Latest news with #BrittenSinfonia
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Britten Sinfonia/Sinfonia Smith Square review – quiet fervour and formal grace
Innovative as always, Britten Sinfonia joined forces with Sinfonia Smith Square for a programme of music for wind ensemble by Messiaen and Stravinsky, alongside Stravinsky's Mass and 20th-century French motets (Poulenc, Duruflé, more Messiaen) sung by the choir of Merton College, Oxford. There were two conductors, Nicholas Daniel for the wind ensemble music, and Benjamin Nicholas (Merton's director of music) for the a cappella works. Daniel, also the Britten Sinfonia's principal oboist since its founding in 1992, steps down at the end of the current season, and this was effectively his final concert with the orchestra. The programme was sombre and beautifully constructed. The main work was Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, Messiaen's great memorial to the dead of both world wars. It was commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of the second, and is still an essential reminder, another 60 years on, of the necessity of hope in dark times. It was prefaced by other 20th-century works reflecting on conflict. The echoes of both Russian Orthodox church music and The Rite of Spring that lurk behind Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments suggest a world lost to revolution and exile, while his Mass, written in the US between 1944 and 1948, moves from hard-edged austerity towards a chilly peace, tentative at best. Poulenc's Quatre Motets Pour un Temps de Pénitence, only three of them sung here, date from early 1939, their surface calm barely concealing deep unease at impending crisis. Ritual elements rightly predominated in performances. Daniel's way with the closing sections of Symphonies of Wind Instruments proved extraordinarily moving, as the music moves towards sad resignation. The Mass was a thing of quiet fervour and formal grace, beautifully sung and played. The reverberant acoustic of St George's Cathedral, Southwark, can sometimes swallow definition and detail in Stravinsky. The vast hieratic ceremonials of Et Exspecto, in contrast, expanded and resonated superbly into the space in an interpretation of intense solemnity, superb control and, at times, cataclysmic loudness. Merton College choir sounded beautiful in the motets: Duruflé's Ubi Caritas et Amor was particularly exquisite. And Daniel also gave us a transcription for oboe of Messiaen's Vocalise-étude, originally a conservatoire test piece for soprano and piano, done with exquisite tone, extraordinary lyrical poise and wonderful depth of feeling.
Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Britten Sinfonia review — a spectacular farewell to Nicholas Daniel
It will go down as one of the noisier farewells in music history. The great British oboist Nicholas Daniel has played with the Britten Sinfonia for 33 years, even while sustaining a dazzling solo career. With this concert under the towering arches of St George's RC Cathedral in Southwark, he signed off in spectacular style. Bringing together the combined wind, brass and percussion players of the Britten Sinfonia and the Sinfonia Smith Square, plus the excellent choir of Merton College, Oxford, the programme mingled mysticism and modernism in a way that seemed to reflect Daniel's own adventurous yet highly charged music making. In this ultra-resonant acoustic the two Stravinsky pieces conducted by him — Symphonies of Wind Instruments and the Mass — perhaps lacked the
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
A sensational, spine-tingling evening with the Britten Sinfonia
This wonderful concert from the Britten Sinfoni a, Sinfonia Smith Square and the Choir of Merton College, Oxford was uplifting on two counts. It was another sign that the classical music world, reeling from the blows of Covid and the evident but never actually stated hostility of Arts Council England, hasn't lost its mojo. This was a big-scale event, composed almost entirely of 20 th -century religious music, put together out of a conviction that unfashionable but great music can attract big audiences – as indeed it did. As for the music itself it was a wonderful antidote to that all-pervasive soft-centred 'spiritual' music that cosies up to you, in an attempt to persuade you religion is about having warm feelings. There was nothing cosy in this concert. The music was as remotely beautiful as the stars and as stark and chiselled as a block of marble, with only the occasional concession to emotional warmth. The first piece, Stravinsky 's Symphonies of Wind Instruments seemed to be the odd one out, with no ostensible religious purpose. But the outcries from high winds over soft chanting in the flutes seemed like priests in dialogue, and the austere alternation of different speeds, directed with perfect control by Nicholas Daniel – better known in the musical world as a superb oboist – sounded like the acting-out of some obscure ritual. The final chorale, rising up with suppressed ecstasy into the lofty neo-Gothic spaces of St George's Cathedral, made one's spine tingle. There were many such spine-tingling moments in the Mass by Stravinsky, where the Choir together with ten wind and brass evoked the ancient Latin liturgy in a way that seemed ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, all at once. It was beautifully shaped by Daniel, who softened the music's severe metronomic tread just enough to let the music speak. In between the Symphonies and the Mass came sacred choral music from Francis Poulenc, a composer who revered Stravinsky but didn't hold feeling at such a long arm's length. One felt the terror in Timor et Tremor and the radiance in Vinea mea electa. The choir under Benjamin Nicholas sang beautifully, but the women seemed somewhat stronger and more secure than the men. To these feelings were added tenderness in two short pieces by Olivier Messiaen. In one of them, an orchestral arrangement of the early Vocalise-étude, Nicholas Daniel played the soaring melody—a poignant moment, as it marked his last performance as Principal Oboe of the Britten Sinfonia. Finally came Messiaen's Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (And I wait for the Resurrection of the Dead) which feels more like an awe-inspiring evocation of fiery stars and nebulae than anything religious. Daniel made sure the silences between movements felt as vast as the music itself, and he gave space to the deafening gong-strokes and apocalyptic brass in a way that made the cathedral's echoey acoustic seem an advantage rather than a hindrance. Like all the music, the piece became the sounding symbol of something incomprehensible beyond this world.
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Britten Sinfonia/Berman review – haunting premiere about memories of the Holocaust
There is memory, but there is also 'post-memory'. Mingled with the recollection of our own life stories, we humans also carry those of others, told or sometimes concealed by those we once knew, or even never met. But what is passed down becomes ours too. This interwoven fabric of past, present and future is the rewarding inspiration behind Michael Zev Gordon's compelling and intelligent new concert piece, A Kind of Haunting. Gordon's substantial setting is for two narrators, baritone and string orchestra. Premiered by the Britten Sinfonia under Jonathan Berman, it proves true to its title. The score explores Gordon's search for his Polish Jewish ancestors, murdered in the Holocaust in 1941: an event of which Gordon's own father barely spoke, and which the composer and his own children now own too. The focus is on the haunting not just the horror. As Gordon says, the work explores the potency of the Holocaust's aftereffects – a gift and a curse, as Marianne Hirsch's narration has it. Gordon's music is deceptively fragmentary. It starts with a shard of lullaby which disappears and reappears without crystalising. Other patterns and phrases recur and rebuild. But the structure is always clear and controlled. There is a strong focus on text, suggesting Gordon does not want the music to become too overwhelming. Occasionally it feels a little too restrained for what is being described, but Gordon's artistic tact pays dividends in the final pages. One narrator, the excellent Allan Corduner, depicts the search. The second, Louisa Clein, reflects, equally convincingly, on the meaning of the interwoven memories. James Newby brings vocalism of great nuance and controlled solemnity to five reflective arias of mounting intensity to texts by the poet Jacqueline Saphra. The opening half of the concert brought two contrasting masterworks of the Holocaust era itself. Under Berman, the Sinfonia played Martinů's Concerto for double string orchestra, piano and timpani with full toned ferocity. One had to remind oneself that the concerto, with Huw Watkins a formidable piano soloist, was written in 1938, before the events it otherwise seems to embody so strongly. Strauss's Metamorphosen, premiered in 1946, is a work of an altogether different kind, with violinist Zoë Buyers leading the 23 string players in a performance whose intimacy captured the veteran composer's vast sense of loss. This concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 9 April The Britten Sinfonia: 1945: A Kind of Haunting is at Elgar Concert Hall, Birmingham on 26 March and Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden on 28 March
