Live choice
Paul Riley picks the month’s best concert and opera highlights in the UK
Music at Tresanton
Methodist Chapel, St Mawes, 4-6 November
Web: musicattresanton.co.uk
Beethoven spearheads this year’s festival in the handsomely refurbished chapel. Pianist and artistic director Noam Greenberg anchors four concerts and four cellists in a survey of the complete cello sonatas – Adrian Brendel wraps the series up with Op. 102, set alongside music by Adès, Liszt and Frescobaldi.
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Barbican, London, 4, 5 November
Web: barbican.org.uk
After a six-year gap, the Amsterdam ensemble returns for a residency under conductor Daniel Harding. The first concert pairs Brahms’s Violin Concerto – with Leonidas Kavakos as soloist – with Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony. The following night, Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 takes centre stage.
Orchestra of Welsh National Opera
St David’s Hall, Cardiff, 4 November
Web: stdavidshallcardiff.co.uk
With Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Brouček headlining the WNO season, his fanfare-rich Sinfonietta ends the orchestra’s own ‘excursion’ to St David’s Hall. Mezzo Jana Kurucová sings Dvorák and Wagner and conductor Tomáš Hanus opens with Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes.
Steven Osborne
Concert Hall, Perth, 6 November
Web: horsecross.co.uk
Late Schubert (the A major Sonata D959) and early Rachmaninov – the turbulent Piano Sonata No. 1 – bookend an improvisation by Osborne on a theme by jazz great Keith Jarrett. The A major Bagatelle from Beethoven’s Op. 33 set provides an inspired prelude to Schubert’s ‘heavenly lengths’.
Cinquecento
Wigmore Hall, London, 7 November
Web: wigmore-hall.org.uk
The Vienna-based vocal ensemble usually champions 16th-century music written for the Hapsburgs. The English Reformation, however, steers a Cinquecento programme that weaves works by Tallis, Byrd and Sheppard around three movements from Tye’s The Mean Mass.
Royal Opera House
Covent Garden, London, 8-26 November
Web: roh.org.uk
Glyndebourne’s summer dalliance with Alcina might be over, but there’s no keeping Handel’s eponymous sorceress down as she casts an irresistible spell over Richard Jones’s new production for the Royal Opera House. It’s conducted by Handel specialist Christian Curnyn, and features Lisette Oropesa in the title role with Emily D’Angelo as Ruggiero.
Academy of Ancient Music
West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, 9 November
Web: aam.co.uk
What with Handel’s ‘Cuckoo and the Nightingale’ organ concerto, Telemann’s violin concerto ‘The Toad’, and Vivaldi’s ‘Goldfinch’ concerto for flute, the theme of the Academy’s new season is being taken to heart. Directed by Laurence Cummings, ’Tis Nature’s Voice opens with Rebel’s anarchic Les élémens, closes with Telemann’s Hamburger Ebb und Fluth and survives a Vivaldian storm.
Takács Quartet
Turner Sims Concert Hall, Southampton, 10 November
Web: turnersims.co.uk
The Takács Quartet comes to the UK for concerts in Bath, London and Southampton. Britten’s first acknowledged string quartet, a product of his wartime sojourn in the US, is framed by the fifth of Beethoven’s debut Op. 18 set and Dvorák’s Op. 106, written on his return from the US.
Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 11 November
Web: rsno.org.uk
Marrying texts from the Mass for the Dead and the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Britten’s War Requiem was premiered 60 years ago. Remembering the anniversary, Thomas Søndergård conducts a performance (repeated in Glasgow) featuring soloists soprano Susanne Bernhard, tenor Stuart Jackson and baritone Benjamin Appl.
Ulster Orchestra
Ulster Hall, Belfast, 11 November
Web: ulsterorchestra.org.uk
Later in the month, the orchestra champions Louise Farrenc’s Third Symphony. First, though, another woman composer is featured, as Grazyna Bacewicz’s rumbustious Overture for Orchestra precedes Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Dvorák’s ‘New World’ Symphony, completes a programme that is conducted by Daniele Rustioni.
Sinfonia Cymru
Riverfront, Newport, 17 November
Web: sinfonia.cymru
Jazz meets classical when trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin Vary joins the Sinfonia for a four-concert tour that ranges from Wagner to Sidney Bechet. Wrapped around Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto are works by Ravel, Milhaud and Weill.
El Gran Teatro del Mundo
St George’s Bristol, 18 November
Web: stgeorgesbristol.co.uk
Named after the play by Calderón and specialising in the early and high Baroque, the ensemble takes an invigorating plunge into the world of the concerto da camera as adopted by Vivaldi, Telemann and Fasch. There’s a trio sonata, too, by the 18th-century Catalan composer Josep Pla.
Arvo Pärt Festival
Oxford, 18-26 November
Web: musicatoxford.com
Across a nine-day festival encompassing film, lectures and concerts, the music of Arvo Pärt is drawn into focus and placed within a wider Estonian context. Among others appearing are the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, O/Modernt, the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet and, saluting the 60th birthday of Galina Grigorjeva, The Carice Singers.
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
Royal Birmingham Conservatory, 20 November
Web: bcmg.org.uk
BCMG is living the 21st-century American Dream. Alongside the UK premiere of George Lewis’s Breaking – inspired by the photography of Stan Douglas – Elliott Carter’s American Sublime partners a work by Katherine Balch. Stephan Meier conducts.
Katherine Broderick & Kathryn Stott
Howard Assembly Room, Leeds, 22 November
Web: operanorth.co.uk
Small Journeys, a new work by Cheryl Frances-Hoad is at the heart of a song recital that remembers Vaughan Williams’s 150th anniversary with the Robert Louis Stevenson-setting Songs of Travel. Percy Grainger and Henri Duparc also have wanderlust in mind, while James MacMillan is thinking of home. (See ‘Backstage with…’, below).
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 23 November
Web: cbso.co.uk
Pekka Kuusisto conducts a concert whose avian theme stretches from Andrea Tarrodi’s Birds of Paradise to Rautavaara’s concerto for birds and orchestra: Cantus Arcticus. Sibelius’s swan and VW’s lark are on topic, and Kuusisto also revisits Isobel Waller-Bridge’s Temperatures.
Belle Époque Festival
St John’s Smith Square, London, 24-27 November
Web: sjss.org.uk
Reynaldo Hahn is ubiquitous in a festival that takes the temperature of late-19th-century France. Soprano Véronique Gens devotes an evening exclusively to his songs, William Howard joins Quatuor Mona for chamber music including Hahn and Fauré, and Southbank Sinfonia shoulders two of Hahn’s orchestral works.
London Philharmonic Orchestra & Choir
Royal Festival Hall, London, 26 November
Web: southbankcentre.co.uk
It’s sobering to think that only one year separates Vaughan Williams’s balmy Shakespeare-setting Serenade to Music and Tippett’s grittily prophetic A Child of Our Time, juxtaposed here. Conductor Edward Gardner is joined by soloists including mezzo Sarah Connolly.
Armonico
St Peter’s Church, Wootton Wawen, 26 November
Web: armonico.org.uk
Armonico’s 20th-anniversary celebrations turn sombre as Christopher Monks directs a performance of Victoria’s six-part Requiem, composed for the obsequies of the Empress Maria of Spain in 1603.
London Sinfonietta
Kings Place, London, 27 November
Web: londonsinfonietta.org.uk
The Sinfonietta’s Turning Points series alights on Takemitsu, who enjoyed a special relationship with the ensemble. The natural world provides the backdrop for a clutch of works including Rain Tree Sketch II, a piece written in memory of Messiaen, who is represented alongside works by Debussy and Webern.
BACKSTAGE WITH…
Soprano Katherine Broderick
Your recital in Leeds on 22 November ranges from Vaughan Williams to the present day. How did you put it together?
It is based around Robert Louis Stevenson and his travels. He was a Scot, and James MacMillan’s Three Scottish Songs are very much part of the folk song repertoire. There are also three folk songs by Grainger – he was from Australia, which was one of the places that Stevenson travelled to in and around the South Pacific. He also spent a lot of time in France, hence the inclusion of three Duparc songs. And Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel sets Stevenson’s own words.
Plus, there’s a new work by Cheryl Frances-Hoad?
Cheryl’s Small Journeys sets words by Adam Strickson, who has written about walks around his home town of Slaithwaite in West Yorkshire, and how he uses those walks to think about the human experience. His poetry is disarmingly honest.
And his involvement brings a local angle to it, of course…
Yes, and the concert will also involve a community project. Last year, when Kathy [Stott] and I performed Schubert’s Winterreise here, we invited community ensembles to listen to it as a traditional recital, then go away to workshop the songs by themselves and come up with something that could be performed alongside them in a later concert. We will be doing the same with Songs of Travel this year. Students from Leeds Arts University, meanwhile, will be providing illustrations to go with some of the songs we perform, and we will also be going on the walks that Adam did to come up with his poems.
Are you a keen walker yourself?
I am! My whole family has just had a big walking holiday in Cornwall, along the coastal paths. I’m from Saddleworth and lived there until around 18 months ago, and we used to enjoy going out walking on the Moors most weekends.
How long have you and pianist Kathryn Stott been performing together in recital?
We met around 15 years ago, when I filled in at last minute for a recital at Salts Mill. Until very recently, she had rarely done any song recitals and felt she was missing out on lieder and so on. And so, just before Covid she got in touch with me and asked if we could go through some Schubert, Schumann and others together. We did that during lockdown, and then last year decided to go all out by performing Winterreise!