Category Archives: Small scale

In Concert – Sean Shibe @ Wigmore Hall: A Celebration of the Guitar

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Sean Shibe (guitar)

J.S. Bach Prelude in C minor, BWV999 (c1727)
Barrios Mangoré La Catedral (1921, rev. 1939)
Villa-Lobos Prelude no. 3 in A minor (1940); Études (1929) – no.1 in E minor, no.5 in C major, no.8 in C sharp minor, no.10 in B minor
Barrios Mangoré Barcarola in D major, ‘Julia Florida’ (1938)
Mompou Suite compostelana (1962) – nos. 1, 2, 5 and 6
Martin Quatre pieces brèves (1933)
Adès Forgotten Dances (2023)

Wigmore Hall, London
Thursday 19 September 2023

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

Expecting the unexpected has become synonymous with Sean Shibe, who tonight began his season-long residency at Wigmore Hall with this recital which deftly blurred any perceived demarcation between improvised or notated music in a compulsively absorbing programme.

One of a surviving handful of pieces probably written for lute, Bach’s C minor Prelude began proceedings – its elegantly methodical unfolding here rendered with real liquidity by Shibe. It segued seamlessly into La Catedral as is among a relative few of Agustín Barrios Mangoré’s extended compositions: the subdued fervour of (belatedly added) Preludio saudade heading into the hieratic processional of Andante religioso, before the lively yet disquieting motion of Allegro solenne brought this vividly yet understatedly illustrative sequence to its close.

Here, as across this recital, Segovia was a pervasive presence – not least on the guitar output of Heitor Villa-Lobos. From his Five Preludes, Schiebe opted for the Third – a Homage to Bach whose echoing open strings summon an opulence, even majesty, out of all proportion to its length. Then came four of his 12 Études – the intensive arpeggio workout of the First, the stark contrasts between melody and accompaniment of the Fifth, the playful alternation of registers in the Eighth, then rounded off with the exacting rhythmic fluidity of the 10th.

The first half closed with more Barrios – his Júlia Florida a barcarolle of melting tenderness whose allure carried over a second half that commenced with four of the six movements from Federico Mompou’s Suite compostelana. One of the Catalan’s handful of works for other than piano, the distanced evocation of Preludio complemented the austere spirituality of Coral as surely as did the folk-tinged pathos of Canción the ingratiating allure of Muñeira – this latter bringing the Galician environs which had inspired this music into greatest prominence.

Shibe’s including music by Frank Martin was more than welcome in the 50th anniversary of the Swiss composer’s death as has passed largely unnoticed in the UK. His only work for solo guitar, Quatre pieces brèves has been championed by many guitarists in Segovia’s wake and Shibe duly left his mark with his quizzical take on its Prélude, the chaste witfulness of Air then the barely contained emotional impetus of Plainte, before Comme une gigue provided a pointedly ‘contemporary’ vantage on the Baroque dance by turns quixotic and invigorating.

That both Martin and Thomas Adès have written operas on Shakespeare’s The Tempest seems as good a link as any into Forgotten Dances, the latter composer’s first work for guitar. Its six vignettes traverse the restless Overture and Buñuel-influenced speculation of Berceuse, via the Ligetian propulsion of Courante and tenuous repose of Barcarolle, to the cumulatively effusive homage to Berlioz of Carillon de Ville then rather more equable homage to Purcell of Vesper – its allusions emerging, Dowland-like, over what becomes an affecting farewell.

An intriguingly varied recital duly afforded focus not least by the calmly assured presence of Shibe – his appearance this evening redolent of the long-gone, much-missed Billy Mackenzie. A limpid rendering of an as yet unidentified encore provided a brief if wholly appropriate envoi.

To read more about Sean Shibe’s residency at the hall, visit the Wigmore Hall website – and click here to visit the guitarist’s own website

In concert – Dawn Landes @ Komedia (Studio), Brighton

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Dawn Landes (vocals, guitar) @ Komedia (Studio), Brighton, 8 September 2024

by John Earls. Photo (c) John Earls

Dawn Landes’ The Liberated Woman’s Songbook is a remarkable album and project. It is Landes’ re-imagining of the book of the same title, originally published by folk singer, guitar teacher and author Jerry Silverman in 1971.

The night before this performance it was the subject of a major concert at London Barbican’s Milton Hall, where Landes was joined a number of special guests including folk legend Peggy Seeger and poet Jackie Kay.

Tonight it was a central (but by no means exclusive) feature of this solo acoustic set at the much smaller Studio space of Brighton’s Komedia. Telling the stories and highlighting the voices of women through songs spanning over 200 years, this section of the evening had the feel of the best kind of musical history lesson.

Hard is the Fortune of All Womankind, a traditional ballad from 1830, is the earliest of the collection  and was deeply affecting, as was The Housewife’s Lament (1866), whose lyrics come from the diary of a woman named Sarah A. Price in Ottawa, Illinois. She had seven children, all of whom died in her lifetime.

Bread and Roses (1912) was one of the songs for which Landes was ably joined by Sylvie Lewis. Along with The Mill Mother’s Lament (1929) – “Let’s stand together workers and have a union here”  – and Florence Reece’s Which Side Are You On (1931), it emphasised that many of these songs are not just based on women’s liberation but workers’ and trade union rights also. This was apposite given that the annual meeting of the Trades Union Congress was taking place just up the road (in which I declare an interest as an attendee).

This may all sound rather earnest, but whilst the seriousness of the issues was never diminished, there was plenty of humour throughout the evening. This was helpfully illustrated by this section’s ending with Meredith Tax’s adaptation of the children’s song There was a Young Woman Who Swallowed a Lie (1970). These songs and these women still need to be heard.

This Liberated Woman’s section of the performance was bookended by songs from some of Landes’ other albums. The show opened with Bluebird, from the album of the same name celebrating its 10th anniversary, which set the tone perfectly. From the start it was clear this was going to be intimate, beautiful and ultimately joyous.

Heel Toe was captivating and smoky, Wind and Rain – “Hands up if you’ve had enough” – was fabulous, and there was an absolutely cracking version of Why They Name Whiskey After Men.

Dawn Landes has a gorgeous voice. The singing was clear and expressive, the guitar plucking deft and there were even some sparkling golden boots (“glitter makes things better!”) which were removed at times for some barefoot stomping or appended with tambourine.

All in all one genuinely got the sense that after the excitement of the previous night’s extravaganza this smaller club outing was a back to basics affair. Landes seemed to enjoy it and absolutely held the room.

John Earls is Director of Research at Unite the Union and tweets / updates his ‘X’ content at @john_earls

Published post no.2,296 – Tuesday 10 September 2024

In concert – Chaka Khan’s Meltdown: Bruce Hornsby @ Royal Festival Hall

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Bruce Hornsby (vocals, piano), Olivia Chaney (vocals, harmonium)]

Royal Festival Hall, London
Tuesday 18 June 2024

Reviewed by Ben Hogwood Photos (c) Ben Hogwood

Bruce Hornsby likes to challenge his audience. When I was fortunate enough to interview him for musicOMH, he went into some detail – with great feeling – about how the gig experience should not be a mere reproduction of his recorded output.

In reality, the opposite is the truth. While he presents his best-known material, he coats it in new clothes, pairing it in some cases with modern classical piano works. Ligeti, Webern, Elliott Carter and Schoenberg all make themselves known in the course of this solo piano set, their chromatic compositions a direct contrast to the pop songs with which they are juxtaposed.

Hornsby is a natural raconteur in between, his stories told with a glint in the eye but also with a good deal of meaning and emotion. The piano is his closest relative, for sure – and the feeling is that not a day goes by without Hornsby spending at least a few hours seated at the keyboard. Watching this gig is akin to eavesdropping on a practice session in the room next door. Sure, there are some rough edges, but they are all part of the charm – moments where the voice has to travel higher than it might normally go, or where there are too many notes to fit into the available meter at the end of a particularly fulsome improvisation.

For these performances are very much in the moment, and for that the audience is grateful. The Royal Festival Hall stage is an oversized living room, the audience effectively sat around the fire as the host tells his musical stories. The narration is kept brief, as the generous host ‘only has 90 minutes’ in which to fit the music he wants to play.

Ten minutes in and we have already had our money’s worth, in the form of elegant versions of Days Ahead and Soon Enough. In these songs Hornsby uses the piano as a miniature orchestra, creating colours through the unusual density of the left-hand part but giving us memorable melodies and lyrics too. The voice is in good shape, the piano even more so.

Cast-Off is the first to showcase his more recent musical directions, the co-write with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon a humourous tale of a man addicted to break-ups but one with a lingering sadness. The melodic profile is now angular, but the tunes still make sense, while the harmonies strain at the leash leaving their audience behind.

At times it seems Hornsby is determined to challenge and even rile the audience, with provocative one-liners and musical about-turns. The Way It Is now comes without its principal riff – but it still reaches deep into the soul, a moment for the audience to think and check themselves, assess their life direction even. It remains a special song, one of the ‘80s best, and the mark of a good song is that it can work in several guises. The same can be said for The End Of The Innocence, a Hornsby composition for Don Henley, which by its end inhabits the air of a Brahms intermezzo.

The co-writes are a source of constant surprise and wonder. There are songs written with Chaka Khan (the moving Love Me Still), performed with Sting, Eric Clapton and Bruce Springsteen (Halcyon Days), or with Elton John (Dreamland), where the piano line is recognisably the work of Hornsby.

He sings affectionately of his son’s dislike of school (Hooray For Tom) and ventures into ‘the curiously American genre of the murder ballad’ for the Pat Metheny collaboration Country Doctor, where wondrous things happen beneath the floorboards – aka the piano’s lowest register. This is the song with the most rhythmic drive.

At two points in his set Hornsby is joined by fellow singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney, who also plays harmonium. Their version of The Pogues’ Fairytale In New York is on the quaint side, and feels under rehearsed, but works thanks to the musicianship on show, even if the harmonium is low in the mix. Balance is restored for Mandolin Rain, one of the best songs on show, where Hornsby’s deadpan emotional guard almost slips.

He is a true entertainer, able to get the crowd eating out of his hand while they marvel at the skill and guile of a performer who has not yet been fully appreciated in his time. Fifteen albums into his career, Hornsby is more adventurous on his approach to 70 than he ever has been, set to challenge his audience even further with time. More power to his elbow, for a great pianist such as him deserves this stage on a much more regular basis. The crowd, discussing a memorable night, would surely agree.

Published post no.2,214 – Wednesday 19 June 2024

In concert – Summer Music in City Churches: Tier3 Trio @ St Giles Cripplegate

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Tier3 Trio [Joseph Wolfe (violin), Jonathan Ayling (cello), Daniel Grimwood (piano)]

Liszt arr. Saint-Saëns Orpheus
Tchaikovsky arr. Grimwood Andante non troppo (second movement of Piano Concerto no.2 in G major Op.44) (1880)
Arensky Piano Trio no.1 in D minor Op.32 (1894)

St Giles Cripplegate, London
Thursday 13 June 2024, 1pm

Reviewed by Ben Hogwood

‘Love’s Labours’ is the title of this year’s Summer Music in City Churches festival, based opposite the Barbican Hall in St Giles Cripplegate. The ten day-long enterprise is proving ample consolation for the much-missed City of London Festival, which once captivated audiences in the Square Mile for three weeks and offers music of equal range and imagination.

For the second year in succession the Tier3 Trio visited for a lunchtime recital, following up last year’s tempestuous Tchaikovsky Piano Trio with an attractive programme subtitled From Russia with Love. They began with a curiosity, playing Saint-Saëns’ little-known arrangement of Liszt’s symphonic poem Orpheus for piano trio. A highly effective transcription, it retained its dramatic thread in this fine performance, notable for its attention to detail and well-balanced lines when reproducing Liszt’s slow-burning music. Pianist Daniel Grimwood successfully evoked Orpheus’ lyre, while Jonathan Ayling’s burnished cello sound probed in counterpoint to Joseph Wolfe’s violin.

Tier3 was formed during lockdown, and in the same period when he was performing Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no.2 in Germany, Grimwood realised the suitability of the work’s slow movement for trio. He rightly complemented ‘the extent to which Tchaikovsky was an experimenter in form’, a trait found in many works but at its inventive peak in the second concerto, whose slow movement is in effect a piano trio with orchestra. Here the arrangement was just right – balanced, elegant and fiercely dramatic towards the end. Clarity of line was secured through sensitive pedalling from Grimwood, the trio using the resonant acoustic to their advantage, while the individual cadenzas were brilliantly played.

These two notable curiosities linked beautifully into one of the best-known works of Anton Arensky, his Piano Trio no.1 in D minor. Arensky is not a well-known composer, fulfilling in part an unkind prophecy from his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. However that does not mean his music is without merit – far from it, as in his brief life of 45 years he wrote two symphonies, four orchestral suites, a substantial output of piano and high quality chamber music, of which the first piano trio is the pick.

Dedicated to the cellist Karl Davidov, it is equal parts elegy, drama and ballet – with a powerful first movement setting the tone. The balletic second movement Scherzo demands much of the piano, but Grimwood was its equal, sparkling passagework from the right hand dressed with twinkling figures for cello and piano. The emotional centre of the trio was in the slow movement, with a heartfelt tribute to Davidov in Ayling’s first solo, while the finale rounded everything up in a highly satisfying payoff, a return to the first movement’s profound theme capped with an emphatic closing section.

These were very fine performances from a trio at the top of their game, navigating the resonant acoustic of St Giles with power and precision. On this evidence, Rimsky-Korsakov would have had to eat his words!

You can read more about Summer Music in City Churches at the festival website – and you can listen to a Spotify playlist below, containing the music heard in this concert – with the original version of the Tchaikovsky:

Published post no.2,209 – Friday 14 June 2024

In concert – Quatuor Danel: Shostakovich & Weinberg #5 @ Wigmore Hall

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Quatuor Danel [Marc Danel & Gilles Millet (violins), Vlad Bogdanas (viola), Yovan Markovitch (cello)]

Shostakovich String Quartet no.7 in F# minor Op.108 (1959-60)
Weinberg String Quartet no.7 in C major Op.59 (1957)
Weinberg String Quartet no.8 in C minor Op.66 (1959)
Shostakovich String Quartet no.8 in C minor Op.110 (1960)

Wigmore Hall, London
Monday 3 June 2024

by Richard Whitehouse Photo (c) Marco Borggreve

Quatuor Danel’s interleaving of string quartets by Shostakovich and Weinberg arrived at its effective half-way point this evening with a programme featuring the seventh and eighth of their respective cycles: quartets that are as different from each other as are these composers.

His briefest and likely most ambivalent, Shostakovich’s Seventh Quartet is dedicated to the memory of his first wife from the vantage of the short-lived marriage to his second. Its three movements play without pause, their oblique formal and expressive circularity being potently realized here – whether those fugitive speculations of the opening Allegretto, wistful regret of the central Lento, or seething anger of a final Allegro whose fugal aggression pointedly heads back to the opening theme for a close of simmering unease. Music, then, which implies much more than could really be stated, as the Danel underlined throughout this perceptive reading.

Coming 11 years after its monumental predecessor, Weinberg’s Seventh Quartet might seem representative of a (necessary) lowered ambition in the late- and post-Stalin years. Subdued and even enervated, its opening Adagio never strays from a musing uncertainty the ensuing Allegretto (originally preceded by a vivid scherzo, subsequently withdrawn) offsets through its poise and charm. Neither predicts a finale as takes the precedent of that in Shostakovich’s Second Quartet to its logical extreme – these 23 variations on a sombre theme unfolding as a palindrome from sustained grandeur to seething energy, then back to the start for a glowering apotheosis. Undoubtedly one of the great such movements in the history of the string quartet.

Such music would usually mark the end of a programme but, following the trajectory of this double-cycle, it concluded the first half of a recital which continued with Weinberg’s Eighth Quartet. Once relatively familiar through its championing from the Borodin Quartet and, in the UK, the Lindsays, its single movement (reciprocally taken to a new level with the 13th Quartet of Shostakovich) builds from initial reticence to a dance-like section of pronounced Klezmer inflections. Affording a culmination of audible anguish, this duly subsides towards the mood of the opening for a conclusion of becalmed intimacy realized to perfection here.

It is worth recalling how much more frequently played, compared to the rest of his cycle, was Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet even a quarter-century after its composer’s death. All credit to the Danel for investing it with a continual sense of (re-?) discovery – the pensive allusiveness of its initial movement yielding an anticipation brutalized by the violence of its scherzo then deflected by the quizzical repartee of its intermezzo. The fourth movement assuredly took no hostages to fortune in its graphic alternation between the confrontational and consoling, and it remained for the finale to restore emotional equilibrium with its resumption of the opening music – albeit now devoid of quotations as Shostakovich stands ‘naked’ before his listeners.

A gripping performance and one, moreover, that brought this first phase of the Danel’s cycle to a natural close. It resumes on October 16th with the Ninth and 10th Quartets by Weinberg alongside the Ninth Quartet by Shostakovich – a programme equally eventful and intriguing.

You can hear the music from the concert below, in recordings made by Quatuor Danel -including their most recent cycle of the Shostakovich quartets on Accentus:

For more information on the next concert in the series, visit the Wigmore Hall website. You can click on the names for more on composer Mieczysław Weinberg and Quatuor Danel themselves.

Published post no.2,200 – Wednesday 5 June 2024