Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida bring darkness and dreams to Wigmore Hall

Mark Padmore continued his season-residency at Wigmore Hall with a programme of lieder by Beethoven and Schubert.  In the latter’s ‘Ihr Bild’, one of the Heine settings in Schwanengesang, the…

More virtuosic feats from Tenebrae at Wigmore Hall

Tenebrae is one of the UK’s national treasures and like a perfectly manicured county cricket pitch barely a blade of grass is out of place.  Everything in this Wigmore Hall…

A truthful Winterreise from Ian Bostridge and Angela Hewitt at Wigmore Hall

Wunderlicher AlterSoll ich mit dir gehn?Willst zu meinen LiedernDeine Leier drehn? [Strange old man!Shall I go with you?Will you grind your hurdy-gurdyto my songs?] If the answer to the wanderer’s…

Stream of Tears (Iberian roots): The Sixteen at Wigmore Hall

Marian devotion in the New World was the focus of this concert by The Sixteen at Wigmore Hall.  Perhaps it was coincidental that it happened to be Mother’s Day in…

Louise Alder and Joseph Middleton at Wigmore Hall

Louise Alder’s lunchtime recital at Wigmore Hall, with pianist Joseph Middleton, was almost operatic in its scope and emotional energy.  And, Alder showed her fearlessness by opening her programme with…

Carolyn Sampson, Tim Mead and Arcangelo explore German-Italian crosscurrents at Wigmore Hall

This concert at Wigmore Hall by Arcangelo, under their director Jonathan Cohen, explored German-Italian cultural crosscurrents in the early 18th century.  So, we had a motet dating from the Italian…

Mark Padmore and Imogen Cooper at Wigmore Hall

The five concerts forming Mark Padmore’s 2022-23 residency at Wigmore Hall will be his last ‘full recitals’ at the Hall, though not necessarily his last appearances.  The series focuses on…

James Gilchrist and the Nash Ensemble at Wigmore Hall

On a day that the retiring Bishop of Liverpool described the culture of politics ‘right across the west’ as ‘adversarial, scratchy, exhausted’ and ‘rancid and dangerous’, the words of Dame…

Sounds of the Solstice: Tenebrae at Wigmore Hall

‘God made Sun and Moon to distinguish the seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons.’  So preached John Donne…

Varied performances from the London Handel Players at the Wigmore Hall

Loss and celebration were the themes embedded in a programme comprising two secular cantatas from J.S. Bach’s Leipzig years, and a single aria attributed to him but now believed to…