-Baden in 1887, the reception was lukewarm (even
from Joachim himself), yet time has been kind to the now-popular work.
76 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Chandler takes the lead in the
three violin concertos (numbers
Four, Five and Six). His playing
is brilliantly skilful, immediate
and engaging. The handling of
the cadenza at the end of the Sixth
Concerto (one of the first cadenzas
to appear in print) is especially
impressive. Chandler is partnered
in true concertante style by the
string players of La Serenissima,
who come into their own in the
three sinfonias (or ‘sinphonias’)
that make up the rest of the set and
further reveal Brescianello’s gift
for melodic writing. The album is
rounded off with a French-style
suite and the slow movement from
Vivaldi’s RV 366 Violin Concerto,
which the German violinist and
composer Johann Georg Pisendel
inserted in place of Brescianello’s
own Vivaldian adagio in the fourth
concerto. John-Pierre Joyce
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++
Mozart
Piano Concertos K242*;
K315f**; K365*
Robert Levin (keyboards), *Ya-Fei
Chuang (keyboards), **Bojan Čičić
(violin); Academy of Ancient Music/
Laurence Cummings
AAM AAM043 60:48 mins
The exhilarating
completion of the
Robert Levin/
Academy of
Ancient Music
Mozart piano
concerto series goes from strength
to strength: this is Volume 11, with
just two more to come. There’s a
curiosity here in the two-piano
version of the three-piano concerto,
K242 (which will be in Vol. 12)
composed in 1776 for the Lodron
family – it’s amazing how little is lost
as Mozart condenses the writing.
The performance sparkles, but
there’s no avoiding the fact that the
material here is slightly four-square.
The most delectable sounds from
the fortepianos are in the buzzy,
chirruping cadenza in the central
movement, and while the two
keyboards are perfectly matched
by Levin (who here plays first) and
Chuang (second), one might relish a
touch more spatial separation.
The contrast with the more
familiar two-piano concerto in E
flat, K365 could scarcely be more
striking: here is magnificently
mature Mozart, brilliantly
articulated with light-footed grace.
Chuang is now piano one: just hear
the subtlety with which she nudges
the music into the minor in bar
208 of the first movement, and the
precise vigour with which she and
Levin duel in the C minor episode of
the finale.
To complete the album, a single
movement K315f featuring piano
and solo violin, which Mozart
abandoned, perhaps daunted by
balance issues? Levin has rescued
it with typical inventiveness and
he and Bojan Čičič play with flair.
Nicholas Kenyon
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
J Novák
Concerto for Two Pianos and
Orchestra; Concentus Biiugis;
Choreae Vernales
Clara Nováková (flute), Dora Novák-
Wilmington, Karel Košárek,
Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra/
Tomáš Netopil
Supraphon SU43312 71:46 mins
Jan Novák
was one of
Czechoslovakia’s
most talented
20th-century
composers,
producing fine orchestral music –
including the concertos recorded
here – and several film scores.
A love of Italy and its classical
culture resulted in award-winning
Latin poetry as well as providing
inspiration for the Concentus Biiugis
and the Choreae vernales, both
from the 1970s. His admiration for
Stravinsky, very clear in the finale of
the Concentus Biiugis, and Martinů,
with whom he studied in the late
1940s, is unashamed but rarely
derails Novák’s personal voice. The
Concerto for Two Pianos from 1955
with its glistening orchestration
and sprung rhythms begins very
much in the world of Martinů’s
symphonies, but it goes on to
explore novel sound combinations
harnessed to a clear control of form.
Novák’s two daughters take the
solo roles: Clara, for whom Choreae
vernales was composed, on flute,
and Dora on piano in the double
concertos. Predominantly pastoral
in mood, the Choreae vernales
has its edgier moments and Clara
provides both amplitude of tone
and beguiling virtuosity in its
charming middle movement. In
the spikier outer movements of the
piano concertos Dora and her fellow
pianist Karel Košárek’s tight sense

Adventurous spirit:
Petri Kumela performs
a set of vivacious new
Finnish guitar concertos
of ensemble generates exhilarating
impetus while reserving more full-
throated emotion for the beguilingly
romantic slow movements. The
recorded sound manages to capture
the way Novák embeds the solo
piano sound in the orchestral
texture; Tomáš Netopil and the
Prague Radio Symphony are on
splendid form supplying attentive
and idiomatic accompaniment.
Jan Smaczny
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Weinberg
Cello Concertino*;
Violin Concertino**; Rhapsody
on Moldavian Themes;
Symphony No. 7
*Wen-Sinn Yang (cello), **Tassilo
Probst (violin); Jewish Chamber Orch
Munich/Daniel Grossmann
Onyx ONYX4237 78:34 mins
The eloquent
opening and
closing passages
of Weinberg’s
recently
discovered
Cello Concertino of 1948 project
a deep sense of loneliness and
suffering that may well be related to
Weinberg’s precarious situation in
HEIDI PIIROINEN, GETTY
the Soviet Union at that time, when
a campaign of anti-Semitism was on
the rise. Although Wen-Sinn Yang
gives an impassioned account of the
solo cello part, he doesn’t project the
melodic line with quite the same
degree of subtlety and nuance as
Pieter Wispelwey (Evil Penguin).
The Jewish Chamber Orchestra’s
accompaniment could be more
blended in the slower sections. At
the same time, the raw folk-like
execution of the klezmer rhythms in
the second movement have a tangy
authenticity on the present release.
The Violin Concertino is a more
wistful work, but darker resonances
are never far from the surface.
Tassilo Probst’s warmly lyrical
and intimate sound is well suited
to its overall character. He wipes
away the underlying sorrow in the
Finale with some brilliant daredevil
passagework, and negotiates the
technical fireworks of the Rhapsody
on Moldavian Themes.
In contrast, the Seventh
Symphony is emotionally elusive.
A prominent role is given to a
solo harpsichord whose neo-
Baroque interpolations in the outer
movements are perhaps designed
to sound deliberately out of step
with the darkly contrapuntal string
writing that colours the rest of the
work. Daniel Grossmann and the
Jewish Chamber Orchestra have
the measure of its complexities and
deliver a committed performance.
Erik Levi
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Destination Paris
Works by Cabral, Bizet, Lehár,
Gounod, Rameau, Legrand,
Lai et al
Gautier Capuçon (cello), Jérôme
Ducros (piano); Orchestre de
Chambre de Paris/Lionel Bringuier
Erato 5419772146 72:29 mins
‘Destination
Paris’ reflects
athletes’ and
fans aspirations
for the 2024
Olympics, due
to be hosted by the French capital.
The event is also the impetus for
Gautier Capuçon’s chirpy collection
of crossover musical postcards. The
resulting potpourri spans several
centuries, with an emphasis on
popular song, whether from opera,
cafe culture or film. It starts with
Edith Piaf staple ‘La foule’ and the
‘Habanera’ from Carmen. By the
time of the insouciant stroll through
Joe Dassin’s ‘Les Champs-Élysées’
the intent is clear. This is a light-
hearted romp through French pop
culture, with fromage aplenty.
Accompanied variously by
pianist Jérôme Ducros and the
Orchestre de Chambre de Paris
under Lionel Bringuier, Capuçon is
evidently having fun. He makes his
cello sing characterfully, bringing
out the melancholy of Kosma’s ‘Les
feuilles mortes’, winsome passion
of Aznavour’s ‘La Bohème’ and
exuberance of ‘Ah, je veux vivre’
from Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.
Unsurprisingly, the ‘classical’ pieces
fare well, from a funky approach to
Rameau’s ‘Danse des sauvages’ to
the eloquence of Fauré’s Sicilienne.
Ducros’s artful arrangements are
effective, while his good-humoured
playing endears, especially his
deceptive nonchalance in Georges
Brassens ‘Les Copains d’abord’.
The deeper cultural resonances
of songs and themes by the likes
of Michel Legrand and Richard
Cocciante may elude non-native
listeners. Ennio Morricone’s ‘Chi
Mai’ has been widely used in
anglophone settings, but for the
French it is associated with pet food
commercials. Nonetheless, Gallic
charm wins through and the Radio
France children’s choir singing
Jean-Jacques Goldman’s specially-
composed, and catchy ‘Pense à
Nous’ provide an unexpected
earworm. Christopher Dingle
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING ++++
Concerto Reviews
Exquisitely Absurd
Guitar Concertos by Antti
Auvinen; Lotta Wennäkoski;
Riikka Talvitie
Petri Kumela (guitar); Tapiola
Sinfonietta/Dima Slobodeniouk
Alba ABCD475 62:50 mins
‘Exquisitely
Absurd’ neatly
summarises the
three, vivacious
concertos
featured on this
album of world-premiere recordings
from guitarist Petri Kumela and
Tapiola Sinfonietta, conducted by
Dima Slobodeniouk. Stylistically,
each work sits on a liquid continuum
from one pole to its apparently
contradictory opposite. Balancing
the surreal with the lyrical – often
simultaneously – they offer a
refreshing take on the pairing of
classical guitar with orchestra while
looking affectionately askance
at Nordic modernism from deep
within its embrace.
Kumela excels alongside the
composers. All Finns born in
the 1970s, they share a spirit of
adventure and naturalness of
expression that underpins an
ultimately serious intent. Antti
Auvinen’s Andalusian Panzerwagen
Jazz (2021) proves less flippant than
its title suggests – notwithstanding
the cartoonish juxtapositions
that proliferate across its four
movements. Swaggering and
bopping, from skitter to droop
and insistent riff, there’s a yearning
here too, which comes most to
the fore as the work spools to its
enigmatic conclusion.
Lotta Wennäkoski’s Susurrus
(2016) initially sounds born of the
same impulse to contradict – and
its taut single movement explores a
similarly brilliant palette of colours
and textures. Yet a less earthbound,
more intimate sense of exploration
emerges from her rustlings, squeaks,
snaps and insistent pulses.
Whether the two movements
of Riikka Talvitie’s Without Irony
(2009/22) are just so is open to
question – but perhaps that’s
her point. At once delicate and
fiercely dramatic, the work is
full of invention and kinetic
energy. It successfully pivots on
the seriousness of play – and the
fruitfulness of serious, sympathetic
collaboration. Steph Power
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING ++++
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 77
Opera
OPERA CHOICE

Rousset conjures a stunning slice of Lully

Conductor, cast and orchestra triumph with this great Thesée, says Berta Joncus

keyboard additions, repeatedly

shifting the pulse to undercut
conventional word emphases.
Lully Most of the vocal solos are in
Thésée Lully’s hallmark récit-air format; the
Mathias Vidal, Karine Deshayes, cast leads, veterans from Rousset’s
Deborah Cachet et al; Les Talens earlier Lully productions, know
Lyriques/Christophe Rousset how to keep this music fresh and
Aparté AP325 161:00 mins (3 discs) impassioned. Euphony blooms
This, one of Lully’s greatest works, is in duets and trios, as in the sweet
one of Christophe Rousset’s greatest melancholy with which two ‘old men’
recordings. With Thésée (1675), (tenors Fabien Hyon and Robert
Lully unites opposites – intimacy Getchell, Act 2, Scene 7) entreat
and spectacle, fluidity and structure listeners to relish life’s pleasures, or
– within a super- the plangency with
saturated score. These Lully veterans which a priestess
Action revolves and two followers
around the
know how to keep (sopranos Marie
sorceress Médée, this music fresh Lys, Deborah
who prefers to Cachet and
murder Thésée, the object of her Bénédicte Tauran, Act 1, Scene
desire, rather than lose him to a 6) protest the war featured in the
young rival. From her opening opera’s first act. The choir dives
scene, Rousset makes us hear the into character, whether as warriors,
vulnerability of Médée (Karine Athenians, devils or shepherds. The
Prisoner of passion:
Deshayes) while, against the sparest band abandons itself to the strutting,
Karine Deshayes is a
of continuo, she whisperingly punching, wayward moves of Lully’s vulnerable Médée
laments being prisoner to her shock-and-awe orchestration.
passion. When sparkly confidante This recording can only burnish
Dorine (Thaïs Raï-Westphal) urges Lully’s legacy, and that of its director.
You can access thousands of reviews from our extensive archive on
Médée to assert herself, however, PERFORMANCE +++++
the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
Rousset bounces in with arch RECORDING +++++

George Lewis The work’s focus is the a series of historical episodes. lines, with spiky, finely drawn
Afterword Association for the Advancement From life in the Jim Crow deep dissonant textures and motifs
Joelle Lamarre, Gwendolyn of Creative Musicians (AACM), the South via the Great Migration rippling to and fro the seven players,
Brown, Julian Terrell Otis; Chicago collective formed in 1965 north, thence Paris and a return to as if in musical manifestation of the
International Contemporary (by pianists Muhal Richard Abrams consider achievements and ongoing ideas debated.
Ensemble/David Fulmer and Jodie Christian, drummer Steve difficulties, ‘music, collectivity, Those ideas remain central to
Tundra TUN015 118:13 mins (2 discs) McCall and composer Phil Cohran) ethical action, and self-realisation’ Black musicians’ ongoing struggle
In 2010, to support Black experimental are cast as ‘keys to the future’. for creative freedom and identity.
composer George performers and composers in the Ruminative, discursive and Afterword demands that we hear
Lewis noted that, face of oppression, social injustice sometimes didactic, it’s a cerebral those not just bearing witness to that
‘Communities – and musical stereotyping. work – and, at a slow-moving struggle, but living it. Steph Power
provide access. Drawing on interviews from two hours, a rather taxing one, PERFORMANCE +++
They provide newspapers and A Power Stronger the weight leavened by the RECORDING +++
access to history, they provide access Than Itself – Lewis’s book on the inventiveness of the instrumental
to key individuals and traditions … AACM, published by the University writing and by astute performances Tobias Picker
How to provide access to tradition of Chicago Press in 2008 – an from the cast and International Awakenings
AYMERIC GIRAUDEL

and history is extremely important.’ unnamed soprano, contralto and Contemporary Ensemble under Jarrett Porter, Joyce El-Khoury et
Five years later, Lewis explored tenor evoke its backstory, formation conductor David Fulmer. Most al; Odyssey Opera; Boston Modern
these themes and more in his first and purpose, embodying multiple striking is the furious delicacy that Orchestra Project/Gil Rose
opera, Afterword. community perspectives through underpins the often languid vocal BMOP Sound 1094 103:38 mins (2 discs)

78 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


Heroic failure
is grist to the
operatic mill;
but a physician’s
ability to only
briefly awaken
patients who have been asleep for
decades suffering from encephalitis
lethargica is an entirely different
kind of failure.
Unless you are Tobias Picker, one
of the most consistently interesting
among the present generation of
US theatre composers. Working
with his regular librettist Aryeh Lev
Stollman, Picker transforms the
story of Dr Oliver Sacks’s work with
surviving victims of the sleeping
sickness pandemic of the 1920s into
a music drama that is every bit as
gripping as the movie made from
Sacks’s own account of his time at
New York’s Beth Abraham Hospital
in the 1960s, depicted in his book of
the same title, Awakenings.
Framed by the fairytale of
Sleeping Beauty, who sleeps again
at the end of the opera, it is also
about Sacks’s own awakening to
his love for men. At the heart of the
opera is an emotional love triangle
between the patient Leonard,
who loves Nurse Rodriguez, who
loves Sacks. Sacks and Rodriguez
finally share a kiss in the dramatic
penultimate scene.
Picker’s score ebbs and flows
through a contemporary Romantic
vein that he has made his own with
a fine ear for instrumentation. Gil
Rose, conducting an ensemble with
strings, winds, a harp, tuba and
piano, relishes a Ravel-like waltz
when the patients feel the first
benefits of the drug L-Dopa.
An utterly dependable cast is led
by Jarrett Porter as Sacks and the
young Mexican tenor César Delgado
as Rodriguez. Keith Klein
is a dark-voiced doubting boss
to Sacks.
However, the real vocal honours
belong to Joyce El-Khoury as Rose
imagining that her husband is
coming to visit as she retreats again
into darkness.
Christopher Cook
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++
Wagner
Siegfried
Simon O’Neill, Michael Volle,
Peter Hoare, Anja Kampe et al;
Bavarian Radio Symphony
Orchestra/Simon Rattle
BR Klassik 900211 233:09 mins (3 discs)
Operatic fireworks:
Philippe Jaroussky
is vocally agile in
Forgotten Arias
Recorded live
in Munich in
two concert
performances
in May 2023,
Rattle’s Siegfried
has as its greatest asset the Bavarian
orchestra. Some 25 of the musicians,
apparently, play at Bayreuth, so
their acquaintance with the score is
scarcely in doubt.
Despite having the orchestra on
stage rather than in a pit (let alone
the Bayreuth pit, which makes life
unusually easy for singers), textures
have been carefully balanced.
Rattle shows a keen awareness of
orchestral colour and brings an
impressive dynamism to the music.
His tendency is to be quite speedy –
and there is certainly virtue in such
an approach.
Yet despite the conductor
believing that he has at his disposal
‘the best cast of singers you can get
in the whole world right now’, things
are less accomplished vocally, with
a largely mature cast, some of whom
might have done better with their
roles a few years back.
The two tenors – Simon O’Neill’s
protagonist and Peter Hoare’s
characterful Mime – are too
similar, with the former’s solid but
occasionally nasal vocalism not
consistently providing a voice of the
ideal size or tonal beauty.
With Michael Volle’s baritone a
little rough these days, his punchy
but potent Wotan is not always
entirely centred. Anja Kampe’s
Opera Reviews
Philippe
Jaroussky has a
list of splendid
recordings,
awards and an
asteroid named
after him – so his fame is already
established in the heavens! He has
specialised in roles from the early
18th-century high Baroque; this
recording takes him a little later
with arias c1750-c1770. Behind his
selections often lies his admiration
for the castrato Giovanni Carestini
who sang some of these pieces
and had a powerful and clear
soprano voice, a wide range and an
extraordinary virtuosity.
All of these features are mirrored
in Jaroussky’s peformance of
Bernasconi’s ‘Siam navi all’onde
algenti’ from his opera L’Olimpiade
in which the lovers are like ships in
a storm and their passions blow like
icy winds. He tears up and down the
runs, ornamenting at will, and offers
Brünnhilde possesses the necessary great firework cadenzas that draw us
weight, though her lyricism falters into the situation and emotion. The
towards the end. same agility is true of Jommelli’s ‘Fra
Georg Nigl’s Alberich is firm cento affanni’ (from Artaserse) with
and saturnine – one of the best the addition that the more subtle
assumptions on the set. Franz-Josef harmonies draw out changes of
Selig is a dignified Fafner, but Danae colour from Jaroussky’s voice. One
Kontora’s Forest Bird Woodbird or two items do present challenges
is brittle and not always perfectly of interpretation for the performer.
pitched while Gerhild Romberger’s For example, Valentini’s music for
Erda is rather dull. ‘Se mai senti’ is a little blank for
Clean sound, despite the live expressing the tender text. Finally,
context. George Hall in historical terms, this selection
PERFORMANCE +++ provides a marvelous introduction
RECORDING ++++ to the composition models that
Mozart would have come across in
Forgotten Arias his youth. Indeed his earliest arias
Works by Bernasconi, Piccinni, set the same texts as those found on
Gluck, Ferrandini et al the last five tracks.
Philippe Jaroussky (countertenor); Anthony Pryer
Le Concert de la Loge/Julien Chauvin PERFORMANCE +++++
Erato 5419763388 73:28 mins RECORDING +++++
BACKGROUND TO…
Wagner’s Siegfried
The germ of what would become the third part of
Wagner’s mighty cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen
took hold in 1851 when the composer was
formulating a standalone opera about the
character’s death (Siegfried’s Tod). Realising he
had a much bigger story on his hands, Wagner
began to work on a preface, Der junge Siegfried.
Composition on the opera we know began
in 1856, but ground to a halt after Act II was completed the following
year. Wagner recommenced work in 1869, finishing it in 1871. Siegfried
premiered as part of the completed cycle at Bayreuth in 1876.
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 79
Choral & Song
a CHORAL & SONG CHOICE Bartók • Kodály
Bartók: Cantata Profana;
Transylvanian Dances; Kodály: Te
A timely work delivered Deum; Psalmus Hungaricus
Transylvania State Philharmonic

with power and poignance Orchestra & Choir/Lawrence Foster

Pentatone PTC 5187 071 (CD/SACD)
64:14 mins
Béla Bartók once
John Pickard’s Mass in Troubled Times packs a punch described the
among his choral canon, says Ashutosh Khandekar Cantata Profana
as his ‘most
profound credo’,
yet it remains
an under-appreciated part of his
output. That may have something
to do with the technical challenges
of its writing for double chorus,
tackled so strikingly well here. But
what really sets this release apart is
that it’s the first with a Romanian
text close to what Bartók originally
used before the work was published
in Hungarian. It draws us back to the
source of the piece, subtitled ‘The
Nine Enchanted Stags’ and based on
traditional Transylvanian ballads
which tell of how a father loses his
sons when, out hunting, they cross a
haunted bridge and are transformed
into stags. Dealing not only with
personal loss but symbolising
freedom and independence,
it’s a key work of Hungarian-
Unflinching commitment:
Transylvanian musical culture.
the BBC Singers impress The conductor Lawrence
in vocally demanding and Foster, a distinguished champion
ambitious music of Romanian music (Enescu
in particular), draws a fierce
performance from his choral and
orchestral forces, and the tenor Ioan
John Pickard hashtag condemning the drowning of a Syrian child Hotea and baritone Bogdan Baciu.
Mass in Troubled Times etc refugee, to Arabic verse, Orthodox chant and poetic Underlining Bartók’s connections
BBC Singers/Martyn Brabbins et al allusions to Edith Sitwell and TS Eliot. Throughout, with Transylvania (the composer’s
BIS BIS-2651 (CD/SACD) 74:30 mins D’Costa weaves the tragic tale of a Syrian father birthplace is in present-day
If the world was in crisis when Mass in Troubled Times escaping the ravages of war with his young daughter. Romania) he also shapes a vivid
was premiered in 2018, then the work has only gained The BBC Singers sing with unflinching account of the Transylvanian Dances,
in power and poignancy. commitment to a demanding the orchestral version of an earlier
Pickard has only a handful Conductor Martyn Brabbins score encompassing vocal Sonatina for piano. The bagpipe-
of choral pieces to his name,
which all feature on this album
brings focus and coherence to techniques drawn from
diverse cultural genres.
evoking woodwinds at its opening
have special piquancy.
alongside instrumental works this fascinating melting-pot Pickard showcases their Zoltán Kodály’s Psalmus
performed by two fine soloists, virtuosity as soloists while Hungaricus may be a better-known
Chloë Abbott (trumpet) and David Goode (organ). preserving the choral integrity of the ensemble part of the choral repertoire, but the
Many of the choral works show the obvious influence writing. Martyn Brabbins brings focus and coherence searing performance here (not least
of 20th-century choral masters, especially Duruflé to this fascinating melting-pot. We are never in doubt from the tenor Marius Vlad) will
and Howells. However, it is Pickard’s vivid setting of that this is a work of deep spiritual intent, questioning refresh anyone’s view of the work.
Shelley’s Ozymandias (his Op. 1) that prepares you for in its faith but sure in its humanity. His Budavári Te Deum, likewise
the Mass’s more dissonant and expressive world. PERFORMANCE +++++ written for a Budapest celebration,
The Mass is a substantial departure from the RECORDING +++++ gets the album off to an imposing
traditional sacred liturgy, and writer Gavin D’Costa start, with Foster and his forces
has provided the composer with an evocative You can access thousands of reviews from our
extensive archive on the BBC Music Magazine (including a quartet of vocal soloists)
springboard. He incorporates fragments of text in blazing away. John Allison
website at www.classical-music.com
five languages, ranging from a 2015 Turkish Twitter PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++

80 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


M-A Charpentier
Messe de Minuit; In Nativitatem
Domini Canticum etc
Ensemble Correspondances/
Sébastien Daucé
Harmonia Mundi HMM 902707
80:52 mins
Although
barred by Jean-
Baptiste Lully’s
jealously guarded
monopoly from
composing
operas, Marc-Antoine Charpentier
invested much of his talent for
dramatic vocal and instrumental
writing in music for the Catholic
Church. The Christmas story in
particular provided Charpentier
with ample material to explore
human relationships, emotions and
spirituality through various genres,
including the two dramatic motets
and the celebratory mass on this
recording.
The central work is Charpentier’s
Messe de Minuit for four voices,
flutes and violins. Written around
1694, it was probably commissioned
by the Jesuits of Saint-Louis in
Paris and contains rich harmonies,
popular melodies and lively
rhythmic motifs. The simple, rustic
aspects of the mass are reinforced
by the inclusion of folk-like ‘noëls’
– similar to Christmas carol tunes.
These and the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo,
Sanctus and Agnus Dei are sung
with joy and gentle intensity by
Ensemble Correspondances,
although director Sébastien
Daucé shies away from some of the
rougher-edged textures that might
have enhanced the work’s popular
festive spirit.
The two motets – In nativitatem
Domini canticum and In nativitate
Domini nostri Jesu Christi canticum
– are more serious retellings of
the Nativity story. In the first, the
orchestra of strings, woodwind
and continuo is integrated into
the drama with the inclusion of
two programmatic interludes.
The second motet is a shorter,
tighter work, scored for three
upper voices and continuo. It
recalls Charpentier’s training
under Carissimi in Rome in the
1660s and is exquisitely sung, with
delicate instrumental support. The
MARK ALLAN, ANDREJ GRILC
recording (from the Seine Musicale
in Paris) is warm and sympathetic.
John-Pierre Joyce
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Bob Chilcott
Christmas Oratorio; Jesus
Christ, the Apple Tree; The Pear
Tree Carol etc
Neal Davies, Sarah Connolly, Nick
Pritchard; Choir of Merton College,
Oxford/Benjamin Nicholas
Delphian DCD34321 72:10 mins
Bob Chilcott’s
Christmas
Oratorio was
premiered in
the middle of
summer some
four years ago at the Three Choirs
Festival. It’s a balm-like mix of the
Christmas story – gleaned from the
familiar ‘And it came to pass...’ texts
from the book of Luke (familiar
not least for those who have long,
possibly fidgety, memories of school
carol services), the traditional
intoning of hymns and Chilcott’s
sensitive, always lyrical settings of
carols and liturgy.
One of the strengths of this
oratorio lies in the narrative from
Luke, given to the Evangelist – Nick
Pritchard, here as at the premiere –
whose mellifluous, quiet tale-telling
adds lyrical narrative in between
organ-accompanied hymns and
new carol settings.
The sombre Magnificat is
sung by Sarah Connolly, as Mary
after the visitation of the Angel
Choral & Song Reviews
Luminous performer:
soprano Sarah
Aristidou shows great
power and imagination
Gabriel. Alongside Connolly’s rich,
expressive mezzo, a largely split
choir of male and female voices
sing the Latin, as if the massed
ranks of history’s nuns and monks
intoning the hours behind her. It’s
a quietly theatrical touch, sung
evocatively by the Choir of Merton
College, Oxford, as if somehow to
express ecclesiastical benediction,
or perhaps relevance. The straight-
sung hymns, with organ, can jar, but
the occasional bit of judicious brass
from the Oxford Contemporary
Sinfonia, conducted by Benjamin
Nicholas, is transformative.
Chilcott uses the Evangelist,
and Olivia Jageurs’s accompanying
nimble harp, to give us those
moments of rapt stillness that mark
that certain Christmas magic, and
also to change the flow amidst some
lovely settings – particularly ‘A
Carol to the King’.
The sweet harmonies of Chilcott’s
‘Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree’ and
‘The Pear Tree Carol’ bookend the
Oratorio, the latter followed by
his jazz-inflected ‘Welcome All
Wonders’, which while apt in subject
matter (joy at the birth of Christ) is
utterly incongruous musically and
programmatically in this context.
Sarah Urwin Jones
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Coleridge-Taylor
Partsongs – Sea Drift; By the
Lone Sea Shore; Isle of Beauty;
The Lee Shore etc
The Choir of King’s College London/
Joseph Fort
Delphian DCD34271 46:38 mins
A passionate
admirer of
Grieg and
Dvořák, Samuel
Coleridge-
Taylor sought
to create a ‘romantic Nationalism’
of his own, rooted in Black music.
This he did in his extraordinarily
popular Hiawatha cantatas of
1898-1900. The British-Sierra
Leonean composer is however
gladly no longer defined just by this
trilogy of choral works, and this
appealing album shines a light on
his outstanding contribution to the
partsong. These works may bear
the hallmark of Coleridge-Taylor’s
time at the Royal College of Music
studying with the doyen of English
church music, Charles Villiers
Stanford, but they have a depth and
drama all of their own and are well
presented here by the Choir of King’s
College, London under the skilful
direction of Joseph Fort.
The album’s highlight is without
doubt the opening track, ‘Sea Drift’.
This terrifically vivid setting of
Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s poem tells
of a ghostly form who stands on the
shore ‘in the lightning’s glare’ as the
sea foams around her. Divided into
eight parts, the choir lives every
twist and turn of this exhilarating
piece to produce a genuinely
thrilling performance. The quicker,
more characterful songs included
are also well executed, notably the
crisp and delicate ‘The Sea Shell’
and the fiercely dramatic ‘The Lee
Shore’, which offers another stirring
portrayal of stormy waters.
Elsewhere, there are some lapses
in intonation and an even more
varied exploration of timbre would
sometimes be welcome, particularly
in the quieter, more atmospheric
songs, such as ‘Dead in the Sierras’,
which conjures up the landscape of
Sierra Nevada in a narrative telling
of the death of a hunter. Nonetheless,
this well-recorded album features
some commendable singing and
offers a welcome celebration of a still
under-sung composer.
Kate Wakeling
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING ++++
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 81
Choral & Song Reviews
Handel
Messiah
Lucy Crowe (soprano) et al; The
English Concert/John Nelson
Erato 5419774160 167:28 mins (2 discs)
At the age of 80
John Nelson
finally feels ready
to record Handel’s
Messiah. It’s not
just a labour of
love, but an act of faith – literally
so; and to underline the oratorio’s
message the recording was made
live in that symbol of hope and
reconciliation: Coventry Cathedral.
(Doubly sacred for Nelson since
it was here in 1962 that Britten
conducted the premiere of his War
Requiem – and in addition to the
double-disc set, the ‘pilgrimage’ is
further enshrined in a bonus DVD).
What to expect when a conductor
fêted for his sumptuous Berlioz joins
forces with the historically informed
forces of The English Concert? If the
Sinfony hints at an old-fashioned
approach – compounded by a
somewhat lugubrious opening to
Part 2 – in the event, with a few
exceptions, Nelson’s tempos are
actually quite brisk, and now and
then keep the choir hanging on for
dear life. (Sleek yet chiselled, the
chorus is also distinctly mellifluous,
perhaps, at times, to a fault).
The theatrical instincts that
have served Nelson so well in
Berlioz ensure some detailed
characterisation such as the
semiquaver flurry of beating wings
as the angels prepare to impart
their joyous message. And baritenor
Michael Spyres is not afraid to
unleash a little operatic heft where
necessary. Nimbly-executed,
‘Every Valley’ is enthusiastically
embellished, and the accompanied
recitative ‘Thy rebuke hath Broken
His heart’ distils a scena-like
intensity. All four soloists are
outstanding; and if Lucy Crowe’s
‘Rejoice Greatly’ is a tour de force
of coloratura brio, its 1741 original
version – included in a useful
appendix of variant arias – proves a
breezy charmer. Paul Riley
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Arvo Pärt
Tractus – Sacred Works
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber
Choir; Tallinn Chamber Orchestra/
Tõnu Kaljuste
ECM ECM2800 65:06 mins
82 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Passionate interplay:
Randall Scotting
and Jorge Navarro
Colorado explore
17th-century love
Tractus is an
attractive
collection of
works inspired
by religious texts,
composed by
Arvo Pärt over the past quarter of
a century. The title comes from the
opening work, Littlemore Tractus,
a meditative setting of an extract
of a sermon by Cardinal Newman,
commissioned to mark the
bicentenary of his birth.
The link between clergyman
and composer is telling: Newman
rejected the modernising of the
Anglican liturgy, calling for a return
to its pre-Reformation roots; Pärt
rejected Serialism and Modernism,
turning to Gregorian chant and
Renaissance polyphony.
These choral and orchestral
works were composed during a
period when Pärt was expanding
and loosening the formal
minimalist style which he calls
‘Tintinnabuli’, in which repeated
triads underpin simple melodic
lines to produce a hypnotic effect.
The accomplished forces assembled
here perform with an understated
purity and pinpoint accuracy that
can sometimes feel anonymous.
These Words, for orchestra, is the
most expressionistic of the works
featured, restless and visceral. Most
impressive of all is the Cantique
des degrés, a setting of Psalm 121
commissioned by the royal family of
Monaco. The majestic sweep of the
chorus and orchestra is punctuated
by glowing brass fanfares, revealing
an exuberant side to Pärt, full of
festive flair.
In stark contrast is L’abbé
Agathon, a mystical ballad for solo
soprano. The unusual orchestration
for four cellos and four violas gives
scope for some vivid scene-setting,
and Maria Listra delivers an
immaculate account, haunting in
her high pianissimo singing.
Conductor Tõnu Kaljuste and
ECM’s producer Manfred Eicher
are Pärt’s long-term collaborators,
and they make an utterly assured
contribution to this concentrated
retrospective of the composer’s
approachable, deeply felt
compositional style.
Ashutosh Khandekar
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING +++++
Enigma
Works by Rachmaninov,
Schubert, Messiaen, Wolf,
Ravel, Jörg Widmann and
Andreas Tsiartas
Sarah Aristidou (soprano), Daniel
Arkadij Gerzenberg (piano); Jörg
Widmann (clarinet)
Alpha Classics ALPHA740 73:06 mins
This
Mediterranean-
inspired album
opens with
Andreas Tsiartas’s
striking Lamento
Turco, an increasingly imploring
vocal meditation delivered
with passion and imagination
by Aristidou. Rachmaninov’s
oversentimental Vocalise is then
dispatched swiftly, before his ‘A-oo!’,
a weighty song of yearning.
Not every transition works;
Schubert’s warhorse ‘Der Hirt auf
dem Felsen’ sounds a little frivolous
after Rachmaninov, though
the performance benefits from
Widmann’s bright, glowing sound
and an expansive, arch-Romantic
approach from Aristidou (whose
voice is really terrific).
Aristidou’s approach is fine in
the earlier repertoire but really
comes to life in newer works,
including Messaien’s ‘Répétition
planétaire!’ (from the cycle
Harawi), depicting the music of the
universe. Gerzenberg shines here,
too, layering colours and textures
with care and craft. The exotic
improvisation ‘Enigma’ works well
and does not outstay its welcome.
The move to Wolf’s setting of
Mörike’s paean to an Aeolian harp
is successful, not least because
of the exquisitely judged piano
sound. Ravel’s popular Greek
song ‘Chanson des cueilleuses
de lentisques’ is breathtakingly
intimate, hazy with sunshine.
Schubert’s ‘Nachtstück’ is a touch
bland and woolly but redeemed by
a luminous rendition of ‘L’escalier
redit, gestes du soleil’ (also from
Harawi). Widmann’s substantial
and otherworldly Sphinxensprüche
und Rätselkanons is the perfect close.
This is intriguing and original
music making. It’s a pity that they
didn’t include any music by a
woman, and I would have preferred
a substantial liner note, rather than
effusions about the mysterious
infinity of life. But the performance
is tremendously versatile, seductive
and white-hot. Natasha Loges
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING +++++
 Choral & Song Reviews
Infinite Refrain,
music of love’s refuge
Arias etc by Monteverdi, Merula,
Melani, Cavalli, Girolamo,
Castrovillari, Frescobaldi,
Boretti, Strade et al
Randall Scotting (countertenor);
Jorge Navarro Colorado; Academy of
Ancient Music/Laurence Cummings
Signum Classics SIGCD769 66:52 mins
In the
introduction to
his programme of
Baroque Venetian
madrigals and
arias Randall
Scotting writes that it explores the
‘nuances of gay love in the 17th
century.’ Be wary! The word ‘gay’
would have meant something else to
Venetians four centuries ago, while
the word ‘homosexuality’ belongs
to the psychopathologies of the 19th
century. If Monteverdi’s madrigals
and Baroque opera arias speak of
same-sex love, then it’s cast from the
mould of ‘passionate friendship’.
This is not to say that real passion
doesn’t run deep through much of
this music. Countertenor Scotting
borrows your heart in Monteverdi’s
‘Con che soavità’ when a lover
asks how can one speak and kiss
at the same time, while conductor
Laurence Cummings and the
Academy of Ancient Music watch
and play in wonder.
Neither is the tenor Jorge Navarro
Colorado a wall flower when it
comes to love. ‘Se pur destina e vole’,
from Monteverdi’s Seventh Book of
Madrigals is an extended lament for
a lost lover, with Colorado creating
a finely spun vocal line through
lacerating heartbreak. If elsewhere
his tone can be a little monochrome
he’s vibrantly seductive in his
duets with Scotting. ‘Perchè fuggi’
– Monteverdi again – finds both
singers easing deliciously into
the chest resister as a shepherd
who didn’t want to be kissed flees
through a willow tree.
Laurence Cummings, who
plays keyboard solos through the
recital, has an unerring sense of the
lover’s psychology. Listen to the
rising phase on the word ‘baci’ in
‘Tornate, o cari baci’ or the delicate
modulation as the lover accuses
his beloved of ‘bitter tenderness.’
Who can doubt the depth of feelings
between two men?
Christopher Cook
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING +++++
Winter Journeys
Works by Hammerschmidt,
Schein, Senfl et al
Hanna Herfurtner (soprano), David
Erler (alto) et al; Lautten Compagney
Berlin/Wolfgang Katschner
DHM 19439934032 67:46 mins
Winter Journeys
explores the
universal themes
of wandering and
longing, joy and
faith in the pit of
Winter. Traditional Germanic songs
interlard art works by Praetorius,
Schütz, Schein and less well-known
composers like Heinrich Erlebach
and Andreas Hammerschmidt.
Since its founding in 1984, the
Berlin-based Lautten Compagney
has developed a reputation for its
creative programming which often
crosses boundaries between folk
and art, early and contemporary
music. On their latest album,
traditional German tunes and songs
are realised in eclectic arrangements
by cellist-composer Bo Wiget,
whose influences embrace jazz,
pop, minimalism and film music.
Wiget practically orchestrates these
works, exploiting the colouristic
and textural effects of different
combinations of bowed strings,
harpsichord, organ, dulcian,
sackbut, cornett, recorder, lute,
chitarrone, colascione and a
battery of percussion instruments
that tingle and tangle and tap
incessantly. Woven into such busy
textures, these traditional works lose
their simplicity and tend to sound
more like film music than folk.
To my mind, the most successful
performances are the Renaissance
and Baroque works where the
ensemble’s sumptuous colours
are more fitting. Erlebach’s lament
‘Meine Seufzer, meine Klagen’
is sung with haunting pathos
by soprano Hanna Herfurtner;
Hammerschmidt’s ‘Jesu, mein Jesu’
and ‘Sey willkommen, Jesulein’ are
aptly tender and intimate, while
Senfl’s ‘Ach Elslein, liebes Elslein
mein’ is yearningly beautiful
(though the added percussion seems
unnecessary). The vocal numbers
are punctuated by movements
from an instrumental suite by
Schein, ebulliently played. In sum,
you’re likely to love or loathe the
freedom and inventiveness of these
renditions. Kate Bolton-Porciatti
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING +++++
Chamber
CHAMBER CHOICE

Rich rewards from the Busch’s restraint

Ravel and Shostakovich trios benefit from this considered approach, says Erik Levi

After the Mediterranean glow of

the Ravel, the glacial disembodied Sheer sonic beauty:
textures that open the Shostakovich the Busch Trio elicits
Ravel • Shostakovich come as something of a shock. The great emotional
range in these works
Ravel: Piano Trio in A minor; Buschs impressively project the
Shostakovich: Piano Trio No. 2 in emptiness of this opening passage
E minor, Op. 67 by maintaining a cool distant
Busch Trio sound with minimum vibrato. Such
Alpha Classics ALPHA1002 51:51 mins restraint pays dividends later in the
The Busch Trio has the depth of movement where they ratchet up the
musicianship to encompass the very tension with destabilising changes
different emotions of these great of tempo. There’s no emotional
20th-century chamber works. In the relief in the ensuing Scherzo, which
Ravel, I was utterly mesmerised by is delivered with snarling accents at
the sheer beauty breakneck speed
of sound that the The dreamlike quality before we plunge
performers conjure once again into
up in the opening
of the Ravel comes the abyss with
movement. The across vividly the doom-laden
music’s dreamlike chords that open
quality comes across particularly the Passacaglia. The Finale is the
vividly, without any indulgence. most challenging movement both
At the same time, there’s no lack for the players and the listeners.
of urgency in the more agitated But once again, the Buschs focus on
full-blooded sections that have a holding back for as long as possible,
tremendous visceral energy. Similar so that when the climax is eventually
qualities abound in the rest of the reached – with the forceful
work, with a wonderfully mercurial restatement of the Trio’s opening
account of the second movement material – the impact is absolutely
‘Pantoum’, a stoic and dignified overwhelming.
You can access thousands of reviews from our extensive archive on
‘Passacaille’ and a ‘Final’ that builds PERFORMANCE +++++
the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
up to a powerfully assertive climax. RECORDING +++++

Beethoven
String Quartets, Vol. 1 – String
Quartets Nos 1, 6, 11, 12; String
Quartet in F major, Op. 59 No. 1
Doric String Quartet
Chandos CHAN20298-2
157:57 mins (2 discs)
The Doric String
Quartet has
already nailed
its colours to
the mast with
well-received
recordings of Schumann,
Mendelssohn, Purcell and Britten
(also Chandos). Now they are
beginning to do the same with
Beethoven: this double-album is
a taster for the complete set, with
five works spanning the composer’s
early, middle and late periods. And
for listeners with long memories –
and even short ones – they face
stiff competition.
My own memories go back to the
recordings laid down in the early
’60s by the Amadeus Quartet, whom
I was honoured to welcome to the
stage for a concert at my college in
Oxford. I still love the sweetness of
their cantabile, and their purity of
intention. Then I fell in love with
the Quartetto Italiano, thanks to
the magisterial conviction of their
playing. Then it was the Borodin
Quartet, with their stately slow
movements. One could sense this
group’s history through their music
– friends with Shostakovich, whose
quartet cycle they premiered, they
had also played at Stalin’s funeral;
for them music really was a matter
of life and death. Today there are
excellent contenders for the crown.
I have just one reservation
about the Dorics’ version, and it
concerns the volume of the sound.
Sometimes it seems to come from
so far away as to be literally almost
inaudible, and sometimes it’s in
your face. There are times – as in the
second movement of Op. 59 No 1,
which feels as though it’s conceived
spatially – when these fluctuations
are appropriate, but on other
occasions the line of Beethoven’s
thought is arbitrarily interrupted. Is
this due to sound engineering?
In all other respects, this cycle
has got off to a splendid start, with
glorious slow movements, much
solo beauty and a finely judged
sense of ensemble.
There are also moments of wit:
the way the quartet exits from the
Scherzo in Op. 127 is delicately
theatrical, as though the performers
are taking a last peek through the
curtains before scampering off.
Michael Church
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING +++
Beethoven • Schubert
Beethoven: String Quartet No. 14 in
C sharp minor, Op. 131; Schubert:
String Quartet No. 14 in D minor,
‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet
Sacconi Quartet
Orchid Classics ORC100265 80:07 mins

84 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


The Sacconis
have been
together now for
21 years, making
them one of the
UK’s longest-
running quartets. To celebrate the
milestone they have finally allowed
themselves to set down their long-
developed performances of works
that represent the summit of the
artform: Schubert’s ‘Death and the
Maiden’ and Beethoven’s almost
contemporaneous C sharp minor
Quartet, Op. 131.
The players have a notable
consistency of tone, perhaps partly
thanks to the fact that the three
higher instruments are all by the
influential 20th-century Italian
luthier from which the quartet takes
its name; in any case, it takes its lead
from the sweetness of Ben Hancox’s
first violin. The performances
are closely recorded, making for a
feeling of directness and intimacy
rather than spaciousness, and a
focus on nuanced choices of tone
colour – such as the breath-like
sound at the beginning of the
Schubert’s slow movement, almost
evoking an accordion. Elsewhere
this work sounds tautly wound,
the playing crisp and punchy,
the inner rhythms measured and
precise, each voice clear – it’s an
interpretation of calculated drive
rather than abandon.
The Beethoven initially unfolds
with a sense of inevitability, and
little ruffles the surface in the first
movement, but in the Variations that
all changes, and in the fifth of the
seven movements the players make
much of the exaggerated pizzicatos
and the abrasive effects at the end.
A dramatic finale wraps up another
detailed – and ultimately very
satisfying –performance.
Erica Jeal
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Fauré • Franck • Poulenc
• Saint-Saëns
Saint-Saëns: Cello Concerto No. 1;
Fauré: Romance Op 69; Papillon;
Franck: Violin Sonata FWV 8 in A
(trans. for cello and piano by Jules
Delsart); Poulenc: Cello Sonata
Bruno Philippe (cello);
Tanguy de Williencourt (piano);
HR Sinfonieorchester/
KAUPO KIKKAS
Christoph Eschenbach
Harmonia Mundi HMM 902316
81:46 mins
There is much to
enjoy here, but
sadly less happy
moments as well.
Bruno Philippe
possesses a
lovely tone in lyrical items such as
Fauré’s Romance and Après un rêve,
and technically is well up to all the
challenges. His best interpretation
is of the Poulenc Cello Sonata, in
which he and pianist Tanguy de
Williencourt manage the surrealist
elements, moving from lyrical
suavity to demotic perkiness and
back. He can’t be blamed for some
scratchiness in Fauré’s Papillon since
no cellist I’ve ever heard has avoided
it in this piece – one of Fauré’s less
enjoyable offerings, which his
publisher vainly tried to rescue by
calling it first ‘Dragonflies’, then
‘Butterflies’, much to the composer’s
fury. But he and his colleagues
are undeniably responsible for
various doubtful readings in the
Franck Violin Sonata and in the
Saint-Saëns First Concerto. A habit
has taken hold in the former, and
adopted here, of playing the piano’s
four introductory bars of major
ninths not only more slowly than
what follows, but with rubato. This
is surely a nonsense. They are there
firstly to establish the tempo, and
secondly, with rhythm accepted, to
rouse our harmonic interest in what
this discord might lead to. At the
very end of the sonata, the marking
poco animato becomes hysterical,
destroying the movement’s majesty.
Finally, in the first movement of the
concerto the second theme should
be taken at the current tempo, not
more slowly, while the first violins’
high triplets elsewhere are drowned
by woodwind. Roger Nichols
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING +++
Handel
Total Eclipse: Handel at Home,
Vol. 2 – Arias etc (arr. chamber)
London Handel Players
SOMM Recordings SOMMCD0676
75:31 mins
Handel at Home
is a sequel to the
2006 original,
the brainchild of
flautist Rachel
Brown. The 2023
project extends the initial concept
of turning period arrangements of
Handel opera hits into searingly
gorgeous instrumental music.
Brown and violinist Adrian
Butterfield are the only two of the
original five players in this new
ensemble, whose seven members
relish altering Handel numbers even
more drastically.
Handel was renowned for
re-purposing older music, both his
own and others’, so this project’s
interventions mine a vein of period
practice. Making such creations fizz
is no easy task, requiring as it does a
three-fold virtuosity in composition,
execution and extemporisation, but
this recording consistently succeeds.
An incandescent presence, Brown
deploys her invention, and the
particular qualities of the traverse
flute – its sensitivity to touch and
breath, its audible woodiness, its
luminous colours – to create a music
wholly her own. One may be very
familiar with different renditions of
‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, but it is difficult
to be prepared for how Brown keeps
deepening its expression. Equally
fascinating is Butterfield’s one-to-
a-part version of Handel’s Sonata
a 5 in B-flat major (HWV 288); the
shading and textures he brings to
his line, and the Corellian lashings
which he and the others apply to
their parts, are their invention.
Silas Wollston bends Handel’s
harpsichord version of ‘Ombra
cara’ into a revelatory excursus:
under Wollston’s fingers, the aria
becomes an intricately voiced,
delicately timed, soul-baring
almost-sonata, as if this were
the music Handel first imagined
before being forced to submit to the
exigencies of opera seria.
By restoring the role of composer
to its performers, this project shows
Chamber Reviews
Salon transformations:
London Handel Players
reimagine opera arias
period practice coming into its own.
Berta Joncus
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++
Beyond Twilight
Works by Horrocks, A Coleridge-
Taylor, Dunlop, Marie Dare et al
Alexandra Mackenzie (cello),
Ingrid Sawers (piano)
Delphian DCD34306 62:39 mins
‘What’s in a
name?’ wonders
Shakespeare’s
Juliet, lamenting
the divide
between
the Montagues and Capulets.
Centuries later, women continue the
speculation, with many hampered
by the societal implications of their
given moniker – particularly if they
intend to author words or compose
music. Of the 14 largely unknown
works featured on Beyond Twilight,
several were inscribed only with
androgynous initials. AE Horrocks
(1867–1919) – Amy – studied at the
Royal Academy of Music (RAM)
and went on to have several pieces
performed at the Proms. Her
1901 piece Twilight (Rêverie) was
rediscovered in the RAM library
by cellist Alexandra Mackenzie
and pianist Ingrid Sawers during
the pandemic. Very much a cello
solo with piano accompaniment, it
has hints of Grieg, with languorous
melodies that stretch out like a
contented dog by a fire.
The work opens a recital
containing other short pieces the
duo found during their 2020-21
trawl; the majority are premiere
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 85
Chamber Reviews
recordings. Some, such as ‘Chanson
espagnole’, the third part of Ivy
Parkin (1886–c1963)’s Three Pieces
are fairly simple, with clean melodic
lines and a jaunty accompaniment.
Others, like Andante Religioso
by Harriett Claiborne Dixon
(1879–1928), who became a RAM
Associate, are more rhapsodic –
Sawers solders the inner filigree
with a steady hand.
During the late 1940s, the Isle of
Jura was home to a famous literary
resident: George Orwell moved into
Barnhill, the remote farmhouse
where he wrote 1984. But, it turns
out, he was not the only creative
inspired by the misty Scottish
wilderness at that time. Marie Dare
(1902-76) began her Hebridean Suite
in 1947, adding further contrasting
movements in 1951. From a
shimmering ‘Shieling Song’ to a
shaded sea shanty, Mackenzie plays
with appropriate panache.
Claire Jackson
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING ++++
Corellimania
Works by JS Bach, Corelli,
Handel, Telemann
Michala Petri (recorder), Hille Perl
(viola da gamba), Mahan Esfahani
(harpsichord)
OUR Recordings 6.220682 75:46 mins
The title
Corellimania
needs to be
taken with a
pinch of salt.
The programme
is a mixture of arrangements or
transcriptions and, in the case of the
two Handel items, pieces written for
the instruments by which they are
played on the album. Furthermost
from Corelli’s violinist style are the
four duets contained in the third
part of JS Bach’s Clavier-Übung,
here assigned to recorder and
viola da gamba. The inclusion of
his Fugue on a theme by Corelli,
BWV 579, is contextually apposite.
Corelli himself is represented by a
Sonata da chiesa from his Op. 3 Trio
Sonatas, and the popular Sonata
based on the famous 17th-century
Follia melody. Corelli wrote its 24
variations for violin but Michala
Petri plays a version for recorder
published in London early in the
18th century. The fourth composer
featured is Telemann. His six
Sonatas Corellisantes were published
in 1735. Petri, Hille Perl and Mahan
Esfahani have chosen the second
86 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
in the set. In his accompanying
essay Esfahani finds little in the
music other than the order of
movements that is particularly
Corellian. I beg to differ for, while
the Italian style is never strictly
imitated it nevertheless provides a
clear point of departure, sometimes
featuring hallmarks of the older
composer such as suspensions in the
upper parts. The Trio, in A major,
introduces galant gestures to
the programme.
Along with the Telemann, the
Handel Sonata in D minor for treble
recorder affords especial pleasure.
Long known in Thurston Dart’s
edition as one of the Fitzwilliam
sonatas, owing to its autograph in
Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum,
it is a sparkling work of Handel’s
youth. Petri’s fluent and modestly
ornamented playing addresses itself
to the varied humours of its seven-
movements, while Perl and Esfahani
provide discreet accompaniment.
Nicholas Anderson
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING +++
Many Voices: Ensemble
Works by Abel Selaocoe, James
MacMillan, Roderick Williams,
Sonia Allori et al
Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective
NMC NMCDL3053 (digital) 37:13 mins
The flexible roster
of musicians that
comprise the
Kaleidoscope
Chamber
Collective drive
this project, though most of the ideas
come from primary school children.
Shimmering discoveries:
Alexandra Mackenzie (l) and
Ingrid Sawers (r) celebrate
overlooked women composers
The concept involved creating high-
quality pieces for young musicians
(Grades 2-6) to play within a school
setting, and the results showcase
themes that are audibly and
obviously from the children. While
in one sense there is nothing new in
this collection, the difference is the
deliberate use of a smaller ensemble;
in this case, string and percussion
instruments and the voice.
Most of these pieces work really
well, though it occasionally feels as
though the music is concentrated on
sound effects, rather than coherent
phrases that could be developed
into something more exciting. There
is always the danger after all that
the freeing and rich imagination
of children goes off on so many
tangents that bringing the musical
threads together becomes too
disjointed. On that basis, the pieces
that work most successfully are
Aileen Sweeney’s The Corryvreckan
Whirlpool, a delightful folk tune
based on the mythical Scottish
creature known as The Cailleach,
and Tom Poster’s very pretty Lullaby
and Waddle for Puffin. It’s worth
noting that reproducing the latter
without an excellent pianist could
be challenging.
There were multiple other
ideas on this recording that form
a wonderful basis for creative
ensemble music making, though
it cannot be underestimated how
playing and teaching all of this
without musical specialists in our
schools would be impossible.
Anne Templer
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING ++++
Stained Glass
Works by Bacewicz, Ravel,
L Boulanger, Prokofiev and
Arvo Pärt
Johan Dalene (violin), Christian Ihle
Hadland (piano)
BIS BIS-2730 (CD/SACD) 68:48 mins
Taking its over-
arching title
from Witraż
(Stained Glass
Window), the
final piece of its
Bacewicz group, this recital
programme is truly delectable.
Ravel and Prokofiev make perfect
companions, their violin sonatas
complementing one another
despite, or perhaps because of, their
contrasting personal languages;
Prokofiev, writing in the USSR in
1943, was profoundly influenced
by the French works of the 1920s, at
which time he had been living
in Paris. Boulanger’s Nocturne harks
back to 1911, Bacewicz’s characterful
short pieces mostly to the 1950s
in communist Poland and Pärt’s
ubiquitous Fratres to the present
day, yet there’s a distinct sense that
these composers are sibling spirits
who can meld the personal, the
dark and the shining into colourful
soundworlds of their own. Witraż
itself is an early Bacewicz work,
under the mesmerising spell
of Szymanowski.
Dalene and Hadland make an
excellent duo – equal partners who
bounce ideas off one another with
oodles of vitality. Dalene often
presents a gorgeous sound. Yet it is
perhaps in his efforts to characterise
the music that he sometimes pushes
matters to extremes, leading to
moments that sound forced and
too angry. It’s not that the works
themselves do not contain sardonic
twists and turns – they do – or that
beauty alone is all that’s desirable
– it’s not. But a forced, barking
tone risks distracting us from
the music itself. This approach
becomes a problem in the opening
solo of Fratres and resurfaces to
the detriment of the Prokofiev’s
Scherzo, among other examples.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a contemporary
trope: we’re all used to being barked
at and bludgeoned by exaggerated
opinions these days. It’s a pity that
it has been getting into musical
interpretation as well.
Jessica Duchen
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
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Instrumental
INSTRUMENTAL CHOICE

Osborne’s timeless Debussy is a winner

The pianist perfectly matches artistry with technical skill, says Rebecca Franks

rubato and, in Debussy’s own words,

Debussy
Études; Pour le piano; Étude
retrouvée; Berceuse héroïque;
La plus que lente
Steven Osborne (piano)
Hyperion CDA68409 67:06 mins
Czerny was the master of the study
designed to stretch, strengthen and
enliven a pianist’s fingers, while
Chopin breathed fiery inspiration
into the form. And if the echo of a
teaching exercise
lingers, deliberately The beautiful
and amusingly,
in the opening of
recorded sound has a ‘Pour
Debussy’s first lovely clear balance shimmer and
Étude, it’s to the
memory of Chopin that the French
composer dedicated his own set of
12. These late works, written in the
summer of 1915, during a summer
on the coast at Pourville, France,
are dazzling short essays exploring
abstract musical intervals, and
the timbres and sonorities of the
piano. They need a pianist of vast
technical capability, an incredible
sensitivity to the layering, colour
and quality of sound, seamless
‘remarkable hands’.
In Steven Osborne, we have
such a musician – and this album
of Debussy’s Études is full of
superlatives. Marvel at the meltingly
even thirds in ‘Pour les tierces’, the
delicious range of articulation,
and the almost Rachmaninov-like
outpouring at the end. Linger in the
timeless mood of ‘Pour les Quartes’,
all cool fourths, and the way in
which Osborne oscillates between
flurries and stillness. Or admire the
muscular playing
in the outbursts of
les Octaves’.
Then there’s the
scamper Osborne
conjures for ‘Pour les huit doigts’, and
the dancing energy he channels in
‘Pour les notes répétées’. The list could
go on. Technique and artistry are
perfectly allied – and the beautiful Sensitivity and show:
Steven Osborne pivots
recorded sound has a lovely balance
effortlessly between
of clarity, space and resonance. Debussy’s dynamics
Pour le piano, La plus que lente and
the Berceuse héroïque complete the
programme in style.
You can access thousands of reviews from our extensive archive on
PERFORMANCE +++++
the BBC Music Magazine website at www.classical-music.com
RECORDING +++++

JS Bach
Sonatas & Partitas, Vol. 2
Frank Peter Zimmermann (violin)
BIS BIS-2587 62:18 mins
Ever since their
first publication
in 1802 the
idiomatic and
exuberant
polyphony of
Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for
solo violin have challenged and
absorbed performers, composers,
commentators and audiences alike.
Here is the second volume of Frank
Peter Zimmermann’s complete
recording of these wonderful pieces.
He enters an arena generously
populated by competing artists from
Enescu, Menuhin, Martzy, Milstein
and Grumiaux to much more recent
accounts by Hilary Hahn, Viktoria
Mullova, Julia Fischer, Christine
Busch, Alina Ibraginova and others.
Among the immediately striking
differences between then and now
are today’s preferences for lighter
bowing and brisker tempos, though
performers of earlier generations
often could surprise us with dazzling
feats of articulate athleticism.
Zimmermann’s virtuosity is beyond
question as he breathtakingly
demonstrates in the second Double
of the B minor Partita. Occasionally
I found myself wishing that he
could find merit in more relaxed
tempos and a more punctuated
dialogue. The Tempo di Borea
of the Partita lacked amiability
and my ears detected one or two poetically felt. It is my misfortune
chordal infelicities. Such small not yet to have encountered
details as these pale into relative Zimmermann’s first volume.
insignificance as Zimmermann Nicholas Anderson
progresses majestically and with PERFORMANCE ++++
expressive sensibility through the RECORDING ++++
C major Sonata with its elegiac
opening Adagio and immense multi- Beethoven
layered Fuga, 354 bars in length. He Symphonies Nos 1 & 6
manages its contrapuntal density (arr. Scharwenka)
with luminous linear clarity and a Tessa Uys, Ben Schoeman (piano)
fluent understanding of rhetoric. SOMM SOMMCD0677 74:06 mins
A veritable tour-de-force which Almost all
he follows with a limpidly bowed Beethoven’s
Largo and a crisply articulated 19th-century
Allegro assai, where he meets Bach’s domestic listeners
merciless demands with seeming would have
insouciance. This is masterly playing encountered
of music full of challenges and his symphonies via piano
pitfalls, lucidly argued and often transcriptions, and Liszt famously

88 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE


created his own. But faced with the
challenge of the fourth movement of
the Ninth Symphony even he gave
up: he was ‘inevitably and distinctly
convinced of the impossibility of
making any pianoforte arrangement
for two hands that could in any
way be even approximately effective
or satisfactory’.
Enter Tessa Uys and Ben
Schoeman armed with four hands,
with their complete Beethoven series
now reaching its fourth volume with
the First and Sixth Symphonies.
I approached this release with
scepticism – it seems such a quixotic
thing to do – but I was quickly
won over thanks to Franz Xaver
Scharwenka’s ingenious solutions
to the problems the symphonies
throw up. And four hands prove
much more than twice as effective as
Liszt’s two.
Uys and Schoeman have no
trouble creating a world-shaking
Beethovenian storm in the Sixth
Symphony, and their evocation of
the peasant dances have a properly
earthy conviviality; when peace
descends again, the richness of their
palette dispels any hint of boredom.
They nicely catch the ebullience
and wit of the Menuetto in the First
Symphony, and they authoritatively
communicate the harmonic
complexity of that work’s finale.
We usually think of Busoni’s
arrangements in terms of Bach, so
it’s nice to learn that he was also a
Mozart fan. What this pair do with
what Busoni did with Mozart K459
is brilliantly conceived and light as a
feather. Michael Church
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Gurney
Piano Sonatas Nos 1 and 3;
Piano Sonata No. 2 – Adagio;
Five Preludes; Autumn
George Rowley (piano)
Naxos 8.574479 74:48 mins
In his pioneering
book of 1978, The
Ordeal of Ivor
Gurney, Michael
Hurd deservedly
praised the songs
of this tortured composer and poet,
BENJAMIN EALOVEGA, MARCO BORGGREVE
but didn’t mince words about the
instrumental music. ‘The quantity
is there,’ he wrote, ‘but quality is
largely absent.’ Sonatas and quartets
begin with ‘excellent ideas’, then
‘degenerate into note-spinning’.
I was fully prepared to disagree,
but the music and to some extent
George Rowley’s performances
just didn’t let me. It’s not a matter
of the audible influences (Chopin,
Scriabin, Schumann and others)
weighing upon individual pieces,
whether written early in Gurney’s
composing life (the First Sonata is
from 1910) or in the peak years a
decade later. But structural flaws
persistently undermine enjoyment:
good ideas get overworked, or
stifled by too much padding,
particularly unfortunate in the
gloomy landscapes of the more
individualistic Third Sonata. Most
of the shorter pieces, as expected, are
more convincing, with interesting
Scriabin-esque wanderings in the
Preludes of 1919, though even an
earlier programmatic morsel like the
misty and mellow Autumn begins
strongly only to develop a wobble.
Music smacking of effort rather
than sustained inspiration needs
particularly sensitive handling
to make it come alive. British
pianist George Rowley is clearly
sympathetic to the cause, though
his rather plain approach to the
notes doesn’t help those passages
where repeated phrases or constant
semiquavers can easily seem tricks
to fill out a blank page rather than
essential elements in the composer’s
train of thought. Gurney’s songs,
darkly intense, remain his best
advertisement. Geoff Brown
PERFORMANCE +++
RECORDING +++
Mompou
Piano Works – Paisajes;
Variations sur un thème de
Chopin; Cançons i danses
Marina Staneva (piano)
Chandos CHAN20276 82:21 mins
The Bulgarian
pianist Marina
Staneva is
taking quite a
large risk, but
certainly not an
unwelcome one, by choosing the
music of Federico Mompou for her
second Chandos solo recording.
The programme is well selected: the
poetic Paisajes, showing the most
Debussyan side of Mompou’s music,
are followed by the Variations sur un
thème de Chopin, which manages to
transform that composer’s brief A
major Prelude into 12 imaginative
miniatures. Finally the Cançons i
danses, written between 1921 and
1962 (Mompou, born in 1893, died
as recently as 1987), bring a chance
to delve into a wealth of subtly
Instrumental Reviews
evoked atmospheres and nuanced
states of mind.
Mompou has a small but strong
cult following among piano fanatics;
others who have championed him
include such luminaries as Stephen
Hough and Arcadi Volodos. Staneva,
trained in Sofia and more recently in
London, nevertheless holds her own
with considerable flair.
She draws a deep, cushioned
sound from the piano and seemingly
does not see any need to sacrifice
thoughtfulness for plain brilliance.
She brings out the dance elements
that almost always lurk in the
background of the Catalonian
composer’s writing, whether
originating in folk music or jazz,
and performs with a sincerity,
spaciousness, affection for the
music and quiet confidence that
make me eager to hear what she will
do next. All of this, additionally,
makes her a strong advocate for a
composer who can sometimes divide
his audience with that timeless yet
elusive style.
Recorded sound is very warm
and Potton Hall’s intimate acoustic
suits the music, though I sometimes
wondered if the piano itself had been
‘voiced down’ a tad too much.
Jessica Duchen
PERFORMANCE ++++
RECORDING ++++
Violin virtuoso:
Isabelle Faust
is poised and
effortless in Solo
Rachmaninov
Piano Sonata No. 1;
Preludes, Op. 32
Lukas Geniušas (piano)
Alpha Classics ALPHA997 55:45 mins
There’s no playing
to the gallery in
Lukas Geniušas’s
Rachmaninov
with a difference,
though he
could certainly reach to the back
of the largest concert hall with his
resonant fortissimos. Playing on
the Steinway D which was a 60th
birthday present to Rachmaninov
in the spacious-but-still-intimate
main downstairs room of the
composer’s remarkable modernist
Lake Lucerne villa, Geniušas has
brought the original manuscript of
the First Piano Sonata back to life.
Not an early work as the number
might suggest, but contemporary
with the Second Symphony, as the
pianist explains in the booklet note,
an unusual epic built from short,
even repetitive phrases, and the
first version – not usually an option
as is the case with the much-more-
easily graspable Second Sonata
– runs to even greater length. There
are no longueurs, though, in this
compelling interpretation, with
Geniušas running the dynamic
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 89
Instrumental Reviews
gamut in the first two minutes. More
than that, or the usual soft-veined
poetry, there’s a uniqueness about
the sound which sets this recording
in a class of its own: an otherworldly,
often bell-like quality, of crescendos
building naturally to climaxes that
don’t bash you over the head (as this
work can do).
The cover misleadingly suggests
we get all 13 Op. 32 Preludes; there
are in fact only four, but they evoke
different worlds, too, and again first
thoughts give us some differences –
notably the unison at the start of the
majestic No. 13 in D flat major. More
from this pianist in this unique
venue, please. David Nice
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++
Profesión
Villa-Lobos: Prelude No. 3 in A
minor (Homage to Bach); 12 Studies;
Barrios: La catedral; Ginastera:
Sonata, Op. 47
Sean Shibe (guitar)
Pentatone PTC 5187 054 62:05 mins
Sean Shibe’s
album Profesión –
the title of which
is taken from
the composer
Agustín Barrios’s
poem ‘Profession of Faith’ – presents
much of the significant classical
guitar repertoire of the 20th century,
drawing on an astonishing array of
styles and sonorities. Indeed, the
opening chords of this recording
produced such resonance and
vibrancy that at first it seemed as if
the sonic effects had been produced
electronically. Copious sleeve notes
however, revealed the recording
was made in the beautiful Medieval
Crichton Church, providing all
the magical and spiritual sensory
experience one could hope for from
an acoustic recording.
This comprehensive programme
produces at times astonishing effects
that are all the more surprising
because of their immediate
juxtaposition of dynamics and
colours; Shibe has the extraordinary
ability to perform dramatically
contrasting moods without any
sense of it coming. The Canto from
Alberto Ginastera’s Sonata for
example displays a startling range
of techniques and flourishes, while
in Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Allegro non
CHRISTOPH KOESTLIN
troppo from 12 Studies the sounds are
so soft and shimmery, one can barely
hear any contact with the strings at
all; the notes just seem to spill out of
90 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
the instrument. The exploration of
phrasing is also fully exposed and
the clarity of slurs and beautifully
controlled ornaments, as well as the
percussive effects of ‘comping’ (most
notably in the Brazilian flavoured
Finale) are joyfully unleashed.
This is a gleaming and brilliant
album that doesn’t fail to awaken the
senses to the exhilarating world of
un-adulterated acoustic sound.
Anne Templer
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++
Solo
Guillemain: Amusement pour le
violon seul; Vilsmayr: Partita No. 5
in G minor; plus works by Biber,
Matteis the Younger, Matteis
the Elder and Pisendel
Isabelle Faust (violin)
Harmonia Mundi HMM902678
54:29 mins
Isabelle Faust’s
compelling
programme of
Baroque works
for solo violin
draws a series of
fascinating connections between
Italian, English, French and Austro-
Germanic composers, and it makes
the perfect companion to her
memorable recording of Bach’s solo
violin works.
Faust’s starting point is a clutch
of pieces by Nicola Matteis, father
and son – London-based Italians
whose lyrical and virtuosic
idiom took England by storm.
The Ayres by Matteis Senior,
Making Waves:
Bruce Liu showcases
his pristine pianism in
a set of French works
whom Roger North dubbed the
‘stupendious Violin Signor’, have a
real sense of improvisatory freedom
in Faust’s hands, while the virtuosic
Fantasia by Matteis Junior positively
takes wing, so breathtakingly
light is her reading of its impulsive
arpeggios.
Impressive, too, is Faust’s account
of the celebrated violinist Pisendel’s
A minor Sonata – a tour de force
that may have influenced Bach.
Notwithstanding the work’s many
technical challenges, Faust’s playing
is poised and effortless. She uses
minimal vibrato, producing a clean,
silvery sound.
The programme also unveils
some less-well-known names:
the Frenchman Louis-Gabriel
Guillemain (whom a contemporary
praised as ‘the most extraordinary
and adroit violinist’) and the
Austrian Johann Joseph Vilsmayr.
Faust realizes Guillemain’s
delightful Amusements with grace
and refinement – apt for the courtly
French idiom – while she carries
off Vilsmayr’s G minor Partita with
balletic agility. Vilsmayr played
in the Salzburg court orchestra
directed by Heinrich Biber, whose
famous ‘Guardian Angel’ Passacaglia
from the Rosary Sonatas closes
the programme. Faust shapes this
monumental piece most eloquently,
drawing a remarkable range of
colours and sonorities from her 1658
violin by Jacobus Stainer.
Kate Bolton-Porciatti
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++
Waves
Rameau: Nouvelles suites de
pièces de clavecin – Gavotte et six
doubles; Les Sauvages; Menuet I & II;
La Poule etc; Ravel: Miroirs; Alkan:
Barcarolle; Le festin d’Ésope
Bruce Liu (piano)
DG 486 4400 56:18 mins
There are now
hundreds of
piano prizes – and
classical music
contests more
generally, as seen
in the recent expansion of the World
Federation of International Music
Competitions – however, few hold
sway like the International Chopin
Piano Competition. Ahead of the
2020 instalment (which would be
delayed until 2021), director Artur
Szklener visited London and, at an
event hosted by the UK’s Chopin
Society, drummed up support
for the series, reminding us of
prestigious past winners: Maurizio
Pollini (1960), Martha Argerich
(1965), Krystian Zimerman (1975)
et al. Latest gold medalist Bruce Liu
may not be cut from the same cloth,
but, as this recital album reveals, he’s
certainly haberdashery adjacent.
Waves is the 26 year-old’s first
studio recording for DG, following
the release of a glorious collection of
live performances captured during
the competition. Having proved his
affinity for Chopin, Liu tackles three
French behemoths of the keyboard:
Rameau, Alkan and Ravel. Recorded
with an acoustic like a dry Riesling,
the Gavotte et six doubles is pristine
without any primness. Liu finds a
rare – miraculous – balance between
the liquidity that works so well in
Chopin and the lightly plucked style
that retains the essence of Rameau’s
originally harpsichord-based music.
Les Sauvages and a selection of
excerpts act as refreshing reboots
among the Gallic wizardry. Alkan’s
beautiful Barcarolle straddles
thoughtful intent and casual poetic
brilliance (practically on a par with
Marc-André Hamelin via Hyperion)
and Le festin d’Ésope is a virtuosic
romp packed with humorous
insight. The inclusion of Ravel’s
entire five-movement Miroirs
elevates the collection; from the
fluttering Noctuelles to the tolling La
vallée des cloches, Liu demonstrates
further versatility and verve.
Claire Jackson
PERFORMANCE +++++
RECORDING +++++
 New on Orchid Classics

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Sacconi Quartet
The Sacconi Quartet celebrates
its 21st birthday with a recording
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repertoire
Charles Owen &
Katya Apekisheva
Two of today’s outstanding
pianists perform a stunning
selection of French 20th-century
music for two pianos
London Voices / Ben Parry
An album featuring world-premiere
recordings of choral music by British
composer Jonathan Rutherford
Kirill Troussov
The latest release from Troussov’s
Live Series, which has seen
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Brief notes
This month’s selection has just a bit of Christmas cheer sprinkled thoughout
Enescu • Mendelssohn Octets
Soloists of the Queen Elisabeth Music
Chapel et al Fuga Libera FUG808
An enjoyable
coupling of
Mendelssohn’s
youthfully exuberant
masterpiece of 1825
with Enescu’s more emotionally
complex work from 75 years later.
Though the performance of the
former sets off in slightly deliberate
fashion, things pick up nicely
thereafter. (JP) ++++
Fabricius
O Liebes Kind – Christmas Music
La Protezione della Musica
Arcantus ARC22042
Lively, vivid
performances by
this German HIP
ensemble of advent
and Christmas music
by the 17th-century composer and
organist. There’s a fine mix of small,
intimate compositions, often for
voice and one or two instruments,
and larger, more ceremonial pieces.
(SW) ++++
Gál
Concertinos for Violin, Cello and
Piano; String Serenade
Nina Karmon (violin), Justus Grimm
(cello) et al Hänssler Classic HC23049
These three
concertinos may
have been composed
in the 1930s (1966
for the cello), but
the soundworld here is a rich,
late Romantic expressionism –
beautifully rendered by the warm,
full sound of the Sinfonietta
Riga and some committed solo
performances. (SW) ++++
Patrick Hawes The Nativity
Voce Chamber Choir/Mark Singleton
Signum SIGCD752
This collection of
new festive works
– some a cappella,
some with organ –
has a general sense
of hushed reverence, nicely suited to
the soft-edged, well balanced voices
of the Voce Chamber Choir. Only
the occasional lapse in intonation
lets it down. (JP) +++
92 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Korngold Chamber Works
Severin von Eckardstein (piano); Alma
Quartet Challenge Classics CC 72932
Part two of the Alma
Quartet’s Korngold
survey sees the
Dutch ensemble
on sparkling form
in early works by the composer.
There’s inventiveness and a sense
of adventure in these burnished
performances – utterly refined, yet
warm and tender too. (CS) ++++
Mendelssohn • Rheinberger
Choral Works
Netherlands Radio Choir/Benjamin
Goodson Pentatone PTC 5187 039
Scored for
unaccompanied
double choir,
Rheinberger’s
1878 Mass in E flat
is a glorious affirmation of the
composer’s faith, radiating joy. It
is sung with passion and elegance
here, as are the earlier, shorter works
by Mendelssohn. (JP) +++++
Poul Ruders Piano Trio
Trio Con Brio Copenhagen
OUR Recordings 9.70892 (EP)
Written for the
artists in question,
Ruders’s take
on the Piano
Trio is certainly
immersive with plenty of colour
in the bookending first and third
movements. The middle section
is a welcome rest from what is
occasionally a wild ride, but by the
end you’re ready for another trip.
Much fun. (MB) +++
Advent Live, Vol. 3 Works by
JS Bach, Helen Grime et al
Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge
Signum Classics SIGCD768
Recorded live
over three years,
this Advent
showcase features
conductors Andrew
Nethsingha and George Herbert
and, fascinatingly, three iterations
of the choir, with and without
female voices – and though the
performances lack that glistening
King’s polish, there’s much to enjoy.
(CS) ++++
Armenian Brilliance Works by
Khachaturian, Vardapet et al
Nikolay Madoyan (violin), Armine
Grigoryan (piano) Naxos 8.574535
An enjoyable
exploration of some
of Armenia’s finest
composers that
ranges from the
famous Adagio from Khachaturian’s
Spartacus and the lushly romantic
Nocturne by Baghdasarian to folkier
works by the likes of Arutiunian and
Mirzoyan. (JP) ++++
Aux étoiles
Works by L Boulanger, Franck et al
Orchestre National de Lyon/Nikolaj
Szeps-Znaider Bru Zane BZ2007
The French
Romantic sensibility
is clearly audible
across this
beautifully played
selection: texture and atmosphere
are everything, tension ebbs and
flows. Most valuable are the rarely
heard/never-yet-recorded works
by the likes of Augusta Holmès and
Victorin Joncières. (SW)+++++
Bath Baroque Christmas
Works by Charpentier, Purcell et al
The Choir of Bath Abbey et al
Regent Records REGCD581
Huw Williams
directs an album of
Baroque music from
German, English and
French composers,
including Purcell’s ‘The Bell
Anthem’ and Charpentier’s Messe
de minuit pour Noël – all fulsomely
rendered, though acoustically a little
inconsistent, in rare arrangements
with period orchestra. (CS) +++
A Choral Christmas
Works by Bob Chilcott et al
Voces8 Foundation Choir & Orchestra/
Barnaby Smith Decca 556 8937
This album stems
from a lockdown
project designed to
lift the spirits, and
boy does it still do
so. The choir is warm and, as ever,
pitch perfect, but it’s Taylor Scott
Davis’s sparkling, roof-raising
arrangements of the classics that
really impress. (MB) +++++
Christmas
Carols, songs etc (arr. cello)
HAUSER (cello) Sony 19658825582
‘People can enjoy it in
the background, even
if they’re not focused
on listening,’ says
Hauser in his album’s
introduction. Pertinent advice
when it comes to this sanitised
and synthesised collection of 14
Christmas baubles. Only for those
with a serious sweet tooth. (CS) ++
Christmas Around the World
Songs, carols etc (arr. choir/brass)
Knabenchor Hannover; London Brass
Rondeau ROP7025
Eclectic, globe-
trotting Christmas
music, arranged for
London Brass and
the Knabenchor
Hannover’s boy singers – where
else will you find the toccata from
Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo spliced
with a medieval carol? In hushed or
ceremonial mode, the voice/brass
combo meshes nicely. (SW) ++++
Christmas Piano with
Alexis Ffrench
Works by Alexis Ffrench et al
Alexis Ffrench (piano)
Sony Classical 19658824632
You’ll want to pop
this one on late on
the 25th when the
madness is over and
a glass of something
warming is in hand. Ffrench casts
a bit of a spell with these wistful
solo piano takes on familiar festive
fare, and one or two of his own
introspective Christmas crackers.
(MB) ++++
Collective Wisdom
Works by Jackson Greenberg,
Jessica Mayer, Curtis Stewart et al
Sybarite5 Bright Shiny Things BSTC-0191
I love the energy of
these performances
by the New York
string quintet, which
presents its first
new studio album in years. It was
worth the wait, with the likes of
Curtis Stewart’s lustrous Mangas
just perfect for their dynamism and
sense of drama. (MB) +++++
 Brief notes Reviews
Kaleidoscope Works by Saint-
Saëns, Respighi, Chopin, Paganini The month in box-sets
Paul Huang (violin) Naïve V8088
Paul Huang is a
gifted performer
and impressive A legendary voice:
technician, whose Jessye Norman
is celebrated in a
skills are well fabulous new set
showcased in this debut album. But
though he’s darkly supple in even
the most challenging of repertoire,
there’s a slight want of timbral
variation – however elegant and
beautiful. (CS) ++++

Music on Christmas Morning

Carols
Roderick Williams (baritone); Vasari
Singers Naxos 8.574542
The quietly reflective
opening to Finzi’s
In Terra Pax makes
an unlikely, though
not unwelcome,
way to greet Christmas morning.
What follows is an eclectic mix
of the uplifting, the bland and
the occasionally irritating – all
excellently sung, at least. (JP) +++

Rebecca & Louise Chamber Works

by R Clarke and Farrenc
Reeta Maalismaa (violin), Mirka Viitala
(piano) et al Alba ABCD524
All three movements
of Rebecca Clarke’s
1921 Piano Trio
display great
invention, with
tension and lyricism held in
splendid equipoise. A clear-as-a-
bell recording ambience means that
the assertive piano parts in Farrenc’s
Schumannesque Piano Quintet
come through vividly.
(SW) +++++
A Winter Breviary
Works by Reena Esmail, Lucy
Walker, Bob Chilcott et al
St Martin’s Voices/Andrew Earis
Resonus RES10328
It’s a rather rarefied
sound the choir
makes in this mostly
a cappella selection
of contemporary and
altogether contemplative works. The
moments of colour are few and far
between as a result, but when they
do come – as in Thomas Hewitt
Jones’s ‘Love is the Answer’ and Bob
Chilcott’s ‘Mary, Mother’ – the spirit
truly begins to lift. (MB) ++++
Reviewers: Michael Beek (MB),
Jeremy Pound (JP), Charlotte Smith (CS),
GETTY
Artists we’ve lost, ensembles to cherish
Our round-up includes Jessye Norman, Lars Vogt and fine orchestras
It’s been long-awaited, but The Chamber Symphony of
finally fans can enjoy Jessye Philadelphia might not have been
Norman – The Complete Studio around for long (1966-68), but
Recitals (Decca 485 1014), a they still managed some 200
handsomely packaged box of concerts and six recordings. The
delights celebrating the late, great Complete RCA Album Collection
American soprano. It’s a gorgeous (Sony Classical 19658792072)
presentation comprising some 44 brings each of those to CD
CDs and three DVDs and taking for the very first time, so it is
in every aspect of Norman’s a fascinating snapshot of the
memorable vocal prowess. From ensemble, which was founded
lieder to spirituals via the Great and conducted by Philadelphia
American Songbook, it’s got it It’s a treasurable insight Orchestra concertmaster
all – plus a pair of Christmas into Vogt’s development Anshel Brusilow. They even
concerts and previously managed a world premiere –
unreleased gems. Pure class, as a recording artist Richard Yardumian’s Come,
like the soprano herself. Creator Spirit – which sits
Another much-missed artist, Lars Vogt is among works by Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Arensky,
remembered with The Complete Warner Classics Cherubini, Haydn, Wolf and Richard Strauss.
Recordings (Warner Classics 5419760490). The John Mauceri revived the Hollywood Bowl
27-disc collection takes in the German pianist’s Orchestra in the 1990s and in The Sound of
earliest recordings, which he began shortly after Hollywood (Eloquence 484 5233) we’re treated to
taking second prize at the Leeds International 16 discs of glitz, glamour and gaiety. Mauceri
Piano Competition in 1990. From his 1991 joins the dots from European Romanticism to
album of works by Haydn, Brahms, Schubert and Hollywood’s Golden Age via Broadway with six
Lachenmann to his 2006 double dose of Mozart discs of fully fledged film music, themed around
sonatas, the collection offers a really tresurable ‘Dreams’, ‘Nightmares’ and alike, plus some really
insight into Lars Vogt’s development as a memorable takes on music by Gershwin, Irving

Steve Wright (SW) recording artist. Berlin and Schoenberg. Sparkling.

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 93

Books
Our critics cast their eyes over the latest selection of books on all things music
Deck The Hall –
The Stories of our Favourite
Christmas Carols
Andrew Gant
Hodder & Stoughton 352pp (hb) £16.99
What is a
carol? ‘Like so
many catch-all
musical terms,
this one really
defies precise
definition,’
writes Andrew
Gant. Often born
out of the folk and oral tradition,
there is something unique about
the placement of carols in the
musical canon. Their meanings
have shifted over time, with new
words added to old material. Adeste
Fideles becoming O Come, All Ye
Faithful is probably the best known
example of this, but there are many
more which Gant touches on in
this engaging journey through
Christmas carol history.
Tracing the events of the
Christmas story from Annunciation
to Epiphany through the carols that
represent each step of the journey,
Gant shares the surprising musical
stories and social histories of the
music we think we understand. He
takes 27 in turn, some familiar and
others lesser known, unravelling the
tales of how they came to be. Some
begin life as chorale settings, others
as folk carols. We might associate
certain carols with an intrinsic
‘Britishness’, while in reality
they have crossed land and sea in
borrowings from other countries.
Deck the Hall is an unexpected romp
through a festive slice of musical
history, with Gant our thoroughly
entertaining guide. Freya Parr
++++
Miles Davis and the Search for
the Sound
Dave Chisholm
Z2 Comics 150pp (hb) £30
Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis was
tailormade to be the lead character
in a graphic novel like this. The
brooding antihero, who died in 1991
aged 65, was as fearless a genius as
he was a deeply flawed character.
An artistic revolutionary dressed in
GETTY
designer clothes and surrounded by
94 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Festive favourites:
Andrew Gant uncovers
the stories behind carols
in his new book
beautiful women, he always looked
the part as well. Dave Chisholm
captures it all in Miles Davis and the
Search for the Sound. A note-perfect
noir ‘biopic’, he draws on Davis’s
own picaresque
autobiography
and interview
material to
describe his
ascent from a
comfortable
middleclass home
in East St Louis,
Illinois to (hard) living legend on the
global stage.
Given the seamy nature of jazz
life in the ’40s and ’50s and Davis’s
continuing proclivity for drink,
drugs and sexual adventure, the
content is graphic in both senses
of the word. Artistically, the book
captures the mood and music
in vivid Technicolor, almost to
the point of synaesthesia. But
Chisholm, himself an accomplished
jazz horn player, also accurately
describes the arc of Davis’s career,
his groundbreaking bands and what
made their music so special.
Garry Booth +++++
Shining Threads
Joy Bounds
Book Guild 370pp (pb) £9.99
Recent years have seen renewed
musicological interest in the
pioneering British composer Ethel
Smyth. This includes her occupying
the first quarter of Leah Broad’s
outstanding Quartet, a group
biography published earlier this year
charting the lives of four women
composers.
Smyth was
a courageously
unconventional
figure for the
times she lived
in and is perhaps
best known
for her stirring
March of the Women, the anthem of
the British suffragette movement.
Her numerous accomplished
compositions include operas,
orchestral and chamber works and
she had a thrilling disdain for any
sort of feminine decorum. ‘I don’t,’
she once noted acerbically, ‘always
make sure that my hat is on straight.’
Joy Bounds’s historical novel
offers a fictionalised account
of Smyth’s life. Thoughtfully
researched, the book charts her
remarkable development as a
composer, her resplendently
unorthodox private life and
her professional struggles in a
male-dominated world. Bounds’s
writing is not without charm but
can be clunky at times, and the
narrative pace sometimes lags.
That said, this is for the most part
an engaging book that will appeal
to anyone with an interest in the
inimitable Ethel Smyth.
Kate Wakeling +++
Song – A History in 12 Parts
John Potter
Yale 368pp (hb) £20
I spent most of Song trying to
imagine who John Potter’s ideal
reader might be. His repeated
put-downs of
musicology
suggest that it
isn’t academics
– but his ‘further
reading’ is
overwhelmingly
scholarly. Some
technical terms
are explained as if for a lay-reader
– but we’re also assumed to be
familiar with the ins and outs of
fifth-century European politics and
know, without explanation, what a
vihuela is. And he’s keen to stress the
importance of the critically engaged
musician – but tells us firmly that
singers are ‘just there to perform
the music’.
Potter’s own performing CV
is impressive, and the book feels
largely like a dash through personal
favourites, stitched together into
continuous narrative. The upshot
is by turns chewily historical and
puzzlingly simplistic. His 12 chosen
pieces, from Hildegard to Berio,
are not discussed in any detail.
And among them is Gershwin’s
‘Summertime’, described as ‘one
of the most remarkable examples
of Black music’ that just happened
to be ‘written by a white man’ – an
astonishing pronouncement in
2023. As the work of a distinguished
singer and scholar, Song is
disappointingly tin-eared.
Katy Hamilton ++
 Tokyo
17–21 March Rome
· 2024 ·
New York 9–13 September
27–31 May · 2024 ·
· 2024 ·

Vienna
1–5 April London Tel Aviv
· 2024 ·
26–30 August 22–26 September
· 2024 · · 2024 ·

Conductors, Music
Directors and
Artistic Directors
of orchestras and
APPLY NOW:
concert series
as jury
From the archives
Martin Cotton presents this month’s selection of reissued and archival recordings
Monthly round-up
ARCHIVE CHOICE Only the movements without
soloists from a 1981 BBC Symphony
A zinging bit of Purcell Orchestra performance of Berlioz’s
Romeo and Juliet
make it onto
Les Arts Florissants’ 1989 recording of The this release, but
there’s plenty of
Fairy Queen is still fresh and full of energy excitement in the
faster passages, as
well as some untidiness, although
the ‘Queen Mab Scherzo’ is tight
and light. The affection and warmth
that Rozhdestvensky conjures in
the ‘Love Scene’ is very touching,
helped by the carefully balanced
recording in the Albert Hall and
some lovely solo playing. Five years
earlier, the conductor was in the
Royal Festival Hall with the LSO
for Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy:
an urgent performance, but not
opening out enough sonically at
climaxes to make its full effect. (ICA
Classics ICAC 5172) +++
Colin Davis’s live 2001 version of
Elgar’s First Symphony is mostly
weighty and expansive, especially
in the slow movement, but the
Second has greater momentum,
with the Larghetto almost rushed,
A spring in their step: although the melodies aren’t
Les Arts Florissants over-sugared. In Anthony Payne’s
make magic
completion of the Third, there isn’t
the same familiarity with the music,
and the playing is less sure-footed.
Purcell The dry acoustic of the Barbican
The Fairy Queen is always a
Les Arts Florissants/William Christie et al minus, despite
Harmonia Mundi HAF8901308.09 (1989) the ingenuity of
128:42 mins (2 discs) the engineers.
1989 saw William Christie and Les Arts This also affects
Florissants firmly established at the intense accounts
forefront of Baroque opera productions, of the Introduction and Allegro
mostly French, but with a few excursions into foreign territory. This and Enigma Variations, and is
was always one of the most successful, and you can hear the energy highlighted by the inclusion of older
of the performance from the outset, with the orchestral preludes studio recordings, including an
zinging out of the speakers. Christie uses a large, varied continuo eloquent Cello Concerto with Felix
group to give contrasting colours to the music, and the strong line- Schmidt. (LSO Live LSO 0572) +++
up of singers includes Nancy Argenta, Véronique Gens, Sandrine Both the SACD and vinyl
Piau, Charles Daniels, Thomas Randle and Bernard Deletré. It’s a remasterings of Britten’s 1963
pity that their solo appearances aren’t credited in the booklet, but version of his War Requiem come
they form a real ensemble, honed in a series of live performances. with lavish documentation but a
As well as mirroring the incisiveness and rhythmic buoyancy of the hefty price-tag, and will probably
instrumentalists, they also bring tenderness to the more reflective appeal only to fans of the composer
moments: the Plaint, and the Entrances of Night, Mystery, Secrecy who are also hard-core audio buffs.
DENIS ROUVRE, GETTY
and Sleep, with its daring silences between phrases. There’s broad It was always one of Decca’s most
humour for the Drunken Poet, and spring in the step of the Fairies. successful recordings, and the
Forget any semblance of a coherent plot, but revel in Purcell’s spatial effects emerge with new
amazingly fecund musical invention. +++++ clarity, as do details of texture: the
96 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Dies Irae was sometimes congested
in previous issues, but here the
layers are discrete
and blended.
Vishnevskaya,
Pears and
Fischer-Dieskau
are vibrant with
renewed tonal character, and the
commitment and love from all the
performers shines through. The
extended rehearsal clips remain a
welcome bonus. (Decca 485 3765
(SACD); 485 3769 (vinyl)) +++++
If you view Bach’s Christmas
Oratorio as a big choral work
with soloists, Sigiswald Kuijken’s
2013 recording definitely won’t
be for you. It’s strictly one singer
to a part, which gives a dexterity
and transparency to the faster
movements, although even with
the relative lightness of period
instruments there are some balance
problems in the
louder choruses.
The arias and
recitatives are
more coherent,
and among the
soloists, tenor Stephan Scherpe is
outstanding: bright, focussed and
imaginative, and the others aren’t
far behind. With tempos never
dragging, and bags of instrumental
colour in the many obbligatos, this
is a delightful take on the work.
(Challenge CC 72966) ++++
Three excerpts from Bach’s
oratorio feature in A Christmas
Concert with Robert Shaw from
1975, and sound positively stodgy
after Kuijken’s lively take. I’m afraid
this is the general tenor of this well-
upholstered seasonal compilation
with the forces
of the Atlanta
Symphony
Orchestra
and Chorus.
The delivery
is accomplished: Shaw was a
top-rank choral conductor, but
some of the arrangements have a
Hollywood sheen. Sluggish tempos
make this rather indigestible, and
a surprisingly lively ‘Hallelujah
Chorus’ comes too late to rescue
things. (VOX Classics VOX-NX-
3027CD) +++
 Reviews Index
JS Bach Christmas Oratorio 96 Rheinberger Choral Works 92
Sonatas & Partitas 88 Poul Ruders Piano Trio 92
Ballard Devil’s Promenade 72 John Rutter Orchestral Carols 71
Fantasy Aborigine No. 3 72 Saint-Saëns Cello Concerto No. 1 85
The Four Moons 72 Le Carnaval des animaux 72
Scenes from Indian Life 72 Poèmes symphoniques etc 72
Bartók Cantata Profana 80 Schubert String Quartet No. 14 in
Transylvanian Dances 80 D minor ‘Death and the Maiden’ 84
Beethoven ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata (trans. Scriabin Le Poème de l’extase 96
violin and orchestra) 75 Shostakovich
String Quartet in F major, Op. 59 84 Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor 84
String Quartets Nos 1, 6, 11, 12, 14 84 Tchaikovsky The Nutcracker Suite
Symphonies Nos 1 & 6 (trans. (arr. Tyzik, Ellington, Strayhorn) 73
Scharwenka) 88 Viotti Violin Concerto No. 22 76
Violin Concerto 75 Wagner Siegfried 79
Berlioz Roméo et Juliette 96 Weinberg Cello Concertino 77
Brahms Double Concerto 76 Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes 77
Power and expression: Brescianello Symphony No. 7 77
Janet Baker reached Concertos, Sinfonias etc 76 Violin Concertino 77
emotional depths Britten War Requiem 96
M-A Charpentier COLLECTIONS
In nativitatem Domini canticum 81 Advent Live, Vol. 3 Choir of St John’s
Messe de minuit 81 College, Cambridge et al 92
Unboxed Bob Chilcott
Christmas Oratorio etc
Coleridge-Taylor Partsongs
81
81
African American Voices II
RSNO/Kellen Gray
Armenian Brilliance Nikolay
74
Andrew McGregor finds much to enjoy in Decca’s set Debussy Berceuse héroïque 88 Madoyan, Armine Grigoryan 92
celebrating mezzo-soprano Janet Baker’s 90th birthday Études 88 Aux étoiles... Orchestre National de
La plus que lente 88 Lyon/Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider 92
To listen again to this extraordinary voice is to Pour le piano 88 Bath Baroque Christmas
marvel afresh at the richness, the expressive depth, Dvořák Silent Woods 76 Choir of Bath Abbey 92
Elgar Orchestral Works 96 Beyond Twilight Alexandra
the directness of communication and the uncanny Enescu Octet 92 Mackenzie, Ingrid Sawers 85
feeling that you’re being given privileged access to Fabricius O Liebes Kind 92 A Choral Christmas Voces8 et al 92
the emotional truth of a character or song. Fauré Papillon 85 Christmas HAUSER 92
Janet Baker: A Celebration (Decca 485 4438; 21 Romance, Op. 69 85 The Christmas Album
discs) begins with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in 1961 for Anthony Franck Violin Sonata FWV8 in A Phoenix Chorale 71
(trans. cello and piano) 85 Christmas Around the World
Lewis, the 28 year-old mezzo already unmistakeable in the soul-
Gál Concertinos etc 92 Knabenchor Hannover et al 92
searing despair of ‘Dido’s Lament’, as powerful as her 1970s Gurney Autumn 89 A Christmas Concert with Robert
recording with Steuart Bedford. Complete recordings of both are Five Preludes 89 Shaw Atlanta Symphony et al 96
included here, framing the rest of the recordings, and a career Piano Sonata No. 2 – Adagio 89 Christmas from Norway
which helped restore Handel opera in performances with Raymond Piano Sonatas Nos 1-3 89 Lise Davidsen 71
Leppard and the revival of Monteverdi (and other early Italians) Handel Arias etc (arr. chamber) 85 Christmas Piano Alexis Ffrench 92
Messiah 82 Collective Wisdom Sybarite5 92
before the period instrument explosion. A Gluck recital with Leppard Patrick Hawes The Nativity etc 92 Corellimania Michala Petri, Hille
is the closest we get to Orfeo, one of Baker’s signature roles, Kodály Te Deum 80 Perl, Mahan Esfahani 86
plus Bach excerpts and cantatas – including Benjamin Britten Psalmus Hungaricus 80 Destination Paris
conducting Baker, Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at Korngold Chamber Works 92 Gautier Capuçon et al 77
the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival. Britten’s last vocal work Phaedra George Lewis Afterword 78 Enigma Sarah Aristidou et al 82
Lully Thesée 78 Exquisitely Absurd
was written for Baker, an incandescent performance, and she’s a Mendelssohn Choral Works 92 Petri Kumela et al 77
perfect fit for Tippett’s A Child of Our Time alongside Jessye Norman Octet 92 Forgotten Arias
for Colin Davis. Mompou Cançons i danses 89 Philippe Jaroussky et al 79
The song recitals are special, too: Schubert duets and quartets Chopin Variations 89 A Golden Christmas Felix Klieser 71
with Elly Ameling, Peter Schreier, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Paisajes 89 Infinite Refrain... Randall Scotting,
Mozart Oboe Concerto 72 Jorge Navarro Colorado 83
Gerald Moore, and the 1987 recital with Graham Johnson that
Overtures 75 Kaleidoscope Paul Huang 93
began Hyperion’s ‘Schubert Song Edition’. They also recorded Piano Concertos, K242, 315f, 365 76 Many Voices: Ensemble
Mahler’s Songs of Youth with Geoffrey Parsons, invested with the Piano Concertos Nos 26 & 27 75 Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective 86
experience and wisdom of a singer near the end of her career. Symphonies Nos 29 & 40 72 Morning Star The Gesualdo Six 68
Some of Baker’s essential recordings can’t be included in this J Novák Choreae Vernales 76 Music on Christmas Morning
90th birthday celebration. Mahler’s orchestral song cycles and Concentus Biiugis 76 Vasari Singers, Roderick Williams93
Concerto for Two Pianos 76 Noël Armonico Consort 71
Elgar’s Sea Pictures and Dream of Gerontius, all with Barbirolli, Arvo Pärt Sacred Choral Works 82 Profesión Sean Shibe 90
were made for EMI. I might have felt intimidated when I interviewed Penderecki Concerto doppio 73 Rebecca & Louise
Janet Baker for BBC Radio 3, but she was seriously delightful, and I Symphony No. 6 ‘Chinese Songs’ 73 Reeta Maalismaa, Mirka Viitala 93
remember her late husband saying as we left the studio: ‘Oh, don’t Trumpet Concertino 73 Solo Isabelle Faust 90
stop, that was such lovely conversation!’ It was, and that’s how I John Pickard Stained Glass Johan Dalene,
Mass in Troubled Times etc 80 Christian Ihle Hadland 86
feel when I’m listening to these recordings… don’t stop singing, I’m Tobias Picker Awakenings 78 Tidings of Joy Voktett Hannover 71
enjoying it far too much. Poulenc Cello Sonata 85 Verismo RLPO/Hindoyan 74
Purcell The Fairy Queen 96 Waves Bruce Liu 90
Rachmaninov Piano Sonata No. 1 89 A Winter Breviary
Andrew McGregor is the presenter of Preludes, Op. 32 89 St Martin’s Voices 93
Radio 3’s Record Review, broadcast each Ravel Daphnis et Chloé 73 Winter Journeys Lautten
Saturday morning from 9am until 11.45am Piano Trio in A minor 84 Compagney Berlin et al 83

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 97

Audio gift guide
From heavenly headphones to sparkling speakers, our expert Chris Haslam
suggests a wide range of perfect gifts for audio lovers this festive season
THIS MONTH: CHRISTMAS GIFTS
The full package:
the Ruark R410
combines all-in-one
ease and beauty
BUD AND THUNDER
Sony WF-1000XM5
£259
Sony’s multi-award-winning
WF-1000XM4 showed what was
possible with true wireless audio
quality. They remain one of my
favourite ever earbuds, but they
are just a teeny bit cumbersome.
The latest design, however,
addresses this issue, being
impossibly petite (5.5g each) but
somehow managing to still sound
huge. Noise cancellation is also
superb, the partner app allows for
loads of customisation, battery
life (with wireless charging) is
a solid eight hours with a total
of 24 hours including the case,
and they’re made mostly from
recycled plastic. sony.co.uk
98 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
ALL TO PLAY FOR
Ruark R410 Integrated Music
System £1,299
Maybe one for a combined birthday and
Christmas gift, Ruark’s latest all-in-one
audio system is a thing of beauty. The
handcrafted slatted wooden grille gives the
R410 a luxurious retro-modern look, while
the 4.4" TFT full-colour interactive screen
and signature Rotodial control on top hints
at the technology within. The 120W Class
D amplifier drives two 10cm long bass units
and 20mm silk dome tweeters, while AirPlay
2, Bluetooth aptX HD and Chromecast are
built-in. There’s also Tidal Connect, Spotify
Connect, BBC Sounds and radio – DAB/
DAB+, FM and internet radio – plus with
Wi-Fi connectivity, you can connect to a
home network and stream hi-res files up to
24-bit/192kHz PCM. ruarkaudio.com
LIFE IS BUT A STREAM
Wiim Pro Plus £219
It’s not the most attractive little black box, but the Pro Plus
enables you to add streaming services to your traditional
hi-fi. Plug into a spare line input and enjoy the ease of
AirPlay 2, Alexa casting and Chromecast, along with Wi-
Fi streaming for all major services such as BBC Sounds, On the move:
Qobuz, Spotify, Tidal and Amazon Music. You can even fitness-friendly
create a multi-room setup, adding your old hi-fi into your headphones
Alexa family, for instance, while also enjoying better
quality audio with up to 24-bit/192 kHz music on both FIT FOR PURPOSE
digital and analogue outputs. wiimhome.com OneOdio OpenRock Pro
Easy stream: £119
Wiim’s little black An ideal gift for the music loving
box has it all fitness fanatic, these true wireless
ear hook-style headphones feature
two 16.2mm dynamic drivers that
sit close, but not inside the ear, and
sound great – with solid bass and
clean instrumentation – without
leaking much sound. These ‘Air
Conduction’ headphones are a
welcome audio upgrade to bone
conduction designs and, for safer
road running, allow external traffic
noise in. They’re also secure to wear,
waterproof and have up to 46 hours
of listening time. oneodio.com
 Evolved design:
Px7 S2e wireless
headphones

Look, no wires: Unity’s high-res HED

HEADS UP 2024 and beyond…

Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2e £379 If my maths is correct,
The original Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2 was one of my favourite I’ve listened to, rated
headphones last year, only eclipsed by the Px8. This latest wireless and reviewed 39 pairs of
design – the ‘e’ stands for evolved – combines the best aspects of headphones over the past
former models, with re-tuned acoustic performance, 40mm custom 12 months. The growth of
drivers and 24-bit DSP. Throw in Active Noise Cancellation, 30- the market has been nothing
hour battery life and unmatched comfort and you’ll be wise to put short of phenomenal, and
them at the top of your Christmas list. bowerswilkins.com shines a light on how people
are consuming music.
Portable perfection: And while basic Bluetooth
Bluetooth speakers from Roberts
dominates for most casual
consumers, there are signs
MOVABLE FEAST that the quality of wireless
Roberts Reunion £79 audio may soon be able
Stylish, compact and loaded to compete with wired
with practical features, this headphones. Swiss brand
affordable Bluetooth speaker Unity has recently launched
from British radio stalwarts HED, a luxury pair that can
Roberts offers surprisingly stream high resolution
spacious 360-degree sound lossless audio over Wi-Fi,
from two full-range drivers while a joint effort from
and two passive radiators. IPX7 PSB, Sonical and MQA
protection guarantees it won’t On the airwaves: promises headphones with
RETRO STYLE a digital radio star
complain if you accidentally high-resolution wireless
leave it out in the rain and you Loewe radio.frequency £179 transmission by early 2024.
can also link two together for A delightful digital radio for the streaming era, this new model from You may even get a free app-
stereo playback. Finally, the premium German brand Loewe plays FM and DAB/DAB+ plus based hearing test with your
retro-inspired go-anywhere Bluetooth 5.0. It’s a beautiful design, boasting fine solid oak inlays next headphones, and have
design has an 18-hour battery and a specially developed acoustic fabric cover. The cylindrical them tuned to your own ears.
life, making it ideal for picnics, profile is a subtle nod to Loewe’s iconic 1930s OE333 radio receiver But fear not, traditional
patios or simply moving but, unlike the original, this design boasts a 14-hour battery life and
hi-fi lovers – there’s plenty
from room to room with you. crystal-clear audio – ideal for your enjoyment of, of course, BBC
robertsradio.com
for you to look forward to.
Radio 3. loewe.tv
With vinyl sales holding
firm, expect more turntables
designed for people simply
CABLE MANNERS to enjoy their music. And
Chord C-Series Cables from £32 look out for speakers and
How much to spend on hi-fi cables is a debate as old as the gramophone audio systems boasting
itself, but adding a Chord C-Series cable to your Christmas list this 360-degree sound from
year could help you understand the appeal. One thing is for certain: Dolby Atmos. Technology
these cables are built to last, with high quality components throughout. designed for soundtracks to
Choose from classic analogue connectors, HDMI, optical, subwoofer, blockbuster movies is now
USB Audio and headphone jacks to help your hi-fi sing. chord.co.uk translating brilliantly to huge
orchestral performances.

BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 99

Live choice
Paul Riley picks the month’s best concert and opera highlights in the UK
Leaning Bachwards:
Masaaki Suzuki
conducts the Christmas
Oratorio in London
Royal Northern Sinfonia
Chorus
Hexham Abbey, 1 December
theglasshouseicm.org
While the Royal Northern Sinfonia
embarks on a nine-concert
candlelit tour offering Grieg,
Watkins, Whitacre and choice
Baroquerie, its Chorus has itchy
feet of its own as it celebrates
50 years not out. ‘A Choral
Nativity’ recounts the Christmas
story in music by, among others,
Rachmaninov, Handel and
Roxanna Panufnik.
Orchestra of the Swan
Village Hall, Willoughby,
1 December
orchestraoftheswan.org
Under violinist-director David
Le Page, the Orchestra of the
Swan plunges deep into musical
midwinter, encountering works
ranging from Corelli’s Christmas
Concerto to music by Vivaldi, Holst
and Liszt. With his arranger’s hat
on, Le Page has been keeping
himself busy, so that ‘anon.’ and
‘trad.’ keep festive company with
The Pogues.
100 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
The Marian Consort
St John the Baptist Church,
Little Missenden, 1 December
marianconsort.co.uk
Fresh from a day at Wigmore
Hall focusing on the music of
Laurence Osborn, the versatile
vocal ensemble’s thoughts
turn seasonal. ‘For Delighting
the People’ unwraps music
accompanying a Jacobean
Christmas and, framed by
Gibbons, ranges over Byrd, Bull,
Parsons and Weelkes.
Orchestra & Choir of the Age
of Enlightenment
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London,
2, 3 December
southbankcentre.co.uk
Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, a
1734 festive gift to the church-
goers of Leipzig, traces a
six-cantata journey from the
Nativity to Epiphany. Masaaki
Suzuki, founding director of Bach
Collegium Japan, conducts a
complete performance spread
over two days, and among the
soloists are the Cutting brothers:
countertenor Hugh and tenor Guy.
Orchestra of St John’s
SJE Arts, Oxford, 3 December
sje-arts.org
John Lubbock combines the
orchestra he founded over half
a century ago with OSJ Voices
and tenor Dominic Bevan for
a performance of Britten’s
cantata St Nicolas – the work
whose premiere in June 1948
inaugurated the very first
Aldeburgh Festival. The work is
repeated in nearby Dorchester
Abbey on 9 December.
The Harmonious Society of
Tickle-Fiddle Gentlemen
NCEM, York, 3 December
ncem.co.uk
The National Centre for Early
Music Christmas Festival is the
gift that keeps on giving. From
Restoration theatre music to
Byrd, Bach and a Bouche de
Noël, it surpasses itself with the
splendidly named Tickle-Fiddlers,
and what is possibly the first ever
oratorio in English: an anonymous
setting of the Nativity story
predating Handel’s Messiah by a
couple of decades.
Sestina
Ulster Museum, Belfast,
5, 6 December
sestinamusic.com
With six editions of ‘Carols at the
Museum’ under its belt, Sestina
returns for a seventh instalment.
Composed in 2014, Derry-born
Seán Doherty’s A Nywe Werk and
Eleanor Daly’s arrangement of the
17th-century Canadian Christmas
hymn The Huron Carol feature
alongside works by Tormis and
James MacMillan.
Armonico
St Mary’s Church, Warwick,
6 December
armonico.org.uk
Germany and Italy go head-to-
head in a Christmas cornucopia
that is rounded off by Praetorius’s
21-part In dulci jubilo. The
Venetian first half includes a
Magnificat by Monteverdi and
Giovanni Gabrieli’s 16-part Audite
Principes. Joining the Armonico
forces is The English Cornett and
Sackbut Ensemble.
Scottish Ensemble
St Machar’s Cathedral,
Aberdeen, 7 December
scottishensemble.co.uk
The ensemble’s candlelit winter
tour invariably unpacks an eclectic
selection box – this year, the
premiere of a new work by David
Fennessy crowns Arvo Pärt’s
O Emmanuel and The Lamb
by Tavener. As well as JS Bach
and Philip Glass, there’s an
arrangement for strings of Joanna
Marsh’s In Winter’s House. (See
‘Backstage with…’, right)
Solomon’s Knot
Wigmore Hall, London,
7 December
wigmore-hall.org.uk
Three hundred years ago, JS Bach
took up the post of Thomaskantor
in Leipzig. Marking the anniversary
with a seasonal twist, the
Solomon’s Knot collective tackles
one of the fruits of his first
Christmas there: the original E flat
version of the Magnificat, plus
Christmas interpolations.

The Sixteen
St John the Evangelist, Oxford,
9 December
thesixteen.com
The Sixteen hit the road for five
concerts that include a London
performance of Handel’s Messiah.
In Oxford, medieval carols and
Hildegard von Bingen’s O Quam
Magnum Miraculum impart
season’s greetings alongside
Lobo, Byrd and Joubert.
Royal Scottish National
Orchestra
Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow,
9 December
rsno.org.uk
It’s Christmas Eve in the
Stahlbaum household and
preparations are afoot for a great
party… Andrey Boreyko conducts
a suite from Tchaikovsky’s ballet
The Nutcracker. With it, performed
by Ilya Gringolts, is the Scottish
premiere of the Tchaikowsky Violin
Concerto – André Tchaikowsky’s
Concerto Classico, that is,
which received its belated first
performance in 2021!
Tom Winpenny
St Alban’s Cathedral, St Albans,
10 December
stalbanscathedral.org
Having previously recorded the
work for Naxos, the Cathedral’s
assistant master of music gives
a seasonal recital devoted to
Messiaen’s great organ cycle La
Nativité du Seigneur. Composed
in 1936, it was described by
Messiaen as nine pieces ‘to
honour the motherhood of the
Virgin Mary’ with ‘The birth of the
Lord’ as its subject.
Britten Sinfonia &
BBC Singers
Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden,
10 December
saffronhall.com
From massed choral forces to
period-instrument minimalism,
Handel’s Messiah is for many an
essential fixture in the Christmas
landscape. Britten Sinfonia rings
the changes, performing it in the
arrangement – including horns,
clarinets and trombones – that
Mozart made at the behest of
Baron van Swieten. It is conducted
by the BBC Singers’ own chief
MARCO BORGGREVE, TOMMY GA-KEN WAN
conductor, Sofi Jeannin.
I Fagiolini
Howard Assembly Room, Leeds,
13 December
operanorth.co.uk
Violinist Rachel Podger’s Brecon
Baroque teams up with I Fagiolini
to side with the angels in a
struggle between good and evil.
A Neapolitan tarantella and
villancicos from Salamanca are
deployed against the devil, while
Monteverdi, JS Bach and Vivaldi
pave the way to Juan Francés de
Iribarren’s Xacara de Navidad.
Royal Opera House
Covent Garden, London,
16 December – 7 January
roh.org.uk
Who doesn’t relish a good
fairy tale at Christmas? Antony
McDonald’s 2018 production
of Humperdinck’s Hansel and
Gretel is revived for the holiday
season. Sung in English and
conducted by Mark Wigglesworth,
it has a double cast, with mezzos
Anna Stéphany/Hanna Hipp and
sopranos Anna Devin/Lauren
Fagan sharing the title roles.
Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Chorus
Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh,
19, 20 December
sco.org.uk
Gregory Batsleer conducts
the premiere of SCO associate
composer Jay Capperauld’s The
Night Watch. Woven around it
are Poulenc’s delectable Quatre
motets pour le temps de Noël and
Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque,
plus works by Holst, Warlock,
Taverner and Cecilia McDowall.
Sansara
Kings Place, London,
20 December
kingsplace.co.uk
The vocal collective’s seasonal
meditation remembers Ukraine
with Valentin Silvestrov’s Two
Christmas Lullabies and A
Quiet Night by Natalia Tsupryk,
commissioned by Sansara
to mark last year’s Ukrainian
Independence Day. There is
music, too, by Byrd, Tallis, Judith
Weir and Rhiannon Randle, plus
Tavener’s The Lamb.
Royal Liverpool
Philharmonic Brass
Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool,
23 December
liverpoolphil.com
With 15 movements from
Tchaikovsky’s festive ballet
score in arrangements by,
among others, Mikhail Pletnev
and Grainger, pianist Alexandra
Dariescu originally conceived
her ‘The Nutcracker and I’ show
for piano, ballerina and animation.
Liverpool, however, enjoys a
version expanded to include
two ballerinas, narrator, brass
and percussion.
Christmas Live
BACKSTAGE WITH…
Jonathan Morton Violinist & director
An eclectic evening:
‘We thread together
a lot of soundworlds
and eras’
From 7-13 December, you are leading the Scottish Ensemble
on a tour of candlelit concerts in cities across Scotland. Is this
a favourite event in the group’s calendar?
We’ve been doing our concerts by candelight for a number
of years now, and have built up a very loyal and enthusiastic
audience. It has been people’s positive reaction to the kind
of programme we do these days – which is essentially a lot of
short pieces strung together – that has encouraged me to keep
researching more ideas every year. It is a lot more work than a
normal concert, as you are threading together a lot of different
soundworlds and eras and you are also thinking about pacing,
energy flow and so on, but it’s a thrill to be able to do it.
How would you describe the feel of the concerts?
The venues and the time of year – December, that is, more than
specifically Christmas – tend to set the tone. As we’ve progressed
each year with these concerts, it seems that what people really
enjoy is having the time to come away from their frenetic lives
and sit down in a beautiful building and listen to an hour-and-a-
half of music. It all sounds a bit obvious really, but we do a lot of
experimenting with the concert format throughout the rest of the
year, so this is one of those times where we just celebrate and
enjoy what I’d call a normal concert.
Included in this year’s programme is a brand new work by David
Fennessy. What can you tell us about it?
What I can tell you at this stage is that the piece will be unique
in the programme in that it will involve some of the instruments
playing off-stage. David has been really thinking about the
beautiful churches and cathedrals in which we will be playing
on this tour and has being taking into consideration the space,
resonance and acoustic. I think it will be very exciting!
Some may be intrigued to see you performing Tavener’s choral
work The Lamb. Have you recruited singers for the occasion?
No! We have worked with singers in the past at Christmas, but
this is an instrumental version. In fact, Arvo Pärt’s O Emmanuel
is also a choral work which, like a lot of his music, he himself has
arranged for various different line-ups. There isn’t an enormous
amount of repertoire for string orchestras, so we do end up
playing a lot of arrangements – I’m always on the look out for good
ones, plus we commission some ourselves. A lot of vocal pieces
work extremely beautifully in this way.
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 101
 If I had read this when I was starting out,
I might have become someone, instead of
being just a bum.
L. van Beethoven (Leslie not Ludwig.)
Dotty - £4.99
Available online from all good Amazons

We pick out this year’s seasonal highlights, from medieval morsels to The Sound of Music
Clive Myrie at Christmas
Throughout December,
Mastermind anchor and BBC
Proms host Clive Myrie presents
a feast of Advent and Christmas
classical music alongside some of
his personal discoveries.
Radio 3, 3, 10, 17, 24 Dec, 1-2pm
A Medieval Christmas
For December’s first Composer
of the Week, Donald Macleod
explores Christmas music and
stories from the Middle Ages –
when peasants and nobles alike
enjoyed festivities from Advent
right through to Candlemas. Some
of those customs still hold sway
today, while many others are lost.
Macleod is joined by early music
expert William Lyons to examine
how Christmas sounded to our
medieval ancestors.
Radio 3, 4-8 Dec, 12-1pm
Inside Music
Two stars of the choral music
world – composer Eric Whitacre
and organist Anna Lapwood –
introduce listeners to their own
personal Christmas classical
selections. On 16 December,
Whitacre chooses pieces from
Palestrina to Florence Price; a
week later, Lapwood selects
favourite moments from Bach’s
Christmas Oratorio, A Christmas
Fantasy from the Ayoub Sisters…
and a couple of sleigh rides.
Radio 3, 16 & 23 Dec, 1-3pm
Christmas around Europe
A bumper day of live and recorded
Christmas concerts gathered
together by the European
Broadcasting Union – including
performances from Amsterdam,
Stockholm, Helsinki, Reykjavík,
Copenhagen, Paris (the complete
Nutcracker) and London, with
special guests the BBC Singers.
Radio 3, 17 Dec, 9am-11.30pm
A Vaughan Williams
Christmas
Kate Molleson explores Vaughan
Williams’s formative Christmases
as a child at Leith Hill Place in
Surrey, a festive honeymoon
GETTY
with his new in-laws, Christmas
THE 12 SHOWS OF CHRISTMAS
Christmas classic: BBC Philharmonic plays music from Miracle on 34th Street
on active service in World War I,
and later yuletides in Dorking
and London. Each show will also
explore one of Vaughan Williams’s
many carol settings and their
genesis among England’s folk
music communities.
Radio 3, 18-22 Dec, 12-1pm
This Classical Life
Norwegian opera singer and
Last Night of the Proms star Lise
Davidsen joins Jess Gillam to talk
favourite Christmas music in this
festive edition.
Radio 3, 23 Dec, 12.30-1pm
Sound of Cinema Christmas
Concert
Radio 3’s weekly guide to
screen music goes ‘in concert’
for Christmas, as the BBC
Philharmonic performs a festive
mix. Matthew Sweet introduces
TV&Radio
scores from timeless classics
such as A Christmas Carol, It’s
A Wonderful Life and Miracle
On 34th Street. There’s also a
journey aboard The Polar Express.
Radio 3, 23 Dec, 3pm
Opera on 3: Christmas Eve
The European Broadcasting Union
presents Rimsky-Korsakov’s folk
opera Christmas Eve, based on
a short story by Gogol. Vladimir
Jurowski conducts the Berlin
Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Radio 3, 23 Dec, 6.30pm
Sunday Feature: While
Shepherds Watched
Elizabeth Alker explores the
ancient tradition of South
Yorkshire carolling. Driven out
of churches by the strait-laced
Victorians, carols found a new
home in the area’s pubs, and this
lively tradition is still flourishing
today. Musicologist and carol
singing expert Ian Russell reveals
how the movement is thriving
today, while folk musician Kate
Rusby talks about the pub
carolling tradition.
Radio 3, 24 Dec, 6.45-7.30pm
A Festival of Nine Lessons
and Carols
As ever, you can enjoy this
supremely evocative feast of
Yuletide words and music from
King’s College, Cambridge,
both live on Christmas Eve and
repeated on Christmas Day. As
has been the tradition since
1983, the service features a new,
specially commissioned work.
Radio 4, 24 Dec, 3-5pm
Radio 3, 25 Dec, 1-3pm
The Hills Are Alive with the
Kanneh-Masons
The British family visits Salzburg
to walk in the footsteps of the
Von Trapp family – inspiration for
The Sound Of Music. The seven
Kanneh-Mason siblings perform
their own arrangements of iconic
music from the soundtrack,
including ‘My Favourite Things’
and ‘Edelweiss’.
BBC Two, date and time tbc
Inside Classical: The Hound
of the Baskervilles
Mark Gatiss stars as Sherlock
Holmes, with Sanjeev Bhaskar
as Dr Watson, in this reading
recorded at London’s Barbican.
The story is accompanied by a
new musical score by Neil Brand,
played on stage by the BBC
Symphony Orchestra.
BBC Four, date and time tbc
watched; c) The Angel Gabriel
10. a) We three kings; b) While shepherds
9. Jingle Bells
8. A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols
7. a) Spain; b) Ukraine; c) US
6. In the bleak midwinter
5. Orlando Gibbons
4. Silent Night
3. Massenet’s Werther
2. Arcangelo Corelli
1. JS Bach’s Christmas Oratorio
QUIZ ANSWERS from p104
BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 103

THE QUIZ
It’s time to put your classical
music knowledge to the test
1. ‘Jauchzet, frohlocket!’ (‘Exult!
Rejoice!’) proclaim the opening
words to which 1734 festive work?
2. Who is believed to have led the
first performance of his Christmas
Concerto for Cardinal Pietro
Ottoboni in Rome in 1690?
3. Which opera, premiered in
February 1892, ends with the
eponymous hero dying in his study
on Christmas Eve to the sound of
children singing ‘Noël’ outside?
4. What favourite Christmas carol
was first sung in St Nicholas’s
Church in Oberndorf, Austria, on
24 December 1818?
5. The composer pictured above
was baptised in Oxford on
Christmas Day in 1583. Who is he?
6. Named after the Gloucestershire
village in which he wrote it,
‘Cranham’ is a well-known setting
by Holst of which carol?
7. From which countries do the
following carols originate: a) Ríu,
Ríu, Chíu; b) Carol of the Bells; c) I
wonder as I wander?
8. What festive musical tradition
did Edward White Benson, Bishop
of Truro, inaugurate in 1880 to try
and get people out of the pub?
9. Dating from 1857, which well-
known Christmas song is believed
to have been originally written
to celebrate the popular sport of
harness racing?
10. The following lines come from
popular adaptations of which
carols: a) ‘One in a taxi, one in car’;
b) ‘And hung them on the line’;
c) ‘Most highly flavoured gravy’?
See p103 for answers
104 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
The BBC Music Magazine
PRIZE CROSSWORD NO. 393
Crossword set by Paul Henderson
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ACROSS
9 Style of opera is more elaborate
following Verdi’s lead (7)
10 See 5 down
11 Achieve extract of score: a chorus (5)
12 Odd bits of craft seen in source of
Scarlatti’s fugue (3)
13 Forte in one is not suited (5)
14 Whole version of Undine enthrals
most of panel (9)
16 More realistic Haydn symphony
article overlooked (5)
17 Ravel finally including this fairy (3)
19 Rumour circulating about Uruguay’s
foremost performer (7)
21 Like instinctive choice of material
for strings (3)
23 German opera composer possesses
empty style (5)
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University rally broadcast in a way
for many people (9)
26 Scale: C major initially in liberal
surroundings (5)
27 Tutti rallentando (but not entirely) (3)
28 Composer Kenji and group (5)
29 Old varieties of Prokofiev’s fruit (7)
30 Performance misrepresented
in article (7)
DOWN
1 Repeatedly grand item at a 7 18,
public, clear, but without piano (8)
2 Senseless upset about director’s
latest Verdi opera (6)
3 School supporting a Schumann
motif (4)
4/20 A piano protocol: encore crazy
piece featured at a 7 18 (8,8)
5/10a Tainted unison corrected in
piece featured at a 7 18 (6,7)
6 Helping to build developing star cult
around extremes of Rieu (10)
7 Musical cartoonist heading for
home, not working with religious
woman? Good (8)
8 Inspiration for d’Indy has it
translated, right? (6)
15 Nervous behaviour about to
disturb dances (10)
18 Rearranged last five in series of
concerts, perhaps (8)
20 See 4 down
22 Why odd article appears in story of
creature from a 7 18 (3,5)
23 Country lad with farm animal
becoming English conductor (6)
24 Respond positively to piano
getting lift (6)
25 Name of two Italian sopranos,
a selection of arena talent (6)
28 Composer’s expression of
annoyance about contralto (4)
Please note: Because of BBC Music
Magazine’s limited office access
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BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE 105

 Music that changed me
Russell Watson
The genial British singer has enjoyed an
enduring popularity since his first hit
album The Voice dominated the charts
in 2000. His story has taken him from
working men’s clubs to some of the
world’s biggest stages, and while he’s
enjoyed plenty of hits, he’s overcome
some heavy knocks to be where he is
today. He is currently on a tour of UK
cathedrals and ‘magnificent buildings’.
I
grew up in Salford, Mum was a
stay-at-home mum, Dad worked
12-hour night shifts, which meant that
predominantly I was listening to Mum’s
favourite songs. She was into everything
from Cliff Richard to John Denver, but she
was a big classical fan as well. There was
one chap that she listened to in particular,
who I think probably slotted into the
‘crossover’ category, and his names was
JAMES LAST. She had a couple of albums,
but she had The Best Of… on repeat. There
was one piece in particular, Einsamer
Hirte, which I think means ‘The Lonely
Shepherd’; I remember listening to that as a
kid and thinking it was very beautiful.
Dad would often work five or six days
a week, so that meant in the short spells
of time when he was at home, he would
commandeer the radiogram in the corner
of the lounge. He was into country music,
and in particular JOHNNY CASH. So
whenever Dad was at home it would be
Johnny Cash, Johnny Cash or Johnny
Cash. Occasionally he would put on a bit of
Olivia Newton-John, though I think there
may have been underlying reasons for
that. I remember my Mum saying, ‘You’re
not putting her on again are you?’ The one
Cash song that resonates with me is ‘Ring
of Fire’. I was growing up with the most
ridiculously eclectic mix of music. I think
that’s the reason I didn’t differentiate, in
the early stages of my recording career,
between pop and classical.
My grandfather was an incredible
GETTY
pianist and I think this is where my
106 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
Tenor
The choices
The Very Best of James Last
James Last Orchestra Polydor 109 189-2
Johnny Cash Ring Of Fire
Johnny Cash
Island 602498878507
Chopin Nocturne No. 2 in E flat
Artur Rubinstein (piano)
Naxos 8110659-60
Mascagni Cavalleria rusticana –
Intermezzo
RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra/Renato
Cellini Sony Classical 88875054492
Puccini Turandot – Nessun Dorma
Luciano Pavarotti (tenor) et al
Decca 430 4332
genuine love of the classical repertoire
comes from – and not just a love for it, but
how it makes me feel when I listen to it all
these years later. I would go into the front
room and sit leaning against the back leg
of the Steinway, feeling the vibrations
going up and down my back as he played
– I’d often fall asleep listening to him. He
was completely lacking in confidence,
but had this incredible talent for playing
concert-standard piano. He used to play
CHOPIN’s Nocturne No. 2 in E flat, which
is a beautiful piece; it brings all those
memories flooding back.
Of everybody, my grandmother was
my biggest influence – certainly as far
as musical taste, and because I spent a
lot of time with her. We’d watch the old
classic movies together and one I used
to love was The Great Caruso starring
Mario Lanza. Her collection of music was
massive. It didn’t fit inside the realms of
the radiogram; it was an extensive library,
here, there and everywhere around the
house. There was one piece that she would
listen to a lot, and that’s the Intermezzo
from MASCAGNI’s Cavalleria rusticana.
It’s a piece that induces some melancholy
and a few tears as well; not tears of sadness,
but for the good memories that stir within
me. When I’d visit her, the front door
would swing open and the first thing to hit
me would be the sound of music and the
smell of freshly baked bread and cakes.
In 1993/94 I was schlepping around
the clubs northwest of Manchester in
my battered old Peugeot 309, turning up
wherever I was booked for £70 a night.
There was one place called Wigan Road
Working Men’s Club, and after my first
set the concert secretary came striding
over. He said, in his very broad Wigan
accent, ‘I’ll tell you what, Lad, you’ve
got a cracking voice on thee; have you
ever tried any of that operatic stuff, like
Pavarotti and his pals do? I reckon that’d
suit your voice right down t’ground!’ And
that was the beginning of it all for me; I
remembered that stuff from when I was a
kid, so I went away and learned ‘Nessun
Dorma’ phonetically. The first time I sang
it, everyone was up on their feet shouting
for more and I thought, ‘I might have
something here’. So I got my first vocal
coach. ‘Nessun Dorma’ was the catalyst for
everything in my career from that point.
Interview by Michael Beek