Review: Opening concert of Sarasota Music Festival with Angelo Xiang Yu
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Joanna MacGregor
Brighton Festival 2021 classical – Adrian Brendel (cello) & Joanna MacGregor (piano) in Brighton Dome Concert Hall, Wednesday 19 May (1pm: 90 minutes, no interval), devised in association with Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra and Strings Attached. Cello Sonatas by Benjamin Britten in C major Op65, Frank Bridge in D minor, César Franck in A major. Also livestreamed.
The Festival’s third live indoor concert in three days since Covid-19 Pandemic lockdowns began in March 2020. Permitted audience: 250 (Dome seating capacity is 1,700) at this initial stage of national lockdown lift on socially distanced indoor concerts.
Masks mandatory, one-way routes. Seating bookable in household groups, sitting together. In the raised-area stalls and upstairs, three empty seats separate those occupied by individuals or groups. Cabaret table-seating on auditorium floor accessed by temporary stairs.
Last modified on Tue 13 Apr 2021 07.50 EDT
The composer Simon Bainbridge, who has died aged 68 after a long period of ill health, responded deeply to the visual arts and poetry in a way that informed a musical style of impressive technical assurance and originality. Time spent studying with Gunther Schuller at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts (1973-74), opened his ears to jazz and what Schuller termed third stream music, a fusion of jazz and classical.
But despite the absorption of jazz influences such as big band and Miles Davis into his style, his compositions remained intellectually challenging, often austere. A flirtation with the minimalism of the American composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, failed to develop into a closer relationship, Bainbridge finding it limiting both harmonically and rhythmically.
(5 out of 5 stars) This is a delightful cd that still sets the standard for these varied violin/guitar pieces even though they were recorded in November 92. Gil Shaham plays with an aristocratic charm that makes every piece sound so refreshing and witty; he has imbued into these Paganini works the purest violin tones and cleanest approach of everyone who has tackled the same works including Monica Huggett s recordings on Harmonia Mundi and the inexpensive Naxos recordings. Indeed while listening to both Huggett s and Shaham s interpretations of the Sonata Concertata , I prefer the latter simply because it is so much more refined; Huggett s playing seems more raw and less polished even though there may appear to be more energy. Huggett plays the piece as if it was a Baroque Miniature Masterpiece; Shaham plays it in the Classical Mold full of romance and feeling- imparting a greater degree of mystery and spirituality. Shaham makes every note sound just right and no quips with the
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