Page 100 - BBC Music (January 2020)
P. 100
Live choice
Paul Riley picks the month’s best concert and opera highlights in the UK
The only way is Essex:
Portuguese conductor
Joana Carneiro heads
to Saffron Hall
Venue of the month
The UK’s best concert halls
30. St David’s Hall
Where: Cardiff
Opened: 1983
Seats: 2,000
When, on 19 January,
Beethoven’s famous concert
of December 1808 is recreated
at St David’s Hall (see right),
it will be one of the longest in
the Cardiff venue’s 37-year
history. But while undoubtedly
eye-catching, it will have to go
some way to match some of the
drama witnessed on stage here
over the years.
The architects Seymour
Harris had their work cut
out when commissioned to LONDON Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, past: Berg’s Violin Concerto,
design a new concert venue Stephen Hough David Fennessy’s Rosewood and played by Lisa Batiashvili.
for the Welsh capital in 1977 Wigmore Hall, 6, 7, 11 January the unsparing keening of Julia
– with space in the city centre Tel: +44 (0)20 7935 2141 Mahler Chamber Orchestra
at a premium, it had to be Wolfe’s LAD.
constructed above a shopping Web: www.wigmore-hall.org.uk Royal Festival Hall, 31 January
complex. The challenge was Brahms is resolutely stitched Baroque at the Edge Tel: +44 (0)20 3879 9555
successfully met and five years into the January instalment LSO St Luke’s, St James Web: www.southbankcentre.co.uk
later, in September 1982, of pianist Stephen Hough’s Clerkenwell, 10-12 January The enthusiastically peripatetic
St David’s Hall staged its first Wigmore Hall residency. On Tel: +44 (0)20 7638 8891 ensemble fields artistic partner
public concert. The official 6 January, he is joined for the Web: www.baroqueattheedge.co.uk Mitsuko Uchida as soloist and
opening, by Queen Elizabeth clarinet sonatas by Michael Where else would Purcell meet director in two of Mozart’s most
The Queen Mother, took place Collins, who also performs Lou Reid and Joy Division, congenial piano concertos:
the following February. the Clarinet Quintet with the or electric viols wrap Irish No. 17 in G and the E flat K482.
It was in July of that year, Castalian String Quartet. traditional music around Marin They frame Jörg Widmann’s
however, that St David’s Hall Then, having dispatched the Marais? This innovative three- Chorale Quartet (his String
was really placed on the map, Piano Quintet in the middle day festival returns, brandishing Quartet No. 2) in its reincarnation
when it staged the first BBC concert, Hough is joined by a new concert-play saluting for string orchestra.
Cardiff Singer of the World Renaud Capuçon to conclude Galileo plus Bach’s cello suites
competition, won by Finnish this Brahms minifest with the reimagined with a Finnish twist. SOUTH
soprano Karita Mattila. Eagerly complete violin sonatas. Joanna MacGregor
anticipated, the bi-annual London Symphony Turner Sims, Southampton,
competition has since helped Sean Shibe Orchestra and Chorus 16 January
to launch the careers of singers
such as Bryn Terfel, Katarina Hayward Gallery, 10 January The Barbican, 19 January Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 5151
Karnéus and Jamie Barton. Tel: +44 (0)20 3879 9555 Tel: +44 (0)20 7638 8891 Web: www.turnersims.co.uk
Outside competition time, Web: www.southbankcentre.co.uk Web: www.barbican.org.uk Schubert’s piano sonata
the hall’s season includes Complementing the Hayward Beethoven’s seldom-performed swansong, D960 in B flat,
concerts by the Cardiff-based Gallery’s retrospective of painter oratorio Christ on the Mount of looms large over a programme
BBC National Orchestra of Bridget Riley, the Scots guitarist Olives is unexpectedly ubiquitous including the Prelude and
ALAMY, DAVE WEILAND from internationally renowned from his softLOUD album celebrations kick in. And Simon und Isolde as transcribed
as the 250th anniversary
Wales, plus frequent visits
Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan
plunders some of the repertoire
conductors, soloists, choirs
by Zoltán Kocsis and Liszt
Rattle is an early adopter. He
exploring rhythm and patterning.
and orchestras.
pairs it with something from
(respectively), plus a selection
Scottish lute music from the
from Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata.
17th century prefaces Steve
Vienna’s more recent musical
102 BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE
