Stephen hough

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Bristol’s new concert hall is extremely fine

Bristol has a new concert hall, and it’s rather good. The transformation of the old Colston Hall into the Bristol Beacon has been reported as if it was simply a matter of upgrading and renaming. There were probably sound reasons for doing so, but in fact (and despite protests from the Twentieth Century Society) the postwar auditorium has been demolished outright and replaced with a wholly new orchestral hall designed on the best current principles: shoebox-shaped, with much use of wood and textured brick. Butterworth sears his melodies on to the eardrums. Isn’t it weird we still think of the Edwardians as inhibited? Acoustically, it’s extremely fine – not a

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Hit every auditory G-spot simultaneously: CBSO/Hough/Gardner concert reviewed

Rejoice: live music is back. Or at least, live music with a live audience, which, as Sir Simon Rattle admitted, addressing the masked and socially distanced crowd immediately before the LSO’s first full-scale public performance for 14 months, is kind of the whole point. Yes, he said, they’d streamed online concerts from the Barbican, but the silence of emptiness is a very different proposition from the silence of a hall containing 1,000 human beings. He’s right, of course. Those 14 months have tested to destruction the notion that digital platforms can offer the same sort of emotional nourishment. Once again, then — rejoice! And nobody mention the Indian variant. For

Thursday

Richard Bratby

The musical event of the year: Wigmore Hall BBC Radio 3 Special Broadcasts reviewed

Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals; and if you weren’t actively promoting old Ludwig Van there was money to be made whinging about overkill. So was Stephen Hough’s decision to end his Wigmore Hall recital last Monday with Schumann’s Fantasie in C — a work conceived at least partly in homage to Beethoven, which opens with a fragmented musical landscape that Schumann at one point called ‘Ruins’ — a conscious reflection of the musical world’s changed circumstances? Or would that be reading too much into a situation in which a once-routine lunchtime concert suddenly feels like