Tag Archives: classical-music

In concert – Gwilym Bowen, Gareth Brynmor John, William Vann, Navarra String Quartet @ Temple Church, London – Ian Venables: Out of the Shadows (a 70th birthday concert)

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Gwilym Bowen (tenor), Gareth Brynmor John (baritone), William Vann (piano), Navarra Quartet [Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, Eva Aronian (violins), Sascha Bota (viola), Brian O’Kane (cello)]

Venables Out of the Shadows Op.55 (2023)
Vaughan Williams arr. Vann Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934)
Vaughan Williams On Wenlock Edge (1909)
Vaughan Williams Love Bade Me Welcome (1911)
Venables Portraits of a Mind Op.54 (2022)
Howells An Old Man’s Lullaby (1947)

The Temple Church, London
Tuesday 4 November 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

The emergence of Ian Venables as the leading British art-song composer was suitably marked with a 70th-birthday concert, sponsored by the Morris-Venables Charitable Foundation under the auspices of Temple Music Foundation and held in the evocative setting of Temple Church.

Song cycles being at the forefront of Venables’s output, it made sense to start with one of his most recent – Out of the Shadows a wide-ranging overview of male love. From the coyness of Constantine Cavafy’s At the Cafè Door and the barbed humour of Horatio Brown’s Bored, this takes in the fleeting ecstasy of Cavafy’s The Mirror in the Hall and stark soulfulness of Alfred Tennyson’s Dark House, prior to the overt playfulness of John Addington Symonds’s Love’s Olympian Laughter and calm affirmation of Edward Perry Warren’s Body and Soul.

Affectingly sung by Gareth Brynmor John (above), it preceded likely the most influential such cycle in English. A. E. Housman may have disliked his settings, but Vaughan Williams always gets to the heart of the matter in On Wenlock Edge. Hence the volatile imaginings of its title-number or hymnic poise of ‘From Far, from Eve and Morning’, the brooding dialogue of ‘Is My Team Ploughing’ or nonchalant wit of ‘Oh, When I Was in Love with You’; reaching a climax in the innocence to experience of ‘Bredon Hill’, with ‘Clun’ ending the sequence in fatalistic repose.

Gwilym Bowen gave a searching account of this cycle (doubly so having replaced Alessandro Fisher at such short notice), with Brynmor John comparably attuned to the understatement of George Butterworth’s Love Blows as the Wind Blows. These settings of W. E. Henley amount to a cohesive yet subtly contrasted entity – the existential musing of In the Year that’s Come and Gone followed by the deadpan charm of Life in Her Creaking Shoes and effervescence of Fill a Glass with Golden Wine, then On the Way to Kew brings a close of deftest poise.

Bowen duly tackled a further Venables cycle. Written to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s birth, Portraits of a Mind is a notably inclusive one of the composer. Hence the gentle pantheism of George Meredith’s The Lark Ascending and the meditation on creativity of Ursula VW’s Man Makes Delight His Own; the engaging impetus of R. L. Stevenson’s From a Railway Carriage a perfect foil to the resignation of Christina Rosetti’s Echo, before lines from Walt Whitman’s A Clear Midnight conjure a warm transcendence.

Throughout these performances, the playing of the Navarra Quartet (above) evinced an incisiveness and eloquence always at the service of this music; William Vann’s attentive pianism astutely deployed in his appealing arrangement of VW’s Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’. Brynmor John opened the second half with that composer’s disarming take on George Herbert’s Love Bade Me Welcome (first of Five Mystical Songs), with both vocalists heard to advantage in An Old Man’s Lullaby – Herbert Howells’s setting of Thomas Dekker that made for a winsome envoi.

Taken overall, this was a wholly pleasurable evening and welcome confirmation of Venables’ creative prowess – his corpus of songs or song-cycles surely second to none among those for whom the English language is a source of never-ending and always unexpected possibilities.

Click here to read an extensive tribute to Ian Venables on from his husband, pianist Graham J. Lloyd – or click on the names to read more about Gwilym Bowen, Gareth Brynmor John, William Vann, the Navarra Quartet and Temple Music Foundation

Published post no.2,710 – Thursday 6 November 2025

In concert – Laurence Kilsby, Christopher Parkes, Sinfonia of London / John Wilson: Serenade @ Barbican Hall, London

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Laurence Kilsby (tenor), Christopher Parkes (horn), Sinfonia of London / John Wilson

Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910)
Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Op.31 (1943)
Bliss Music for Strings B66 (1935)
Delius arr. Fenby Late Swallows (1916, arr. 1962)
Elgar Introduction and Allegro Op.47 (1904-05)

Barbican Hall, London
Wednesday 22 October 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

One can only commend John Wilson and Sinfonia of London for, in addition to an ambitious recording schedule for Chandos, frequently taking its programmes on tour – as has been the case with this judicious selection of works for string orchestra tonight being heard in London.

There could hardly be an acoustic less suited to Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia than that of Barbican Hall, yet Wilson went a good deal of the way toward making it succeed by having the main string body – and solo quartet – to the front of the platform with the subsidiary group arrayed along its rear. The outer section were taken slowly and almost impassively, but there was no lack of impetus or fervency as the central phase built cumulatively towards its climax.

The relatively modest number of strings seemed ideally suited to Britten’s Serenade. Laurence Kilsby (who made a fine contribution to Bliss’s The Beatitudes at this year’s Proms) brought real tenderness to Pastorale and ardour to Nocturne, while Christopher Parkes was suitably plangent in Elegy and dextrousness itself in Dirge. Tenor and hornist joined delightfully in Hymn, then Wilson drew playing of fastidious poise in Sonnet. Just a little unsteady in the Prologue, Parkes excelled in the offstage Epilogue with its ethereal reprise of that opening music – so rounding off a performance that proved affecting and unaffected in equal measure.

Live and in the studio, Wilson has affirmed a commitment to the music of Bliss which could hardly have been more evident than in Music for Strings which formed the centrepiece of this concert. It had been written for the Vienna Philharmonic to premiere at the Salzburg Festival and, if its formidable technical demands no longer sound forbidding, there can have been few performances of this virtuosity or insight. Trenchant and impulsive, the opening Allegro was followed by an Andante whose sustained eloquence never excluded lightness of touch – with the speculative transition into the final Allegro as deftly handled as the Presto with which this work surges to its headlong close. Not merely a timely revival, this was no less a vindication.

Introducing this second half, Wilson had remarked how Delius’ music needs to be coaxed into yielding up its secrets as surely as it needs selling to the musicians. Late Swallows succeeded on both fronts. As arranged by Eric Fenby from the composer’s only mature string quartet, it takes its place among the latter’s most haunting evocations, and not least in a central section whose rapt intensity brought an emotional frisson that tangibly held its listeners spellbound.

Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro may, by contrast, be a piece that plays itself but it still calls for interpretive input of a high order. Wilson responded with an unusually swift reading such as emphasized its nervous intensity and often volatile changes of mood, though there was no lack of cohesion or underlying momentum in a performance that took such testing passages as the central fugato assuredly in its stride prior to a glowing apotheosis then decisive close.

A performance, moreover, as set the seal on a memorable evening’s music-making. All these pieces, save the Britten, have been recorded by Wilson and Sinfonia of London for Chandos, their advocacy of Bliss hopefully continuing well beyond this 50th anniversary of his death.

Click here to read Arcana’s review of English Music for Strings, the Chandos album containing the Bliss and Vaughan Williams works performed in this concert.

Click also on the links for more information on the Sinfonia of London and their conductor John Wilson, along with soloists Laurence Kilsby and Christopher Parkes. For more information on Bliss, you can visit the Arthur Bliss Society

Published post no.2,697 – Friday 24 October 2025

On Record – Peter Jacobs: The Silent Pool: British Piano Music by Women Composers (Heritage Records)

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Peter Jacobs (piano)

Smyth Piano Sonata no.3 (1877); Piano Sonata no.2 (Andante) (1877)
Maconchy A Country Town (nos. 1, 3, 4, 5 & 7) (1945)
Williams The Silent Pool (1932)
Grime The Silver Moon (2025)
Dring Colour Suite (1963)
Bingham The Moon Over Westminster Cathedral (2003)
Woodforde-Finden Indian Love Lyrics (nos.2 & 1) (1903)
McDowall Vespers in Venice (2002)
Bingham Christmas Past, Christmas Present (1991)
Roe A Mystery of Cats (nos. 1, 4 & 5) (1994)
Beamish Lullaby for Owain (2016)
Da Costa Gigue; Moods (both 1930)
Lehmann Cobweb Castle (nos. 2 & 5) (1908)

Heritage Records HTGCD126 [75’40”]
Producer / Engineer Paul Arden-Taylor

Recorded 16 September 2024 & 26 January 2025 at Wyastone Concert Hall, Wyastone Leys, Monmouth

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

What’s the story?

Peter Jacobs continues his productive association with the Heritage label with this anthology that takes in a well-planned overview of piano music by female British composers, ranging across over more than 130 years of creativity in an impressive variety of idioms and genres.

What’s the music like?

Although female composers had been active in the UK from the outset of the English Musical Renaissance and before, relatively few came to prominence during their lifetime, with many others destined to be rediscovered only years and sometimes decades after their death. While hardly the first of its kind, the present collection is among the most representative in terms of its stylistic coverage which, in turn, underlines they should not be pigeon-holed any more than their male counterparts. Moreover, what was the loss to earlier generations is our gain today.

This recital opens with the redoubtable Ethel Smyth – her Third Piano Sonata contrasting the equable motion of its initial Allegro with the impetuous manner of its closing Allegro vivace. From its larger scale predecessor, the central Song Without Words affords ruminative space between the dynamism and tensions of those movements either side. Of the five (out of nine) pieces in Elizabeth Maconchy’s suite, the eloquent Lament and limpid Bells are especially appealing. Grace Williams is at her most haunting in the piece as gives this collection its title, and Helen Grime pens a miniature stark yet pellucid. Among the most versatile composers of her generation, Madeleine Dring is represented here by a five-movement themed suite which includes such delights as the quizzical Pink Mirror or the appropriately sensuous Blue Air. Judith Bingham may be best known for her choral and brass band music, but there is nothing unpianistic about so translucently textured a nocturne.

Two of Amy Woodforde-Finden’s four-piece suite include the elegant poise of Less than the Dust, while Cecilia McDowall sounds a note of spatial immensity in her Venetian evocation. The four pieces of her Christmas suite find Bingham pursuing an altogether more winsome vein of expression – duly complemented by three out of five whimsical feline homages by Betty Roe, happily still going strong in her 96th year. Sally Beamish contributes a (surprisingly?) capricious lullaby, with two pieces by the short-lived Raie da Costa typifying her witty and sassy manner. The wistful charm of Liza Lehmann, two of six pieces from her only piano suite, affords an elegant then touching envoi.

Does it all work?

As an overall sequence, absolutely. At around 75 minutes, this concert-length recital can be enjoyed as a continuous sequence or in any number of selections. It helps when Jacobs is so persuasive an exponent of this music, much of it remaining little known other than to pianists with his breadth of sympathies but which ought to find an audience given exposure in a live context. As he himself notes, this “random selection [is] united by being rewarding to play, beautifully written for the instrument, varied in style and intellectual depth”. Enough said.

Is it recommended?

It is. Piano sound is as full and spacious as expected given its Wyastone source, while Jacobs contributes laconically insightful notes on the recital overall. Most enjoyable, with hopefully enough material in this pianist’s “library of over 60 years collecting” to warrant a follow-up.

Listen / Buy

You can read more about this release and explore purchase options at the Heritage Records website

Published post no.2,682 – Thursday 9 October 2025

In concert – Kleio Quartet @ Wigmore Hall: Elgar, Webern & Haydn

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Kleio Quartet [Juliette Roos, Katherine Yoon (violins), Yume Fujise (viola), Eliza Millett (cello)]

Elgar String Quartet in E minor Op.83 (1918)
Webern 5 Movements for String Quartet Op.5 (1909)
Haydn String Quartet in D major Op.50/6 ‘Frog’ (1787)

Wigmore Hall, London
Monday 6 October 2025 (1pm)

On the evidence of this BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert, the Kleio Quartet – members of the station’s New Generation Artists scheme – are ones to watch. Not least for their programming, for it was refreshing to see a Haydn string quartet given top billing at a concert rather than making up the numbers.

The concert began with an account of Sir Edward Elgar’s sole String Quartet notable for its poise, elegance and understated emotion. Elgar’s ‘late’ works are best experienced in concert at this autumnal time of year, though the dappled sunlight evoked here was compromised by a subtle yet lasting foreboding. For the youthful Kleio Quartet to capture the thoughts of a man in his early 60s with such clarity was impressive indeed. They did so through a first movement taking the ‘moderato’ of Elgar’s tempo marking to hand – deliberate but never plodding. The dense, Brahmsian counterpoint was deftly unpicked, while the nostalgic elements of the second movement gave the feeling of an ensemble performing in an adjacent room, the listener asked to imagine an elegant salon setting. The purposeful finale snapped us out of this reverie with vigorous exchanges, though there was time for affection in its second theme. Ultimately the music revelled in the Sussex outdoors enjoyed by Elgar and wife Alice, though the Autumnal chill remained present.

Memories of a very different kind coursed through Webern’s 5 Movements for String Quartet, written in the wake of his mother’s death. These remarkable compositions illustrate an unparalleled gift for intense, compressed expression. None of the movements last longer than two minutes, yet so much concentrated feeling is loaded into their short phrases, pushing against tonality with oblique melodies and rich yet desolate harmonies.

The Kleio Quartet found those qualities and more in a deeply impressive account, with the alternate moods of the first movement, argumentative and then delicate, and the forthright third. Countering these moods were the soul searching second and the sparse, eerie fourth, where the ticking motif of Yume Fujise’s viola suggested a period of insomnia. The bare bones of Webern’s anguish were made clear in the final movement, in the high, inconsolable violin of Juliette Roos and the empty closing chords.

Following this with one of Haydn’s most amiable quartets was an inspired move, the Wigmore Hall audience smiling feely as the composer’s humour was repeatedly revealed. The so-called ‘Frog’ quartet, named for the croaking repeated notes of the finale’s main theme, shows Haydn completing his Op.50 set of six quartets with a panache that would surely have delighted their beneficiary, Frederick William II of Prussia.

The Kleio had fun with the unpredictable first movement, spirited yet restless, and the harmonic twists and turns of the Poco adagio, led by expressive flourishes from Roos. The quirky Menuetto revelled in melodic inflections and cheeky asides, with the pregnant pauses of the trio section adding to the irregular rhythms within the triple time meter. All of which set up the fun and frolics of the finale, where the occasional slip of ensemble tuning could be easily forgiven in the spirit of the Kleio’s performance, Haydn charming his audience to the very end.

Listen

You can listen to this concert as the first hour of BBC Radio 3’s Classical Live, which can be found on BBC Sounds until Tuesday 4 November.

Published post no.2,680 – Tuesday 7 October 2025

In concert – Jennifer France, London Philharmonic Orchestra / Edward Gardner @ Royal Festival Hall – Abrahamsen & Mahler

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Jennifer France (soprano), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Edward Gardner

Abrahamsen let me tell you (2012-3)
Mahler Symphony no.4 in G major (1892, 1899-1900)

Royal Festival Hall, London
Friday 3 October 2025

Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse

Tonight’s London Philharmonic Orchestra concert featured the welcome revival of a 21st-century classic. Hans Abrahamsen’s recent output may be relatively sparing, but the works that have emerged represent a triumph of quality over quantity and not least let me tell you.

Set to fragmentary lines drawn by Paul Griffiths from his eponymous novel, this centres on the character of Ophelia – its seven songs falling into three larger parts whose outlining of a ‘before, now and after’ trajectory gives focus to the arching intensity of its 30-minute span. The first, fourth and sixth of these anticipate what comes to fruition during the second, fifth and seventh – the exception being the third whose speculative vocal line is underpinned by a stealthy progress in the lower registers evoking the motion, if not the form, of a passacaglia. Elsewhere the voice evinces an intricacy and translucency that effortlessly carries the word-setting as it pivots between thought of oblivion and transcendence, before eventually being subsumed into the orchestra for a conclusion among the most affecting in recent memory.

The LPO acquitted itself ably in music which is texturally complex for all its harmonic clarity, though it was Jennifer France (above) who (not unreasonably) most impressed with a rendering of the solo part as did ample justice to its high-lying melisma and airborne flights of fancy. Edward Gardner directed with an innate sense of where this music was headed, not least in those final bars with their tapering off into silence. Relatively few pieces are recognized as seminal from the outset, but let me tell you is one such and seems destined to remain so well into the future.

France then returned (or rather stole in) for the finale of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony after the interval. His setting of ‘Das himmlische Leben’ from the folk-inspired anthology Das Knaben Wunderhorn had actually been written almost a decade earlier and was once envisaged as the finale to the Third Symphony, but it makes a natural conclusion to a successor whose relative understatement is sustained right through to this movement’s intangible end: a ‘child’s vision of heaven’ whose intended innocence becomes informed with no little experience by the close.

Gardner had steered a convincing trajectory through the preceding movements – not least the opening one whose mingled whimsy and wistfulness took on a more ominous demeanour in its eventful development, before conveying unalloyed resolve in a warm-hearted reprise and beatific coda. What is among the most striking of Mahler’s scherzo’s proceeded with audible appreciation of its pivoting between the sardonic and sublime, Pieter Schoeman’s ‘mistuned’ violin being first among equals in music whose soloistic textures were thrown into relief by the homogenous stability of the Adagio. Its double variations unfolded with a fluid intensity capped by a coda whose ‘portal to heaven’ yielded thrilling resplendence as subsided into a transcendent raptness that, in other circumstances, could have made a satisfying conclusion.

That this lead so seamlessly into the vocal finale says a great deal for Mahler’s foresight, but also Gardner’s ability to fashion so cohesive a symphonic entity. As the music subsided into subterranean chords on harp, the audience was (necessarily) held spellbound a while longer.

Click on the links for more information on the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Edward Gardner, soprano Jennifer France and composer Hans Abrahamsen

Published post no.2,679 – Monday 6 October 2025