Live events
Paul Riley picks the month’s best concert and opera highlights in the UK
LONDON
Colin Currie Group and Synergy Vocals
Hayward Gallery, 6-7 December Tel: +44 (0)20 3879 9555
Web: www.southbankcentre.co.uk Southbank Centre’s chamber series decamps to the Hayward Gallery for performances of Drumming, Steve Reich’s percussion extravaganza indebted to the music of Ghana. It’s presented in the context of a major retrospective exploring the shape-shifting art of Bridget Riley.
Les Arts Florissants
The Barbican, 8 December
Tel: +44 (0)20 7638 8891
Web: www.barbican.org.uk
It’s 40 years since William Christie founded the Early Music group that takes its name from an opera by Charpentier, and excerpts are included in a splendid gala celebration that touches on Lully and Rameau as well as Handel and Purcell. Christie is joined by co-director Paul Agnew; soprano Sandrine Piau heads the solo line-up.
Verdi’s Otello
Royal Opera House,
9-22 December
Tel: +44 (0)20 7304 4000
Web: www.roh.org.uk
Gregory Kunde replaces Jonas Kaufmann in the title role as Keith Warner’s 2017 production of Verdi’s penultimate brush with the Bard is revived for the first time. With Antonio Pappano at the helm, Ermonela Jaho sings Desdemona and Carlos Álvarez plays the scheming Iago.
Alice Coote
Wigmore Hall, 12 December
Tel: +44 (0)20 7935 2141
Web: www.wigmore-hall.org.uk Julius Drake is at the piano as the intrepid mezzo puts the first great song cycle – Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte – at the heart of a recital featuring Berg and Weill alongside a sequence drawn from Schoenberg’s voluptuous Das Buch der hängenden Gärten.
Explore Ensemble
Kings Place, 13 December
Tel: +44 (0)20 7520 1490
Web: www.kingsplace.co.uk
Kings Place brings in the final weekend of its year-long ‘Venus Unwrapped’ series with a portrait of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho including the UK premiere of Figura, a chamber ensemble reworking of her Clarinet Concerto. There are new works, too, by Rebecca Saunders and sound artist Joanna Bailie.
SOUTH
Pomegranate Piano Trio
Pittville Pump Room, Cheltenham, 3 December
Tel: +44 (0)1242 227979
Web: www.cheltmusicsoc.co.uk What’s not to like about an ensemble trading under the name of a seductive fruit? Their
Cheltenham programme is rather seductive, too. Mozart’s Piano Trio in B flat spikes an otherwise French twosome of Fauré’s turbulent late D minor Trio and Ravel’s A minor – completed in haste so its composer could join the First World War effort.
Jonathan Biss
Cedars Hall, Wells, 18 December Tel: +44 (0)1749 834483
Web: wells.cathedral.school/events The American pianist is currently eight volumes into a project to record all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas – completion is scheduled for the composer’s 250th anniversary next year. Before repeating the programme at Wigmore Hall the following night he plays Nos 4 and 5 plus two sonatas bearing nicknames: the ‘Tempest’ and the protean ‘Appassionata’.
EAST Glyndebourne On Tour
Theatre Royal, Norwich,
3-7 December
Tel: +44 (0)1603 630000
Web: theatreroyalnorwich.co.uk Christiane Lutz directs Glyndebourne’s first ever production of Verdi’s Rigoletto in a season that revisits Robert Carsen’s provocative schoolroom take on Handel’s Rinaldo. Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore kicks things off. The 19th-century comic opera is conducted by Ben Glassberg and stars Sehoon Moon as the doting Nemorino bewitched by Benedetta Torre’s teasing Adina.
Maxwell Quartet
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 5 December
Tel: +44 (0)1223 748100
Web: www.kettlesyard.co.uk Winners of the Trondheim International Chamber Music Competition twice over, the Maxwell Quartet includes some trademark Scottish folk music in a line-up that places Joey Roukens’s atmospheric Visions at Sea between the third of Haydn’s Op. 71 Quartets and Schubert’s turbulent Death and the Maiden Quartet.
MIDLANDS,
NORTH AND WALES Consone Quartet
Theatr Clwyd, Mold, 1 December Tel: +44 (0)1352 344101
Web: www.theatrclwyd.com Prize-winners at the York Early Music International Young
Artists Competition and recently anointed BBC New Generation Artists, the Consone Quartet sets string quartets by Mendelssohn and Mozart (the third of the set dedicated to Haydn) beside early Schubert and Boccherini.
Joby Burgess Collective
Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, 3 December
Tel: +44 (0)161 907 5555
Web: www.rncm.ac.uk
‘This is a happening not a concert,’ proclaims the headline for percussionist Joby Burgess’s Credo in USA programme, a pun on John Cage’s featured ‘dramatic playlet for two characters’: Credo in Us.
The American tribute extends to Linda Buckley’s Discordia, marimba quartets by Eric Whitacre and Terry Riley’s seminal In C.
Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 12 December
Tel: +44 (0)121 780 3333
Web: www.thsh.co.uk
Composer Jörg Widmann wrote his song cycle Das heiße Herz for Christian Gerhaher in
2013. The settings have been orchestrated and in this concert receive their UK premiere as one of eight CBSO centenary commissions. The work is framed by Elgar’s Two Part-songs and Brahms’s Third Symphony. Thomas Bauer is the baritone soloist and Mirga Gra inyte˙ -Tyla the conductor.
BBC Philharmonic
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 14 December
Tel: + 44 (0)161 907 9000
Web: www.bridgewater-hall.co.uk Omer Meir Wellber introduces himself to Bridgewater Hall as the orchestra’s new chief conductor with another first: the UK premiere of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Bayan. The intriguing solo trio falls to Vadim Gluzman, Johannes Moser and Elsbeth Moser respectively, and Wellber establishes his Romantic credentials with Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7.
SCOTLAND
AND N IRELAND Mascagni’s
Iris
City Halls, Glasgow, 1 December Tel: +44 (0)141 353 8000
Web: www.glasgowconcerthalls.com Music director Stuart Stratford inaugurates Scottish Opera’s new season of semi-staged rarities with Mascagni’s Japanese-inspired precursor to Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, which was composed six years later. Natalya Romaniw takes the role of the ill-fated Iris.
Danny Driver
Concert Hall, Perth, 1 December Tel: +44 (0)1738 621031
Web: www.horsecross.co.uk Pianist Danny Driver (see ‘Backstage with’, right) curates a three-concert Ligeti series at Wigmore Hall in 2021/22 and limbers up with a performance of the hair-raisingly virtuosic Études Ligeti amassed in four books over a 16-year period. Movements from Bach’s genial Partita No. 1 in B flat are peppered throughout the programme.
Ulster Orchestra
Ulster Hall, Belfast, 5 December Tel: +44 (0)28 9033 4455
Web: www.ulsterorchestra.org.uk Conductor Killian Farrell comes bearing musical gifts at this lunchtime concert. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was a Christmas Eve birthday present to his wife Cosima, while the
Overture to Hänsel und
Gretel was Humperdinck’s engagement gift to his fiancée. The second Waltz sequence from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier keeps romance rampant.
Scottish Chamber Orchestra & Chorus
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 5 December
Tel: +44 (0)131 668 2019
Web: www.sco.org.uk
Stravinsky’s muscular Mass for choir and double wind quintet makes the perfect foil for the last of Haydn’s great mass settings: the pungently coloured Harmoniemesse. In between, conductor Gregory Batsleer hands over the reins to soloist Stephanie Gonley who directs Bach’s A minor Violin Concerto.