The Guardian: The English Concert/Bicket review – Handel of grace and elan as Bicket takes us back to 1749 London

The Guardian
By Tim Ashley

This recreation of the composer’s benefit concert for the Foundling Hospital was beautifully delivered

Harry Bicket and the English Concert have recently embarked on an extraordinary and ambitious project entitled Handel for All, the aim of which is to eventually make their own filmed performances of the composer’s entire output available free online. This Barbican concert essentially recreated an afternoon in May 1749, when Handel gave a benefit performance of his own works in aid of the Foundling Hospital in London. The programme, then as now, consisted of the Music for the Royal Fireworks, extracts from Solomon, and the Foundling Hospital Anthem, newly composed for the occasion, though much of it actually recycled existing material, including the Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah.

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The Guardian: Mahan Esfahani – ‘The harpsichord is like the posh, pretty boy in prison’

The Guardian
Rachel Cooke

Mahan Esfahani was nine when he first heard a harpsichord. He and his parents were visiting Iran, the country where he was born, and which his family had left for the US five years before. “An uncle gave me a bunch of cassettes,” he says. “One was of Karl Richter [the German conductor and harpsichordist] playing Bach. Well, I listened to it, and I thought: ‘This is what I’ve got to do.’ I don’t mean in terms of a career. I just thought my life would be well spent in the company of this instrument. I thought I would get a profession, which is what every Iranian parent wants for their child, and that – once I was a doctor or lawyer – I’d be able to buy a harpsichord, and play at home.”

Was it like falling in love? “Yes, absolutely it was.” Can he describe how the sound of it made him feel? He thinks for a moment: it’s hard to put into words. “When I played the flute or the violin, which I did seriously, it was as if there was a hand over my mouth. The second I played a harpsichord, it was as if the hand had been removed. This was the sound I’d been looking for to express myself.”

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The Guardian: Facing the music - Long Yu

The Guardian

The Chinese conductor – music director of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of Beijing Music Festival – on his musical inspirations, from Beethoven to Benjamin, and Karajan to Qigang Chen

‘If I were not a musician, I would still want to connect people’ - conductor Long Yu. Photograph: PR

What was the first record or cd you bought? 

My childhood coincided with the Cultural Revolution. During this period there was a ban on Western music, and I learned music theory through Chinese music. My generation was one of the first to study abroad, and after attending the Shanghai Conservatory, I studied at the Hochschule in Berlin, where a new world of recordings and music opened up to me. I don’t remember the first record I bought, but these times in Berlin were a time of deep exploration for me. I studied great conductors such as Karajan. To this day, I look back on my time in Germany and the recordings I studied with great affection.

... and the most recent?

Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach Trios with Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer.

What’s your musical guilty pleasure?

I am interested in learning more about many genres – pop, rock, and jazz. Exploring outside of classical music sometimes informs my approach to traditional repertoire.

Vinyl or digital?

Digital.

If you had time learn a new instrument, what would it be?

Before I was a conductor, I was a pianist and percussionist. My grandfather, a gifted composer and pianist, taught me to play the piano from an early age. He also guided me to become a conductor. He said the baton can lead you to a magical world, which is much more interesting because conductors experience different kinds of music including operas, concertos, and symphonic works. Having the faculty of an entire orchestra’s instruments now seems imperative to me.

Did you ever consider a career outside of music? Doing what?

I am lucky to conduct orchestras all over the world, and music offers a common language in which to communicate. This is probably what I enjoy most about my job; if I were not a musician, I would still want to connect people, perhaps through diplomacy.

hat single thing would improve the format of the classical concert?

I want young people to love music. If I could change one thing, I would make the classical concert accessible to as many people as possible.

What or where is the most unusual place/venue you’ve performed?

Last year, I had the great pleasure of touring in China with Yo-Yo Ma. We performed at some incredible places including an outdoor concert at the Old City Wall in Xi’an in Central China, and in Dunhang, at the edge of the Gobi Desert. We worked with young people in these places and encouraged them to continue their musical life. It was a very special experience for both of us.

What’s been your most memorable live music experience as an audience member?

I remember my formative years in Berlin watching Karajanand many of the last generation’s legendary artists. I will carry these concerts with me my entire life. In 1979, I was in the audience as Isaac Stern made his first appearances in China. I was 15 years old and I hadn’t ever heard violin playing like his. Years later, I was honoured to invite Maestro Stern to the Beijing Music Festival. Last year, the Stern family and I started the Shanghai Isaac Stern International Violin Competition to honour the importance and the impact of Maestro Stern’s visits to China. He brought many Chinese musicians to the world stage.

We’re giving you a time machine: what period, or moment in musical history, would you travel to and why?

I would love to travel to Vienna 7 May 1824 for the premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Can you imagine what it what have been like to be in the audience for that final movement when the chorus comes in? Or, to have seen Beethoven’s face when, not able to hear the audience, he finally turned around at the podium to see their wildly enthusiastic reaction? An incredible moment.

What is the best new piece written in the past 50 years?

In the last 50 years, there have been so many important composers such as Messiaen, George Benjamin, and Qigang Chen, who all all use their creative voice to move music a big step forward.

Imagine you’re a festival director with unlimited resources. What would you programme - or commission - for your opening event?

This October we’re celebrating 20 years of the Beijing Music Festival where, since founding it two decade ago I have been lucky to realise many of my musical dreams. This celebratory year, we are presenting co-productions with the Salzburg Easter festival and the Aix-en-Provence festival, and a Beethoven symphony cycle with Paavo Järvi and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. The festival is such an important part of Chinese cultural life and has planted many classical music seeds in China. 

Long Yu conducts the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra in two concerts as part of its first UK tour: 14 May at Cadogan Hall, London and 16 May at Birmingham Symphony Hall.

The Guardian: Haochen Zhang's CD review – An Intimate, Artful Piano Recital

A self-confessed introvert … Haochen Zhang.

The Guardian
By Erica Jeal

Haochen Zhang is both a prodigiously award-winning pianist and a self-confessed introvert, and the wide-ranging choice of repertoire on his first studio disc reflects this. He captures the childish, quickly dissipating seriousness of Schumann’s Kinderszenen, and plays it with the kind of artistry that sounds sincerely artless.

Liszt’s Ballade No 2 has Zhang creating great rumbling waves in the left hand, then closing in an atmosphere of hard-won peace. In this, and in Janáček’s Sonata 1 X 1905, he excels in conveying the larger shape of the piece, knitting the phrases together into long paragraphs, yet he doesn’t short-change the showier passages. Brahms’s Three Intermezzos, Op 117, make for an understated close to an intimate, inward-looking disc, and their feeling of slow rise and fall evokes the breathing of a huge creature asleep. Rarely on this recording does his playing make a forceful bid for the attention, but it certainly rewards close listening.

The Guardian: Orchestral maneuvers in the park - classical festivals in stunning scenery

Dawn in Grand Teton national park. Photo: Alamy

The Guardian
By Brian Wise

Visual artists have been so successful at capturing America’s national parks that some have served as valuable campaigners for wilderness conservation. Consider Albert Bierstadt’s huge landscape paintings of Yosemite or Ansel Adams’s famous photographs of Yellowstone. But composers have mostly refrained from portraying these natural wonders, perhaps hampered by music’s fundamentally abstract nature.

A few have tried, however, and more will do so in the coming months as the National Park Service celebrates its 100th anniversary.

In the 20th-century, Ferde Grofé was classical music’s greatest national parks advocate. His Grand Canyon Suite – inspired by a camping trip to Grand Canyon National Park in 1916 – depicts a painted desert, a pounding storm, and the clip-clop of a mule descending to the canyon floor. Grofé later portrayed other national parks, composing a Death Valley Suite in 1949 and a Yellowstone Suite (1960).

In 1972, French composer Olivier Messiaen, a synesthete and lover of birdsong, made an eight-day visit to Utah’s Bryce Canyon and neighboring national parks, which yielded Des Canyons aux Étoiles … (From the Canyons to the Stars …), a gaudily pictorial, 12-movement symphonic poem. More recently, Nico Muhly, on a commission from the Utah Symphony, composed Control: Five Landscapes for Orchestra (2015), also inspired by Utah’s national parks (and featured on a new recording).

A category apart is Stephen Lias, an American composer who has held a series of National Park Service residencies, living and working in Rocky Mountain, Glacier, Denali and Glacier Bay National Parks, among others. His music will be performed in centennial concerts in Washington DC on 23 and 25 August.

There’s another way that culture and national parks intersect: at a number of music festivals that take place near or on park grounds.

Grand Teton music festival (Grand Teton national park, Yellowstone national park)

When it comes to Rocky Mountain festivals, Aspen, and to a lesser degree, Vail, get most of the attention. But this fest, located in Teton Village, Wyoming, puts you within an alphorn’s call of Grand Teton national park, with its magnificent 13,000ft peaks. It’s also an hour’s drive from Yellowstone, with its hot springs and grazing bison. Headliners include violinist Joshua Bell performing the Four Seasons of Vivaldi and Piazzolla, cellist Johannes Moser (Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations), violinist Nicola Benedetti (the Korngold Violin Concerto) and up-and-comer Simone Porter (Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto). While programming leans on the tried and tested, the rugged surroundings can pull you out of your comfort zone.

4 July - 20 August, $10-$55, gtmf.org