Latest news with #chambermusic
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Hermes Experiment review: As the lines blur between original works and arrangements, this concert becomes almost mesmerising
The Hermes Experiment Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle ★★★★☆ Musical transcription, arrangement and variation have been with us forever. Or at least since the first human heard the likes of a cuckoo or maybe some long-extinct bird and chose to imitate it. Before the invention of sound recording, transcriptions and arrangements were essential for anyone trying to build a knowledge of music. You could buy solo piano or piano-duet arrangements of symphonies, operas, oratorios, chamber music, even a piano-duet version of Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata aimed at players whose technique did not rise to the solo version. Orchestral arrangements brought early music to audiences who might otherwise not have got to hear it. Sheet-music sales peaked about a century ago, when electrical recording and radio broadened the range of music that was readily available for hearing. But arrangements have been on the rise in recent decades. Can you name a single work for violin, guitar and accordion? Or tuba, piano and percussion? Or soprano, clarinet, double bass and harp? READ MORE The first combination is headlined by Nicola Benedetti and can be heard at the National Concert Hall in November. The second is led by Daniel Herskedal, whose jazz-classical-fusion trio tours for Music Network in October. And the third is the line-up for The Hermes Experiment – Héloïse Werner, Oliver Pashley, Marianne Schofield and Anne Denholm-Blair – who open Dublin International Chamber Music Festival at the Royal Chapel in Dublin Castle on Wednesday. This group has been ploughing its individual furrow to high praise for more than a decade, during which time it has commissioned more than 60 works, three of which appear in their Dublin programme: Laura Moody's intense Rilke Songs, Lisa Robertson's dark An Sgaireag: She Screams, and Misha Mullov-Abbado's more folksong-like The Linden Tree. Perhaps the most striking feature of the evening is the way in which the lines are blurred between original works and arrangements, not least because the four musicians pay so much attention to the possibilities of manipulating timbre by straying into each other's territory to create new tone colours. The arrangements, all but one by the musicians themselves, are more rewritings than simple transcriptions, and even the earliest music, Barbara Strozzi's agitated Tradimento, first published in 1659, is rich in 21st-century effects and colourings. With 12 items on the programme, this is one of those evenings when the almost mesmerising whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The art of arranging is alive and well. Dublin International Chamber Music Festival continues until Sunday, June 8th
RNZ News
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Making rainbow connections
This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions. Tabea Squire Photo: Eustie Kamath Once again, secondary school music students across the country are competing in Aotearoa's annual chamber music contest. But for this, the competition's 60th incarnation, composer Tabea Squire has attempted to address a perennial issue: how do you put very different ensembles on an equal footing? Squire's solution is a little like a set of Lego blocks - short musical phrases coded by colour (she calls them 'bricks') some of them pitched, some just rhythm - which competitors can arrange, repeat, mix and match as they like, to build their own piece. It's called "Rainbow Construction" and the blocks she's set out in the user manual represent all the colours of said rainbow, along with ultraviolet, which is a family of options for rests. As in the sounds you can't hear - get it? Speaking to RNZ Concert, Squire said the inspiration for the piece came from Terry Riley's "In C" which also invites players to mix and match musical ideas set out by the composer. Squire says there's only one hard and fast rule: don't transpose the notes she's written in the bricks into different keys. Otherwise it's all over to the competing groups and the instruments they use, be they steel percussion bands or string quartets or anything in between, to decide how to build their piece. And no, if it doesn't suit your ensemble, Squire says you don't have to attempt it. Meanwhile Squire, who won the composition category of the New Zealand Community Trust Chamber Music Contest in 2006, continues to work on her fully-scored music for concerts, including one which the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra will play later this year. And here's a video of another of her works, "I Dance, Unseen". District rounds for this year's NZCT Chamber Music Contest began this week, with the final in Auckland in August.
South China Morning Post
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
No holds barred in pianist Haochen Zhang and Dover Quartet's French May Hong Kong concert
Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang made it clear his concert with the Dover Quartet had concluded when he closed the lid of the Steinway grand piano in the Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall following a monumental rendition of César Franck's Piano Quintet in F minor. Advertisement Despite the rapturous applause that followed a display of unceasing modulations, constant harmonic movement and more pianissimos and fortissimos than are heard in most chamber music performances, an encore would have been as out of place as another main course after dessert. No-holds-barred playing of the highest calibre was the hallmark of this French May festival presentation by Premiere Performances of Hong Kong on May 12. In the quintet's opening 'Allegro', the group's voices were like single grape varieties in a finely balanced wine cuvée, each retaining their distinct character amid the density of Franck's music. Pianist Haochen Zhang (rear) and the Dover Quartet, comprising violinists Joel Link (far left) and Bryan Lee (second from left), cellist Camden Shaw and violist Julianne Lee, perform at the Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall on May 12, 2025. Photo: Kenny Cheung/Premiere Performances of Hong Kong Their playing of the 'Lento' second movement was profoundly reflective, from the stillness of the opening to the more heartfelt passages that followed, where the richness and resonance of the quartet's sound was evident, especially in the bravura playing of cellist Camden Shaw. Advertisement
South China Morning Post
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Russia's Borodin Quartet to perform in Hong Kong on its 80th anniversary China tour
Russia's Borodin Quartet returns to Hong Kong this week with a programme that marks the chamber music ensemble's 80th anniversary. Comprising two violinists, a violist and a cellist, the quartet remains an authoritative interpreter of Dmitri Shostakovich's music. On May 16 the ensemble will perform the Russian composer's String Quartet No 1 in C major, Op 49, and on May 17, his Piano Quintet in G minor, Op 57, with Russian pianist Andrey Pisarev. Yao Jue, who invited the Borodin Quartet to perform in Hong Kong, says its programmes will showcase the ensemble's style and inspire Hong Kong audiences. Photo: Hong Kong String Orchestra
New York Times
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Frick's Gift to New York: A Superb New Concert Hall
Most everything at the Frick Collection, which reopened last month after a nearly five-year renovation, is the same as it was, but better. Hand-loomed velvet wall coverings have been replaced, making Vermeers and Rembrandts pop with fresh vibrancy. Chandeliers and skylights have been cleaned. It's the museum we knew, with the grime wiped away. What a relief. For almost a century, the jewel-box Frick has held a special place in the city's heart. Why mess with perfection? But sometimes messing around is worthwhile. The public can now enter the Frick family's upstairs living quarters, turned into intimate galleries. And the museum has returned bearing another gift: a superb space for music, which has swiftly become one of the best places to hear chamber performances in New York City. The Frick's well-loved concert series has moved from an ovoid room off the garden court, where performances took place since the 1930s, to a new, 220-seat, curved-amphitheater auditorium two stories underground. In a debut burst of six concerts over two weeks, the theater was put through its paces. Youthful Baroque ensembles blazed through early music. A long, spare piano solo by Tyshawn Sorey had its New York premiere. The Takacs Quartet and Jeremy Denk played memorably volatile Brahms. There were pieces from Tudor England as well as a just-written song for the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo. If you went to all six performances, you heard two Steinway pianos — one from the late 19th century, one recent — as well as a fortepiano, a harpsichord, a synthesizer, a violin fitted with old-style gut strings and another with modern metal ones. Through the very different programs, instruments and textures, the sound was clear, vividly present and resonant. There's a crackling aliveness to music in the hall. Every slowly decaying tone in Sorey's 'For Julius Eastman' registered. The acoustics encourage both transparency and blending — each of the Takacs players had a defined voice, but those voices also melded — which is difficult to achieve in a relatively small room like this one. It's also tough to make a subterranean space feel airy and bright. But the new Stephen A. Schwarzman Auditorium — designed by Selldorf Architects, which led the Frick renovation, with acoustical consulting by Arup — avoids claustrophobia. With pale walls, stylish brown leather seating and a gently wavy proscenium framing the performers, the hall is spacious yet cozy, with frisky touches. (Those zigzag banisters!) Even in a cultural center like New York, ideal homes for chamber music — gatherings of just a few players, historically in domestic salons — are rarer than you might think. Alice Tully Hall, where the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center resides, sounds good, but with nearly 1,100 seats, lacks the immediacy this repertory lives on. Weill Recital Hall, a staid shoe box at Carnegie Hall, holds fewer than 300, but if seated at the back, you can feel far from the action. The Morgan Library's Gilder Lehrman Hall benefits from partnerships with Young Concert Artists and the Boston Early Music Festival, but the space is precipitously raked and feels stifling, with flinty acoustics. The Board of Officers Room at the Park Avenue Armory is an ornate delight, but its limited season concentrates on vocal recitals. In this company, the Frick's auditorium stands out. Concerts at the museum began in 1938, just a few years after the former home of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick opened to the public. The artists presented in that early period were a who's-who of legends like Claudio Arrau, Andrés Segovia and Gregor Piatigorsky. Seating 175, the damask-lined, amber-glowing music room encapsulated the Frick's gentility; until 2005, by which time the focus had shifted from stars to rising artists, tickets were free and had to be requested by mail. Some devotees were furious when it was announced that the room would be given over to exhibition space in the renovation. 'Destroying the Frick's music room — a chamber concert venue beloved for generations — is an erasure of New York City's cultural and civic memory,' one resident testified at a Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing in 2018. But while the music room had old-school charm, its acoustics were inert compared to the zestiness of the new auditorium. In the opening concert, on April 26, Lea Desandre's mezzo-soprano floated atop the sparkling Jupiter Ensemble in Handel arias. The following weekend, Alexi Kenney, whose violin sported those gut strings, joined Amy Yang on fortepiano in scorching Schumann sonatas. The dazzling flutist Emi Ferguson combined with the vivacious group Ruckus for a playfully conceived but seriously virtuosic program interweaving miniatures by Telemann and Ligeti. Even if the space no longer resembles a 19th-century salon, it is, if anything, more intimate. At the Takacs concert, a tall young man in the front row leaned forward at one point, listening intently, and his face was just a couple of feet from the first violinist. While the fortepiano was characterful in the Schumann, and Denk's 1880s piano blended well with the Takacs in the Brahms, one acoustical issue concerns the modern concert grand. The Steinway used during Susan Rothenberg's Sorey premiere and Mishka Rushdie Momen's juxtaposition of Tudor works and contemporary pieces tended to sound stony and blaring in the new hall, even in softer passages. After spending the first few performances in the center near the front, I sat in a back corner for Rushdie Momen's recital, and the piano sound bounced off the wall so strongly that it almost made my ear ring. Some kind of dampening panels or other intervention might help with the trouble. But it's hardly unusual for new halls to need acoustical tweaks. Jeremy Ney, appointed the Frick's head of music and performance a year ago — a blink of an eye in the long-planned world of classical music — has hit the ground running with this richly varied, brilliantly played festival. Hopefully he is given the resources to continue to organize robust seasons, not a mere scattering. And hopefully, in a landscape of museum performance programs increasingly dominated by wan site-specific productions and strained exhibition tie-ins, the series will retain the commitment of these opening weeks: great music, passionately performed. It's as simple as that.
