Music to my ears
What the classical world has been listening to this month
Edward Gardner Conductor
I don’t usually have music on in the background really, but early in the lockdown I was listening to a lot of music every day and really enjoying it. I felt like a teenager again. Some of the things I listened to I was preparing, like Gubaidulina’s Über Liebe und Hass, which I’m hoping to do with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in a year or so. It’s an incredible oratorio and a complete revelation. Her ability to combine the visceral with the spiritual is really extraordinary.
The LPO is coming up to its 90th anniversary in the 2022/23 season, so I’ve been going through its commissions and listening to what we can resurrect. James Macmillan’s Viola Concerto is a really great piece that deserves as much exposure as possible – the recording on Hyperion with Lawrence Power and Martyn Brabbins is wonderful. I’ve been discovering a few more of James’s pieces for myself – the world knows about them well, but I didn’t so much.
It’s amazing what music bypasses you when you’re on such a narrow path of classical music. My son recently reintroduced me to Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack, an album I used to listen to as a kid. He’s really into it and it’s so lovely to relive some of that music. The panache of a song like ‘Brighton Rock’ was really mind-blowing; I probably hadn’t heard it for 25 years. It was just so great to rediscover the fantasy and brilliance of that group.
And also…
I don’t normally read much, but I love it. I’ve just finished Bill Bryson’s The Body and I’m in the middle of Julian Barnes’s latest novel, The Man in the
Red Coat. Bryson has such a love of storytelling and sharing knowledge in a beautifully humble way; every page is packed with stuff I simply didn’t know. Barnes’s books really inhabit different worlds and he just seems to be able to sum up the beauty and idiocy of humanity.
Gardner’s recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes with the Bergen Philharmonic is out in September Sarah Willis Horn player
I don’t listen to a lot of music. When you’re in an orchestra and you’re playing six to eight hours a day, you’re just happy when it’s silent! Cuban and Latin American music is all I can bear after a long day – I like to have a little dance around my kitchen. Singer Ibrahim Ferrer and the Buena Vista Social Club were my entry into Cuban music. The natural joy in their voices and the slightly out-of-tune instruments make me feel like I’m in Cuba when I hear it.
I’m a fan of pianist Víkingur Ólafsson , particularly his new album of Debussy and Rameau. The way he plays Rameau is like rock music. I love all the colours he puts in – it’s as if he has a different colour in each finger and can paint pictures in music. I particularly love his recording of Rameau’s Le Rappel des oiseaux – as a huge bird fan, I enjoy it when composers like Rameau or Messiaen depict birdsong in their music.
I’ve been listening back to the Berlin Philharmonic’s recordings of the Beethoven symphonies with Simon Rattle. He was our principal conductor for 17 years, which was almost as long as I’d
James Macmillan’s Viola Concerto deserves as much exposure as possible
been in the orchestra, so his interpretations became my mine too. We’re creatures of habit, in that we like what we know, so these recordings are comforting for that reason. What an honour to have recorded Beethoven symphonies under Barenboim, Rattle and now Kirill Petrenko. And also…
I’ve been desperately looking for something wholesome and healthy to recommend, but lockdown has meant that all I’m able to come up with is a Netflix binge I’ve had: the Spanish crime drama Money Heist, in which the characters rob Spain’s royal mint. Gripping stuff! Sarah Willis’s album Mozart y Mambo is out on the Alpha label Robert Plane Clarinettist During lockdown, I’ve found it incredibly cleansing to listen to Hesperion XX and Jordi Savall’s disc of Purcell’s Fantasias for the Viols. I love the music’s simplicity as a whole, and yet you also get these amazing squeezed harmonies in there. There’s a timelessness and purity about them that appeals at the moment. The recording itself is wonderfully intimate as well – you really do feel as though you are sitting just a few feet away.
I’ve always loved Huw Watkins’s music, and his Symphony is a piece that I was supposed to have been playing with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in May. I was so looking forward to it. The work is classic Huw – it is aurally very appealing but he never compromises his integrity or originality. I also love the way that it fits within a tradition of British symphonic writing and yet is saying something totally new.
I have recently been getting to know clarinettist Thea King’s early recording of Howells’s Rhapsodic Quintet with the Richards Ensemble on the Lyrita label. This is really is vintage Thea, with incredibly honest musicianship and a gorgeous sound. The piece is quite rhythmically complex and can feel very modern, but when you reach that heavenly, tranquil conclusion with its lovely pastoral harmonies and modal inflections, it is like a warm consoling blanket. And also…
I’ve been watching all 48 episodes of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks from the 1990s. I wanted an epic TV series to immerse myself in and this was absolutely perfect. The mystery, the horror and, above all, the surreal element of it are all so addictive. It veers from slight cringeworthiness to total genius, and the second series is a cinematic masterpiece.
Plane’s disc of clarinet concertos by Hamilton, Gipps, Walthew and Ireland is out now on Champs Hill
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