Category: Classical music

© Provided by The Telegraph
The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra at the Wigmore Hall

Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, Wigmore Hall ★★★★★

You may have missed it, but Tuesday just past was St Cecilia’s Day, named after the Roman noblewoman who refused to marry a pagan because she preferred to “sing to God in her heart”, was martyred for her pains, and became the patron saint of music. During the revival of musical life that followed the ending of Puritanism in England, there was a brief but glorious flurry of pieces composed in her honour.

We too have suffered our own form of puritanism in recent years thanks to lockdowns, which reduced musical culture to a thin gruel of online and “socially distanced” concerts. Perhaps that’s why Tuesday night’s concert in St Cecilia’s honour from the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra at the Wigmore Hall was greeted with such fervour by the packed audience. It felt like a symbolic act of reconnection to music, enacted through stunning performances of music by Handel and Purcell.

It began with one of those pieces composed in honour of the saint, Purcell’s Ode to St Cecilia’s Day. The orchestra’s director, Australian pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout, launched the overture with just solo strings and bass, bringing in the luxurious sound of the full orchestra only for the repeat. It was one of innumerable subtle touches of colouration he encouraged from the orchestral players, who are truly a bunch of heroes. To pick out any names seems invidious, but I can’t resist mentioning oboists Ann-Kathrin Brüggemann and Josep Domènech, entwined in a delicious pastoral trio with bassoonist Eyal Streett at the beginning of Handel’s anthem “As pants the heart”.  

The six singers all from the UK were no less fine, and if I had to pick out one sublime moment it would be tenor Hugo Hymas’s rendition of Beauty thou Scene of Love in Purcell’s Ode. The different emotional worlds of the two great composers – enchanted, mysterious, rhythmically quirky in Purcell, stately; apparently grander, but with its own dusky magic in the case of Handel – shone out beautifully.

This feast of music closed with Purcell’s Birthday Ode for the Duke of Gloucester, a shameless bit of toadying that nevertheless drew forth some inspired music. At the end, when Jaroslav Rouček’s beautifully moulded trumpet duetted triumphantly with soprano Grace Davidson, it really did seem as if the saint – to quote the poet Auden’s Hymn to Saint Cecilia – had come down to us here on earth, to “startle composing mortals with immortal fire”. IH

Hear this concert for 30 days via the BBC iPlayer

Chucho Valdés, London Jazz Festival, Royal Festival Hall ★★★★★

© Tatiana Gorilovsky
Chucho Valdés at the 2022 London Jazz Festival, at the Royal Festival Hall – Tatiana Gorilovsky

Cuban pianist, composer and band leader Chucho Valdés has undoubtedly earned his legendary status (along with numerous Grammys and other major awards) over several decades. As a teenage prodigy, he took over the famed Tropicana Club house band previously led by his father; in the 1970s, he founded the highly influential Latin jazz fusion outfit Irakere; as an elder statesman of the scene, he has continued to build on his prolific catalogue. On Sunday night, the 81-year-old star’s headline date formed part of the London Jazz Festival’s “Icons” strand, and the enthusiastic multi-generational audience reflected the expansive reach of his work. 

As this tall gentleman ambled onstage without airs, carrying a book of sheet music under his arm, the crowd responded with thrilled whoops – though once he began playing, this excitable buzz became a warmly reverential hush. Within a few notes of his opening pieces, you were struck by Valdés’s extraordinary dexterity and flair for original melody at the keys, as well as his ability to elevate even the most familiar Gershwin standards into something fresh and beautifully unconstrained, deftly accompanied on bass, drums and percussion.

While this was enthralling, it was also really the warm-up to Valdés’s main event: a performance of his new big-band opus, La Creación, conceived in the midst of lockdown. Valdés has previously described this ambitious four-movement suite as “the accumulation of all my experiences and everything I’ve learned in music”, though at the Southbank his intro comprised a few genial words in Spanish – he gave full focus to the material and his supremely talented ensemble (including vocalists, brass, sax, further keys, and traditional double-headed bata drum). 

La Creación’s multi-layered material digs deep and hits hard, taking inspiration from Santería spiritual rituals, West African roots, funk and blues. This wasn’t the first time that Valdés has explored his Yoruban heritage and faith through his work (there were distinct bonds with earlier work such as Irakere’s Misa Negra), but it did exude an exceptional presence and vivacity. Positioned to one side, Valdés fluidly underpinned the mesmerising grooves, while lively co-conductor Hilario Luis Durán Torres leapt up from his own keyboard to guide the players weaving through the animated rhythms and refrains. 

In the hands of a less assured and affable artist, the concept might have felt portentous, but this experience proved both immensely sophisticated and joyously playful. It didn’t seem to matter that we were in a seated auditorium on a chilly London night, rather than at an altar or on a heaving Havana dancefloor; Valdés’s life-affirming Creation genuinely captivated you, and carried you beyond the here and now. AH

Chornobyldorf, Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music ★★★★★

© Artem Galkin/Artem Galkin
Chornobyldorf – Artem Galkin/Artem Galkin

Don’t allow the title of the Ukrainian work Chornobyldorf – the self-styled “archaeological opera” that opened the 45th Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival – to mislead you. This extraordinary cross-disciplinary show (which combines such elements as opera, folk music, heavy rock, contemporary dance, experimental film, performance art and religious ritual) is not, as its programme notes might imply, a piece of conventional storytelling about a group of human beings trying to salvage their civilisation after a cataclysmic nuclear disaster.

Rather, this highly original opera – the work of composers and librettists Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko – stands in an eastern European avant-garde tradition that eschews straightforward narrative. Like the pioneering “laboratory theatre” of the great Polish dramatist Jerzy Grotowski in the 1960s and the experimental genius of Russian companies Derevo and Akhe in the 21st century, this bold and imaginative production is concerned primarily with the emotional and psychological impact of the images and sounds that it makes.

The show’s initial imagery – of blackened trees and naked humans engaged in meaningful ceremony – points towards post-apocalyptic dystopia. The music – which is uncompromisingly discordant, like Bartók colliding with heavy metal band Metallica – increases the sense of humanity at a particularly precarious juncture.

What we are witnessing here is a human culture that has been violently broken from its moorings. As these people make their archaeological investigations of the religious, cultural and industrial remnants of their forebears, they mangle paganism with Christianity, ancient Greek mythology with the sacred music of Bach.

Grygoriv and Razumeiko are concerned, not with the grim realities of material survival in a post-apocalyptic world, but with the quest to survive in spiritual and cultural terms. Consequently, everything the characters do is imbued with a remarkable significance.

A male singer in black robes leads worshippers who carry metronomes as if they were religious artefacts. A group of naked figures sing from the kind of pagan shrine one imagines to have been erected by the Aztecs.

This excellently designed piece is constructed entirely of such images. Every scene – whether delivered from atop a large scaffold or in promenade – looks like an exquisite, animated Renaissance painting.

The song itself – from gorgeous vocal polyphony in the Ukrainian folk tradition to great operatic interjections – is beautifully executed throughout.

It might be tempting – given the current conflict – to connect this opera to Putin’s outrageous invasion of Ukraine (and, indeed, the performers bring out the flags of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Army as they take their bows). However, Chornobyldorf predates the invasion by more than a year.

In truth, so universal is its contemplation of human catastrophe that the piece speaks as powerfully to the dreadful conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and indeed to the frightening realities of climate change, as it does to the war in Ukraine itself.

The epitome of the eastern European avant-garde, the show is unlikely to be every British opera lover’s cup of tea. Nevertheless, its UK premiere was a formidable way to begin the Huddersfield festival. Mark Brown

The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival continues until November 27; tickets: hcmf.co.uk

Henry Threadgill’s Zooid and Anthony Braxton, Barbican Centre

© Mark Allen/Mark Allen
Anthony Braxton and Carl Testa at the Barbican Centre – Mark Allen/Mark Allen

More than fifty years ago a group of black jazz musicians in Chicago defied the riots and racism around them to form the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. They dreamed of a new music, utterly free yet purposeful, soaring way beyond the confines of jazz, and they drew on everything from Arnold Schoenberg to John Coltrane. Two of the era’s leading lights brought their latest ensembles to the Barbican stage on Sunday evening, as part of the EFG London Jazz Festival.

Being young at heart, both Braxton and Threadgill like to surround themselves with younger players, and one of the pleasures of the evening was the reverence that could be felt emanating from each group for the gently guiding, white-haired figure at its centre. Beyond that they were very different. Braxton’s guiding influence on his Fusion Quartet was evident in his eager hand signals, which would send the music off in a new direction. His 70-minute uninterrupted set felt like a slow journey through a constantly varying landscape. At one moment Braxton’s high saxophone keening would be so closely intertwined with Susana Santos Silva’s high trumpet that it felt almost like one melody.

Meanwhile drummer Mariá Portugal would explore metallic sounds on cymbals, while bassist Carl Testa tested the possibilities of a tiny handful of notes. This might be followed by a moment of humour, or a luminous interlude of near-emptiness marked by single notes, like a desert in which a bird is the only moving thing. The only jarring element was the electronics, a crude element in a collective sound which was otherwise so enormously subtle.

Like Braxton’s musicians, the members of Henry Threadgill’s quintet Zooid (the name refers to a ‘colonial’ organism made of parts with different forms) had sheet music in front of them, and their music was also poised fascinatingly between fluid improvisation and purposeful form. But whereas Braxton’s set was a string of interconnected miniatures, Threadgill’s unfolded in long burgeoning waves. It was hard to work out how just how Christopher Hoffman’s urgent cello phrases related to the guitarist Liberty Ellman’s lyrical flourishes, and why these fused together so well with tuba player Jose Davila’s agile bass and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee’s quietly urgent patter. The compelling coherence of both sets, even while being totally unpredictable, was mysteriously appealing. The compelling coherence of both sets, even while being totally unpredictable, was mysteriously appealing. They proved that the ethos that fired these great musicians 50 years ago is as compelling and necessary as ever.

The EFG London Jazz Festival continues until 20 November. efglondonjazzfestival.org.uk

Florian Boesch, Wigmore Hall ★★★★★

© Andreas Weiss
Austrian baritone Florian Boesch – Andreas Weiss

Some works of genius remain a puzzle no matter how many times you hear them. Schubert’s tremendous and much-loved set of songs Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey) is one of them. The singer has to impersonate some nameless man, about whom we learn absolutely nothing except that he’s been jilted. Instead of drowning his sorrows with his mates, or finding another woman who actually appreciates him, he decides to walk to his death in the snow, across twenty-four songs of increasingly deranged despair.

It’s actually a deeply implausible scenario, but in this riveting performance from the Austrian baritone Florian Boesch and Scottish pianist Malcolm Martineau it became an all-too-believable portrayal of male anger leading to mental breakdown. The woman had spurned him, so he was now going to take revenge not on her but on the universe, by spurning life and trudging stubbornly to his death.

By aestheticising the man, most performers make him sympathetic, someone who strikes fetchingly poetic attitudes of suffering. There was absolutely nothing fetching about Boesch’s traveller – in fact, he was distinctly unpleasant. There was a self-pitying curl to his lip in the opening song, and a suggestion of rubbing salt in his wounds just to sharpen the pain. And many of the songs rose to a fury of frustration and embitterment that was truly frightening.

Boesch displayed an astounding range of vocal colour, from an insinuating near-whisper to an agonised near shout that pressed on one’s ear-drums, and he pulled Schubert’s rhythms around mercilessly in his determination to express the traveller’s crazed state. Martineau was as daring as Boesch in disrupting the even tread of Schubert’s rhythms, so as to screw truly expressionist levels of emotional intensity from the music.

Just when the procession of despairing songs threatened to become just too relentless, Boesch would grant us a moment of beautiful vocal softness, as the traveller had a memory of happier times, or dreamed of how peaceful death would be. Finally, as the journey reached its end with the traveller listening to the organ-grinder grinding out his sad song, Boesch and Martineau achieved an unexpected and extraordinary other-worldly lightness. One got the sense that the traveller had at last thrown off anger and despair, because he’d finally found some empathy for another human being. The sense of enlightenment through suffering was palpable, and it made the harrowing emotional journey we’d just been through all the more meaningful. IH

Hear Florian Boesch at Dulwich College, London SE21, on Dec 13; songeasel.co.uk

Nobuyuki Tsujii, Queen Elizabeth Hall ★★★★☆

© Robert Ghement/Shutterstock
Pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii – Robert Ghement/Shutterstock

When he burst on to the musical scene 14 years ago, blind pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii was a media sensation, mobbed by teenage groupies after every concert. His playing was praised as “a miracle” and “a healing power” by critics not noted for going into raptures.

On Sunday night, the groupies were again out in force at Tsujii’s recital, though they’re probably nudging 30 now. The once-slender Tsujii is quite stocky these days, but in every other respect he’s still the smiling, somewhat gauche youth who captivates everyone. When you watch him take his seat at the piano and take the measure of the keyboard with his questing, intelligent hands, head flung back, and then without warning plunge into a virtuoso showpiece, it really does feel as if this grubby, tired world has been illuminated by something extraordinary.

Sceptics might suggest that both Tsujii’s adoring fans and those usually hardened critics have been seduced by the overall “miracle” and aren’t really listening to the music-making. But they would be wrong, because Tsujii’s playing is remarkable by any standards. He played an unashamedly popular programme, with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata alongside three of the lighter numbers from Liszt’s musical record of his journeys through Italy, followed by Ravel’s much-loved but very hackneyed Pavane pour une infante defunte and the almost as hackneyed Jeux d’eau.

Every piece showed an astounding delicacy and variety of touch, and real musical insight, apart from the opener. The first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata emerged with immaculate perfection, the undulating accompaniment nicely balanced against the melody – but that was all. The astonishing, visionary strangeness of Beethoven’s masterpiece passed Tsujii by.

The contrast between that and Liszt’s tenderly intimate Consolation no 2 and the pieces evoking Venice and Naples was striking. Here, the soul of the music really was drawn out, suggesting that Tsujii needs the stimulus of properly virtuoso piano music to set his imagination alight. The Gondolier’s Song had a lovely nostalgic swaying quality, and the final whirling tarantella built to an irresistibly wild as well as note-perfect finale.

After Jeux d’eau, which was poetically suggestive as well as vividly pictorial, Tsujii dazzled us with the jazz-flavoured fireworks of Russian composer Nikolai Kapustin’s Eight Concert Etudes. What with those and the very predictable encores including Debussy’s Clair de lune and Liszt’s La Campanella, the programme might, on paper, have looked too hackneyed to be taken seriously. But the seductive feeling Tsujii creates of utter immersion in an inner world meant that even these tired warhorses took on a power to charm. IH

LSO/André J Thomas, Barbican Hall, London EC2 ★★☆☆☆

© Provided by The Telegraph
André J Thomas conducts the LSO at the Barbican Hall – Mark Allan

It’s hard to think of a less likely leading man than a tuba, a musical monster of the deep, most at home when sad-clowning at the back of a brass band. So it was a sight to behold the principal tuba player of the London Symphony Orchestra, Ben Thomson, sat centre-stage, his body almost completely obscured by the instrument’s chaotic tangle of tubing, only his fingers visible skittering across the keys, bebopping feverishly up and down the vast range of this soulful beast. We were approaching the climax of the UK premiere of Wynton Marsalis’s Tuba Concerto – hand on heart, the finest tuba concerto I’ve ever heard. 

Loud, faintly sarcastic applause welcomed Thomson at the start, in the expectation that we were about to witness the musical equivalent of a fat man attempting a pirouette. More fool us. For this leviathan could not only sing as sweetly as any songbird, it could flirt and fly, fluttering its hippo eyelids, gliding through its melodies as gracefully and airily as Fred Astaire.

Thomson could even duet with himself, floating multiphonics over the top of his bass sound by humming while playing. Around him, Marsalis – noted jazzer and chief mobiliser of the bebop revival – set the orchestra off on a jaunty, jerky, heavily syncopated path. Expertly balanced by conductor William Long, the dissonant crunch and percussive funk of the Latin-inflected LSO acted as the perfect foil to the warm flow of the tuba. 

How much you enjoyed the concerto would have depended on your tolerance for the inevitable cringe of watching an orchestra jazz things up. Next to the night’s other UK premieres, however, the work almost felt sophisticated.

Joel Thompson’s To Awaken a Sleeper and Carlos Simon’s Portrait of a Queen were stock musical evocations of tart, overly on-the-nose texts about black suffering narrated in high theatrical style by Willard White and Eska, respectively. Had the composers come out on stage and shouted “Feel sad!”, “Now angry!”, “Now hopeful!’, it would have been hardly less subtle. That said, conductor André J Thomas got a big, generous sound from the LSO (someone needs to book him to conduct Berlioz or Puccini). And it was hard to resist the cumulative force of the sultry, slow-striding second movement of Simon’s infectious AMEN!. 

But it was a night in which you would never have known the past 80 years of classical composition had ever happened. The idiom of all three composers lay barely a few inches from George Gershwin’s. There was a time when the LSO understood why you might want to diversify your composer pool. Engaging composers from alternative traditions and cultures was about carving out space for new sonic possibilities, about aesthetic diversity. Listen, for example, to the extraordinary, brooding Skies of America by free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, commissioned by the orchestra 50 years ago and shamefully never revived. It’s a far cry from Sunday night.

Marsalis, Thompson and Simon may all be African-American, but they all engage in numbingly regressive aesthetics. Today diversity is no longer about finding visionary new ways of making art, but about frit organisations reviving and entrenching safe old ones. The irony is that Scrutonite conservatives have nothing to fear from all this. Those who care about the avant-garde and the need to nurture original voices should be much more concerned. Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Concertgebouw/Daniel Harding, Barbican ★★★★★

© Yannis Bournias
Leonidas Kavakos – Yannis Bournias

Increasing diversity may be the long-term strategy to win new audiences for classical music, but in the meantime hard-pressed managers know there’s nothing like the “dream ticket” of a top-rank international orchestra and top-rank soloist to pull in the punters. It certainly worked its magic on Friday night, when the orchestra many judge to be the world’s finest, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra from Amsterdam, was joined by Leonidas Kavakos, probably the most bankable violinist alive. Before the concert the packed foyers had that fever of excitement I haven’t felt since those far-off pre-Covid days.

The punters’ sky-high expectations were well rewarded, with a programme that admittedly scored zero for adventurousness: Brahms’ Violin Concerto and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. For that very reason it was greeted with special rapture, as it felt like a defiant assertion of the value of sustaining a great tradition – something the Arts Council of England no longer believes in, judging by the funding decisions it made on Friday. When the orchestra under Daniel Harding eased almost diffidently into the gentle opening of Brahms’s concerto, you could already feel the power slumbering in the orchestra, which soon burst out. This mighty build-up led to Kavakos’s explosive entry, which had exactly the magnificent, tragically heroic quality one hopes for.

This reminded us of Kavakos’s superhuman strength of tone, but would he be equally responsive to the tender and intimate side of this many-sided work? Yes, came the answer, but in that regard he shared honours with the orchestra. Even when Kavakos was in full flight my attention was often seized by an expressive phrase in a bassoon or in the violas. Not even Kavakos can put the Concertgebouw in the shade. The fruity richness of the playing and Harding’s sensitive moulding of the tempos meant that details I’d never noticed – such as the moment when the music slips into the sensuously swaying world of Brahms’s Liebeslieder (Love Song) Waltzes – suddenly shone out.

As for Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Harding led a performance of rich, easy-going amplitude that with a lesser orchestra could have seemed sluggish, but with this vintage Rolls-Royce seemed magnificently spacious. It meant that in the moments of peasant rumbustiousness, when the horns whooped and the violins romped, the contrast really made one sit up. My only caveat is that the innocently swaying final movement became so very relaxed towards the end I thought it might actually stop. But really, this was a magnificent evening. If you’re free tonight and can attend the Concertgebouw’s second concert, drop everything and go. IH

The Royal Concertgebouw is at the Barbican tonight at 7.30pm; barbican.org.uk

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By Sukant Deepak

New Delhi, Nov 23 (IANS): The setting could not have been better. The aesthetic Guleria Kothi on the ghat in Varanasi. The balmy afternoon sun… Just before the performance, there was a buzz among those who had come to attend the recent Mahindra Kabira Festival presented by Teamwork — ‘Did you get a chance to listen to her album ‘Home’?’

Even for those who were googling, Carnatic vocalist Sushma Soma’s performance did complete justice to expectations, her vocals carrying everyone smoothly to an otherworldly space in the city of twisted labyrinths lost in the ambiguity of time.

Soma, born in India, who grew up in Singapore was four-years-old when she started learning music at the insistence of her parents who wanted her ‘connected’ to her roots. She may not have been very enthusiastic at that point in time but things changed — slowly but surely — especially after she spent half a year in Chennai, under the tutorage of Lalitha Shivakumar and now RK Shriramkumar.

For her, the classical space can amplify contemporary issues and concerns — like the piece ‘The Elephant’s Funeral’ which emerged after a pregnant elephant was fed a fruit packed with firecrackers.

Although admitting that it is not easy for a youngster not from a family of musicians to mark in the classical music world, the vocalist says her journey has taught her it is not just about classes but also about being in an environment that nurtures that side of an individual.

“That kind of home is extremely important. While that was not there, my parents enjoyed music. Yes, the nurturing part of it is tough, you need ‘that’ push. And I acknowledge the privilege that I grew up with,” Soma tells IANS.

“All for collaborations, she feels the same help people like her to witness music from multiple lenses — what purpose is it serving and the connection it creates. And I want to explore the values of different music. It has been an interesting experience. Mostly, I have only worked with classical musicians and now it is with other genres too. It is important to ask — what is it doing to the music, what flavour is it creating? It can be fascinating for me to observe how I have created different narratives with different musicians and styles and conversations about this as well,” says the artiste, who was awarded the ‘Young Artist Award’, the highest honour for young art practitioners by The National Arts Council, Singapore, in December 2020.

Considering the fact government supports for arts in Singapore is “fantastic”, she attributes her growth to that fact. “The initial funding came from the council that supported the album. I think they recognise artists and that art needs to grow. While I am not in a position to comment on the government support in India as I did not grow up here, it is important that every government extends support to the arts. Not everyone grows up in privileged households. You also start thinking about music as a career only if can support the family. Of course, money is not the only thing, but let us acknowledge that the same gives you the freedom to follow your passion. The state must recognise talent and how they can help the person grow.”

Stressing that corporates have a major role to play too, the vocalist adds that there needs to be an evolved ecosystem where private players, as they do abroad, also contribute.

“Spending on art and culture is a way of giving back to society.”

When she was in Singapore, Shoma saw her gurus once or twice a week but things changed in 2005 when she came to India to learn.

“I would even eat lunch with her, it was not an hourly contract, and we were a part of each other’s lives. My current mentor welcomes me in the same way and it’s very sacred, we disagree and agree. There has always been a space for those conversations, to grow and learn and as well. Yes, I have read accounts of harassment. I hope there’s a space for people to get out when it is not healthy,” she concludes.

When St Louis-born soprano Julia Bullock was 10 years old, her singing teacher explained that her vocal powers would not mature until she reached her late 30s. “I baulked at that, because who in the world wants to wait that long!” says Bullock, laughing. “But I’m now 36 . . . and yeah, I’m able do more than I was even six months ago. Because it’s not just about biological development and technical understanding, it’s also about giving yourself space to organise in every respect.”

Bullock has progressively emerged as a thrilling talent in the classical and opera world — and beyond it. Her sound pulses with electricity and empathy and she has embodied an array of roles onstage, inspiring US composer John Adams to call her his “muse” (and select her for his 2017 opera Girls Of The Golden West, which returns to LA in the new year). Her devastatingly beautiful lead in Handel’s oratorio Theodora at London’s Royal Opera House was a highlight of 2022. She has proved a spirited collaborator — with the San Francisco Opera, and as an artist-in-residence at the New York Met — and a singular curator; her recitals reveal a vivid bond between poetry, politics and protest songs. Somehow, all these qualities are encapsulated within just seven tracks on her debut album, Walking in the Dark. She has an elegant way of making things click.

We meet on a crisp afternoon at a Munich biergarten, not far from where Bullock lives with her husband, German pianist/conductor Christian Reif. The pair originally met while studying at prestigious NYC conservatory Juilliard, and Reif, along with the London Philharmonia, accompanies her on Walking in the Dark. She seems warmly settled in Munich, though her home life has been heavily punctuated with international projects. Since we met, she has given birth to her first child.

Bullock barely paused her live schedule; during the brief period when she couldn’t be onstage herself, she remotely curated this November’s Rock My Soul Festival at the LA Phil — and uploaded a joyous Instagram clip where she shimmies around her apartment to “I’m Every Woman” by event headliner Chaka Khan. Her album, though, taps into a life-long passion for the recorded form.

“I really came to love music through recordings,” she says, between sips of fruit soda. The first gig she attended — Tina Turner, when Bullock was eight — set a high bar (“She was incredible; I would weep if I met her now!”) and she grew up replaying her musical inspirations through stacks of CDs and film footage. “I watched the video of Tina Turner’s Private Dancer tour so many times,” she laughs, “and wow, her energy and presence inspired me.” 

She has arguably found a kindred spirit label in Nonesuch Records, which was originally established as a classical label with a non-exclusionary ethos, and its contemporary catalogue places Bullock in expansively creative company, alongside John Adams, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, KD Lang, David Byrne, Buena Vista Social Club and many more. The label’s chair emeritus Bob Hurwitz first met Bullock at a recording of Adams’s nuclear opus Doctor Atomic. “It wasn’t just her musicality, the clarity of her diction, her ability to embrace a wide range of music she deeply cared for in an authentic way,” says Hurwitz. “Above all, Julia produced a sound that instantaneously drew you in.” 

I came to love music through recordings, I watched the video of Tina Turner’s ‘Private Dancer’ tour so many times and wow, her energy and presence inspired me

“Bob said, ‘I think the most important thing is for the album to be a reflection of where you’re at right now’,” says Bullock, smiling. “I went through tons of material.”

While Bullock is rightly praised for her technical range — the intricate coloratura of her vocals for Adams; her gloriously gutsy blues delivery — she also deserves credit for her seemingly infinite playlist of influences. Her parents, without much money, encouraged her to explore dance classes, performing-arts camps, and community theatre. She recalls growing up with her parents’ collections of ’60s pop, folk and soul; although her father died when she was just nine, his sense of activism and art made an impact. Later, her stepfather would introduce her to classical western European music and indie cinema, while she simultaneously got into ’90s girl groups and neo-soul.

She has personal history with each of the songs she has selected for her album. Its track-listing opens with her tender rendition of Oscar Brown Jr’s “Brown Baby” (also memorably covered by Nina Simone in 1962, and enduringly resonant in the contemporary Black Lives Matter era); it spans powerful African American spirituals and symphonic works, including a startling excerpt from Adams’s 2000 “nativity oratorio”, El Niño, and closes with her dreamy take on Sandy Denny’s 1969 classic “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”.

Walking in the Dark derives its title from lyrics in another of its tracks, “One By One”, originally by 1950s NYC singer-songwriter Connie Converse. Bullock has previously drawn parallels between Converse’s poignant melody and the emotional directness of 19th-century lieder songs; on record, she seems to unfurl every detail of its meaning.

“Converse writes so much about solitude, isolation, self-protection, and needing connection, without casting darkness as negative, frightening or ugly, and lightness as the optimal force, as it’s often been positioned culturally,” she says. “Instead, darkness is a place of protection, intimacy, desire.” 

For Bullock, raised with mixed heritage in what she describes as a segregated St Louis and rising through what remains a frustratingly homogenous industry, this strikes an undeniably heavy chord. “Whether conscious or not, the racist, prejudiced, oppressive, sexualised, exoticised messages I received, both within my home and outside, were social-conditioning tactics that took me years to recognise and process as damaging,” she says quietly. “Going into the arts was a real space of release and relief for me.”

When she first discovered that she could immerse herself in texts and scores and start making connections, the effect was illuminating. “Synapses in my brain just started to fire,” she beams. “And it excited the hell out of me.” 

It still sounds revelatory. Bullock’s voice and identity resounds; her creative routes feel limitless. “Music helps you channel very clean emotions in super direct ways, and to go through transitions very quickly,” she says. “The emotional metabolism of music is so fast.” But her expressions stay with you — and they are always worth waiting for.

‘Walking in the Dark’ is released by Nonesuch Records on December 9, juliabullock.com

St Paul Chamber Orchestra has shared news of the death from cancer of the cellist Bruce Coppock, its former President and Managing Director. Bruce led the ensemble from 1999 to 2008 and again from 2013 to 2016.

The SPCO says:

Under Coppock’s leadership, and because of his vision and tenacity, the SPCO moved away from the traditional orchestra artistic leadership model, centered around a music director, to a musician- led model complemented by artistic partners. Coppock believed that by empowering the orchestra members to make the important artistic decisions, including selecting repertoire, that concerts would be even more compelling and dynamic for the community.

“It is no exaggeration to say that no single person had a greater role in the SPCO’s artistic trajectory over the last 20 years than Bruce Coppock,” said SPCO Artistic Director and Principal Violin Kyu-Young Kim. “His fervent belief that the SPCO’s ultimate success as a chamber orchestra was dependent on the SPCO musicians themselves rather than a single conductor led to a complete transformation of the ensemble. Without the force of his intellect, musical knowledge and expertise, managerial acumen, and innate leadership skills, this kind of transformation could have led to a steep decline in artistic quality and distinctiveness. Instead, the SPCO today is playing at its highest level ever with fantastic artistic partners and a clear artistic profile, and we owe so much of this to Bruce’s vision and leadership.”

Universal Music Group-owned Deutsche Grammophon, which claims to be the world’s oldest record label, just launched its own high-res classical music service.

Called STAGE+,  the service is described by Deutsche Grammophon in a press release as “ground-breaking”. The label calls it the “latest milestone in classical music’s digital development”.

According to the STAGE+ website, a subscription for the service will cost EUR €14.90 per month, or €149 per year.

The move brings two rising music business trends into sharp focus – the first of which is Classical music’s streaming age renaissance.

Classical music is rising in popularity amongst younger listeners, with the genre’s potential in the market attracting the attention of tech giant Apple, which acquired Netherlands-headquartered classical music streaming service Primephonic last year.

The other reason the move is significant is that it means UMG has become the latest label to launch its own music streaming service, following the launch, in 2019, of Sony Music‘s high-resolution music streaming service Mora Qualitas in Japan.

Now, a major label-owned classical subscription music streaming service is set to operate (and compete) in a market already occupied by the likes of Spotify, Apple‘s still unreleased dedicated classical music app, and the likes of classical music app Idagio. Not to mention the likes of Qobuz and Tidal, which also offer classical music in high res.

We’ve previously noted that classical music fans have long bemoaned the search functionality for definitive versions of composer-led works, especially on mainstream music services.

Deutsche Grammophon claims that its STAGE+ service “represents a step change in the audio-visual presentation of classical music online,” and that the use of “optimized metadata will enable classical fans to search via title and access individual works, movements or opera scenes”.

The classical music company says that subscribers will get access to exclusive live premieres on its new service, including long-form concert and opera programmes; music videos; documentaries and behind-the-scenes interviews; new audio releases, as well as albums from the Deutsche Grammophon and Decca catalogs.

This content will be available in Hi-Res audio and Dolby Atmos and the service will be available as a TV, mobile and web app to STAGE+ subscribers, with “many” videos offered in 4K resolution and Dolby Atmos Music.

Deutsche Grammophon says that tech firm Siemens “will be a partner and supporter of STAGE+”.

Deutsche Grammophon says that STAGE+ will be able to “showcase the best new performances every week” thanks to partnerships with prominent opera companies globally, orchestras, concert halls and festivals.

The first premiere stream on the platform sees Víkingur Ólafsson performing music from his latest album, From Afar, in full from Harpa, Iceland, and further content in the first few weeks includes Bach’s Christmas Oratorio performed at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, Max Richter’s Voices from Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie on Human Rights Day and a Mahler cycle from Vienna’s Musikverein.

The curated live and video-on-demand streams will also include Deutsche Grammophon’s Yellow Lounge classical club nights around the world, a Rising Stars series and performances at World Heritage Sites such as the Forbidden City, Sistine Chapel or the neolithic settlement of Carnac in France.

Deutsche Grammophon was founded in 1898 in Hanover by Emil Berliner, the inventor of the gramophone.

“We want to revolutionise the way people access classical music and, working together with our wonderful partners and family of musicians, bring them the very best of what the art form has to offer.”

Dr Clemens Trautmann, Deutsche Grammophon

Dr Clemens Trautmann, President Deutsche Grammophon, said:: “We want to revolutionise the way people access classical music and, working together with our wonderful partners and family of musicians, bring them the very best of what the art form has to offer.

Added Trautmann: “Our artists’ initial feedback on STAGE+ has been incredibly positive, as this is the first service where their stage life and media output can be presented comprehensively in one place.

“In 2023 DG will be celebrating its 125th anniversary, and STAGE+ is the latest example of the creative and innovative thinking that has been the hallmark of the label since its foundation.” 

“There’s an enormous appetite for great classical music content online.”

Frank Briegmann, Universal Music Central Europe & Deutsche Grammophon

Frank Briegmann, Chairman & CEO Universal Music Central Europe & Deutsche Grammophon, said: “There’s an enormous appetite for great classical music content online.

“We’ve seen significant growth in demand for livestreamed concerts and opera performances since launching DG Stage almost two years ago. STAGE+ will transform the space for online classical music.

“I wish to thank our incredible team and our partner organisations for all their hard work and dedication to STAGE+. They have built something special that’s sure to delight and inspire the global classical audience.”

“We are about to enter an exciting new era for streamed classical performances.”

Robert Zimmermann, Deutsche Grammophon

“We are about to enter an exciting new era for streamed classical performances,” said Deutsche Grammophon’s Vice President Consumer Business, Robert Zimmermann.

“STAGE+ will explore the limitless creative and curatorial possibilities that digital technologies have to offer to bring the creative work of DG’s artists – and beyond – closer to their audience.”

“It offers artists the place for their live and filmed performances to sit directly alongside their studio recordings, enabling an integrated experience for classical artist discovery by devoted fans of the genre.”

Dickon Stainer, Verve Label Group

Dickon Stainer, President and CEO of Global Classics & Jazz and Verve Label Group, said: “STAGE+ uniquely immerses the fan in a dedicated multi-dimensional classical experience of the highest quality, complementing the breadth of our repertoire presented on our partners’ services.

“It offers artists the place for their live and filmed performances to sit directly alongside their studio recordings, enabling an integrated experience for classical artist discovery by devoted fans of the genre.”Music Business Worldwide

A trombone with six valves? “I don’t know if anyone played this ever,” the Lebanese French trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf said the other day at the Met, where he was taking in a display of extravagant, even bizarre, brass instruments. Maalouf, who is forty-two, lives in Paris and was in town for a concert. He had been curious about the museum’s horn collection, which includes not just the six-valve trombone—most have none—but also a vaguely bassoon-like thing (an ophicleide!) with a bell decorated to look like a dragon’s mouth, and a tuba with two bells that resemble conjoined twins. In Maalouf’s view, much of what was on display—arcane, intestinal-looking contrivances of coiled brass—was more a tribute to the metalworker’s craft than anything a working musician might want to play.

Not that Maalouf is a fussy traditionalist. His own preferred instrument is a unique trumpet with four valves (one more than the usual three), which allows him to play the quarter tones of classical Arabic music. He studied European classical music at the Conservatoire de Paris, but made his name playing jazz. He has since embraced electronic music, R. & B., hip-hop, Arabic pop, and other styles, collaborating with such musicians as Wynton Marsalis, Sting, Angélique Kidjo, Juliette Gréco, Josh Groban, and the Kronos Quartet. He’s a superstar in Europe, where he regularly sells out arenas; in American instrumentalist terms, he might be placed on a continuum between Kenny G and Jon Batiste, closer to the former in fame and to the latter in style and critical respect. At the Met, dressed in black, with a groomed beard, he could have passed for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s better-adjusted kid brother.

Maalouf’s father, Nassim Maalouf, a renowned soloist in both European and Arabic classical music, invented the four-valve trumpet that both men play. Ibrahim grew up listening to his father practice. One day, he asked if he could try. “My father said, ‘If you want me to teach you, you will be a trumpet player.’ I was seven. I didn’t know what that commitment meant.” He quickly showed promise, but there were bumps along the way. For one thing, if you live with your trumpet teacher, you can’t cheat on practicing.

“He gave me lessons every day, until I was fourteen or fifteen,” Maalouf recalled. Home life was otherwise hard. He was born in Beirut in 1980, but the family soon fled Lebanon’s violence for France; the loss and the upheaval, he said, affected his parents deeply. Nassim was a very strict father. “The only moments he was really soft were when I was taking trumpet lessons,” Maalouf said. He laughed. “Maybe that’s why I kept playing.”

In a sad turn of family melodrama at least as old as “The Jazz Singer,” Maalouf’s embrace of more modern and popular music contributed to an estrangement between father and son. For Nassim, who had no formal education outside of music, the trumpet had been a way out of rural poverty. “It was his tool to escape his destiny,” Maalouf said. “And he expected I would exactly continue his way of playing.” Today, they exchange only the occasional text. “We disagree on pretty much everything.”

Maalouf’s latest album, “Capacity to Love,” his seventeenth—not including the many French film scores he has composed, plus a couple of symphonies—may push his father even farther away. Overtly polemical, it is meant as a musical riposte to the right-wing nationalism gripping Europe and other places around the world. Maalouf enlisted a diverse array of collaborators, including the rappers Pos (of De La Soul) and Erick the Architect; the jazz singer Gregory Porter; musicians from South America and Africa; and, perhaps most daringly, Sharon Stone, a movie star not previously known for her musical gifts. On one track, over a mournful orchestral backdrop and Maalouf’s trumpet, Stone recites an original poem, an angry address to an unnamed American politician (we all know who).

Maalouf approached Stone, he said, because he admires her “strong voice” and her willingness to speak her mind even at the risk of sounding “stupid.” He had wanted a Hollywood figure to help close the album, which begins with an audio clip of Charlie Chaplin’s final speech from “The Great Dictator.” The film, with its plea for tolerance and “universal brotherhood,” had made an impression on Maalouf when he first saw it, in grammar school, as the only Arab in his class.

“When I do a concert, I like that there are all kinds of people listening to me, even people who don’t believe in the same things as me,” he said. “If they’re moved, then we’ve shared something.” Would he welcome even Marine Le Pen or Donald Trump as a fan? “Why not?” he said. “Sometimes little things can change opinions on big things. Maybe they would have some part of their mind that thinks, Maybe, you know, maybe—maybe—I’m wrong.” 

Religious music has existed almost as long as the history of mankind. In every era, from every corner of the world, pieces celebrating and honoring Gods and Goddesses have been found. They are countless.

It’s a much smaller pool of pieces when we narrow the search to “Prayers” that weren’t based on a previously existing spoken prayer, or a psalm or other words from a sacred text. With an eye toward the Thanksgiving holiday, here are a few of my favorite musical prayers created by composers.

In my mother’s line-up of nightly lullabies was Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Evening Prayer” (Abendsegen) from his 1892 children’s opera Hansel and Gretel, based on the Grimm’s fairy tale. She sang in English, instead of the original German, so we could understand there were 14 angels who would watch over and protect me and my siblings, as we slept.

When at night I go to sleep,
Fourteen angels watch do keep,
Two my head are guarding,
Two my feet are guiding;
Two upon my right hand,
Two upon my left hand.
Two who warmly cover,
Two who o’er me hover,
Two to whom ’tis given
To guide my steps to heaven.

Here’s a beautiful version from the Metropolitan Opera, featuring soprano Aleksandra Kurzak as Gretel and mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey as Hansel, the siblings lost in the woods.

Gounod’s opera Faust features a prayer sung by the soldier Valentin as he prepares to go off to war. Valentin asks God to protect his beloved sister Marguerite. The late, magnificent baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky here makes his prayer-plea from the stage of the Royal Opera in London.

There are actually other prayer moments in Faust, but the prayer of the rough soldier got to my heart the very first time I saw the opera.

Another of my favorite musical prayers is from my favorite of Beethoven’s symphonies, his Sixth, the “Pastoral.” Known as a great lover of the outdoors, but not a fan of nicknames and subtitles for his music, it was significant that he gave the five movements subtitles that honored nature, including the final movement, “Shepherd’s Song: Cheerful and Thankful Feelings After the Storm.” He wants you to imagine the shepherd, grateful that his flock was unharmed by the storm that passed in the previous movement. Here’s Paavo Järvi conducting the German Chamber Philharmonic, Bremen.

Beethoven wrote a Latin phrase over the notes for this final movement: Gratias agimus tibi – We give Thee thanks.

Another piece by Beethoven comes to mind when I think of prayer. In 1835 Beethoven began writing his String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132. It was shortly after that he suffered from a stomach ailment from which he thought he was going to die. When he recovered, he finished writing the piece with an additional movement. Again, it’s significant that he gave a title to the third movement, “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart,” or “Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity from a convalescent, in the Lydian mode.” It was important to him to express a prayer of thanks to God for giving him another chance at life. Here is the Praetorious Quartett.

To me, the third movement is both a voice of gratefulness and grace. Beethoven has allowed us to peer into his heart and overhear his prayer of thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving!

CODA:  One of the poems that I had to memorize (and then recite in a high school English class), was e.e. cummings’s “i thank You God for most this amazing.” I have always tried to live a life of gratitude, and this poem has come up in my mind more times than I could count. I found a recording of the poet himself reading his poem, and then Eric Whitacre’s hymn using that poem of thanksgiving for the lyrics.

e.e. cummings:

Eric Whitacre and the Eric Whitacre singers: