Richard Bratby

Today

29 Oct 2020
Richard Bratby

A new opera that deserves more than one outing: Royal Opera’s New Dark Age reviewed

It’s quite a title sequence. Puccini swells on the soundtrack and words flash before your eyes. ‘Ecstatic!’ ‘Spellbound!’ ‘Passionate!’ ‘Dazzled!’ Champagne fizzes, ballerinas pirouette; for some reason Bryn Terfel hovers in the roof of the Floral Hall. The Royal Opera House is back in the game, bringing the uplift of live music-drama to an opera-starved Britain, and if you’re watching it online, the only remaining question is whether the offering on stage can possibly live up to the energy, colour and sheer affirmation of the Royal Opera’s on-screen intro. Don’t be silly. What we get is New Dark Age — a double bill that takes its name from its second half, the latest creation of director Katie Mitchell. Let that title sink in for moment.

A new opera that deserves more than one outing: Royal Opera’s New Dark Age reviewed

Thursday

15 Oct 2020
Richard Bratby

A silly, bouncy delight: Glyndebourne’s In the Market for Love reviewed

Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera, it’s hard to imagine a less probable operatic outcome— even this year. I mean, Offenbach: the saucy skewerer of middle-class pretension; the dazzling, vulgar arriviste of 19th-century opera. It couldn’t have been more incongruous had the sideburned showman himself razzed up, bass thumping, in a pimped Renault 5 and started pulling skids on the ha-ha. He’s never been staged at Glyndebourne, and it’s not hard to guess why. The last time I saw an Offenbach one-acter done in the UK, it was Croquefer, a medieval farce that climaxes with the entire cast succumbing to projectile diarrhoea. Try turning that into a range of luxury gifts.

A silly, bouncy delight: Glyndebourne’s In the Market for Love reviewed

Thursday

24 Sep 2020
Richard Bratby

I pounded my car horn like a Neapolitan cabbie: ENO’s drive-in Bohème reviewed

The email from English National Opera was blunt: ‘Your arrival time is 18.25. If you arrive outside your allocated time slot, you may not be allowed entry.’ Perhaps, to habitual London drivers — if such people exist — negotiating the residential streets of Muswell Hill during a Saturday rush hour is all good clean urban fun. I couldn’t say. I just know that by the time I’d been marshalled into a parking space at Alexandra Palace, my no-claims bonus miraculously still intact, I was in no mood for an evening of updated and interval-free Puccini. Three hours later I was pounding my car horn like a Neapolitan cabbie. ENO’s announcement of Britain’s first live drive-in opera provoked scepticism: this is a company with a history of announcing high-profile gimmicks that never quite happen or quietly flop.

I pounded my car horn like a Neapolitan cabbie: ENO’s drive-in Bohème reviewed

Thursday

17 Sep 2020
Richard Bratby

Affectionate and unthreatening, just like usual: Last Night of the Proms reviewed

The Last Night of the Proms came and went, and it was pretty much as anyone might have predicted, if they’d given it a moment’s thought. A sprinkling of popular classics, a pair of unthreatening premières, the familiar landmarks tastefully and affectionately done, and some show tunes and arias, sung by the soprano Golda Schultz with a generosity and warmth that couldn’t have been more potent if she really had been singing to a packed and cheering Royal Albert Hall, rather than TV cameras and emptiness. It was recognisably a Last Night of the Proms: celebratory in that slipper-wearing BBC way, without ignoring the unavoidable truth that you can’t have audience participation without an audience. And after all that fuss, too.

Affectionate and unthreatening, just like usual: Last Night of the Proms reviewed

Thursday

10 Sep 2020
Richard Bratby

Why orchestras are sounding better than ever under social-distancing

Our college choirmaster had a trick that he liked to deploy when he sensed that we were phoning it in. He ordered us out of the choirstalls and positioned us at random all over the chapel. It was sadistic but effective. With nowhere to hide, there could be no quiet fudging of that awkward leap in ‘O Thou the Central Orb’, and no waiting until after a more confident neighbour had begun their note before scooping hastily (and hopefully unnoticeably) upwards to match their pitch. Every singer became a reluctant soloist. The result was usually either mutiny, or an immediate and dramatic improvement in tone, tuning and ensemble. Apply that principle to the socially distanced orchestras in the current Proms season, and it’s no surprise that so many listeners seem to be finding these performances so affecting.

Why orchestras are sounding better than ever under social-distancing

Thursday

3 Sep 2020
Richard Bratby

Couldn’t the BBC have filled at least some of the seats? First night of the Proms reviewed

The Royal Albert Hall, as Douglas Adams never wrote, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Which is great if you want a colossal audience; less great as a venue for classical music. True, sound engineers have brought us a long way from the 19th century, when one critic (it might have been Bernard Shaw) described a Weber overture wafting around that cavernous acoustic like a feather caught in a draught. If you tune in to Radio 3 — which is how most listeners have always heard the Proms — it sounds fine. But it wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice of venue for a series of classical concerts unless, as mentioned, you’re expecting a vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big audience.

Couldn’t the BBC have filled at least some of the seats? First night of the Proms reviewed

Thursday

27 Aug 2020
Richard Bratby

Enter the parallel universe that is the Lucerne Festival

There wasn’t going to be a Lucerne Festival this year. The annual month-long squillion-dollar international beano got cancelled, along with the rest of Europe’s musical life, round about the time that we were all starting to get bored of banana bread. Then suddenly, in late July, it was on again. The Swiss government authorised distanced and masked audiences of up to a thousand, and a series of nine concerts was rapidly improvised with locally available talent — which, when you have the determination, contacts and (crucially) bank balance of the Lucerne Festival, means people such as Cecilia Bartoli, Igor Levit and, for these opening concerts, Martha Argerich and Herbert Blomstedt, plus a scaled-down Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

Enter the parallel universe that is the Lucerne Festival

Thursday

20 Aug 2020
Richard Bratby

The joy of going to a real concert: OHP’s Heart of Delight reviewed

I went to a concert! Not a livestream or download: a real concert, with real musicians, a real conductor, a real audience, and the real sound of Waitrose cava bottles popping open in the late afternoon. In some ways, this open-air gala from Opera Holland Park made it feel as if the summer season were back on. There were floral-print dresses and canary-coloured chinos; I swear I even saw a tartan picnic rug. And here in a corner were the critics, released back into society for the first time since March. When the correspondent of the Mail on Sunday ostentatiously upgraded himself to a better seat mid-show, it was like we’d never been away. In truth, it only resembled normality if you ignored the total absence of Opera Holland Park’s huge tented theatre.

The joy of going to a real concert: OHP’s Heart of Delight reviewed

Thursday

13 Aug 2020
Richard Bratby

‘Where I grew up, classical music was diversity’: an interview with conductor Alpesh Chauhan

The first time Alpesh Chauhan conducted Birmingham Opera Company, he was surrounded by rats: six-foot tall rats, singing Shostakovich at the top of their voices. There were singing cops, too, and a marching band wearing bloodstained wedding dresses, and this was all happening in a derelict Edgbaston dance hall best known as a location for the 1980s Central TV drama Boon. Well, of course it was. BOC is the company that staged Mussorgsky in a circus tent and Stockhausen in an abandoned chemical warehouse; its whole point is to upend traditional assumptions about opera. The big difference in its production last year of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk came from the orchestra. Chauhan drove Shostakovich’s score with a brooding, purposeful intensity that felt as though you’d been caught in a riptide and dragged under.

‘Where I grew up, classical music was diversity’: an interview with conductor Alpesh Chauhan

Thursday

30 Jul 2020
Richard Bratby

Art tackles social distancing and, for once, actually wins: Philharmonia Sessions reviewed

First there were the home recitals: musicians playing solo Bach in front of their bookshelves, wonkily captured on iPhones. Next came the Zoom ensembles, and near-infinite quantities of editing time and digital processing power achieved what, for a millennium up until March this year, could be produced instantaneously by putting some musicians in the same room. In June, we had live chamber music relays from empty concert halls. And now, after what might be the longest enforced break many orchestras will ever have taken, we have socially distanced online symphonic concerts: the latest, and let’s hope final, manifestation of this godawful New Normal (you’ll know we’re back to the Old Normal once critics start complaining about grey-haired audiences again).

Art tackles social distancing and, for once, actually wins: Philharmonia Sessions reviewed

Thursday

23 Jul 2020
Richard Bratby

Model villages aren’t just for kids

When you leave Bekonscot, the world looks different. The semis and grass verges of suburban Beaconsfield seem slightly wrong: too large, too assertive. It takes a minute or two to adjust your perspective — to size yourself up, or bring the surrounding houses down. In that moment, you experience the sensation described by Will Self in Scale, his morphine-addled hymn to Britain’s most celebrated model village: ‘Some people lose their sense of proportion; I’ve lost my sense of scale.’ Well, supply your own lockdown metaphor. As we emerge, muzzy-headed, from extended voyages around our own living rooms, the government’s recent announcement that we are now free to visit ‘amusement arcades, outdoor skating rinks, social clubs and model villages’ sounded like a bizarre bureaucratic afterthought.

Model villages aren’t just for kids

Thursday

9 Jul 2020
Richard Bratby

Portrait of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic – Britain’s oldest and ballsiest orchestra

Liverpool’s last ocean liner lies half a mile inland, on the crest of a hill. The Philharmonic Hall, home of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, sits between two cathedrals on Hope Street, its towers jutting over the city like twin prows. It’s an unavoidable metaphor: when you enter the Hall on a concert night, the first thing you see is a bronze memorial to the musicians of the Titanic. Everything about the Hall — the grand staircase; the long curving corridors; the art deco auditorium that looks like something from Alexander Korda’s Things to Come — suggests that you’re about to steam off on some fantastic voyage. I’ve heard concerts all over the world, but when I dream about music, it’s always at the Liverpool Phil.

Portrait of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic – Britain’s oldest and ballsiest orchestra

Thursday

11 Jun 2020
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 the musical event of the year? I don’t think that’s overstating it — at least not if Twitter is any indication.

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

Thursday

28 May 2020
Richard Bratby

I’m still not wholly convinced by Kirill Petrenko: Berlin Phil’s Digital Concert Hall reviewed

At the start of Elgar’s Second Symphony the full orchestra hovers, poised. It pulls back; and then, like a dam breaking, the music surges forward in wave upon wave of golden sound. ‘Rarely, rarely, comest thou, Spirit of Delight!’ writes Elgar, quoting Shelley, at the top of the score, and you won’t hear that spirit captured more exuberantly than in a performance from May 2009 by the Berlin Philharmonic under its future music director Kirill Petrenko. The violins gleam, the horns swell and every player is audibly leaning into the music. Under Petrenko, Elgar’s leaping compound rhythms almost seem to dance. The catch, of course — the truth that gives this symphony its universality, and its wrenching emotional power — is that this is pretty much as joyous as it gets.

I’m still not wholly convinced by Kirill Petrenko: Berlin Phil’s Digital Concert Hall reviewed

Thursday

21 May 2020
Richard Bratby

Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube

The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are only so many lockdown videos the human spirit can take. Which is why, on a sunny spring afternoon, in the prime of life and health, I find myself watching the late John Cage stroking bits of wire with a feather. The haircuts suggest that we’re in the early 1980s, and a Ron Burgundy type is floating across the screen in a little box. ‘It’s been said that listening to John Cage’s music is like chewing sand,’ he explains, unhelpfully. It seems that we’ve also been watching a live performance by the German artist Joseph Beuys. And that we’re now going over to a firework display at the Pompidou Centre.

Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube

Thursday

30 Apr 2020
Richard Bratby

It costs a lot of money to look this cheap: Metropolitan Opera’s At-Home Gala reviewed

Desperate times call for desperate measures. With the world’s opera houses currently dark, the New York Metropolitan Opera tackled the crisis the way it knows best — by assembling the most glamorous possible list of vocal megastars and presenting them at astronomical expense. But dollars can’t get around social distancing, and in lockdown even the greatest voice is only as good as the mic on a smartphone. Cue four hours of free-to-view party pieces from 43 of the world’s greatest singers, broadcast live from their homes without orchestra, without editing and without excuses. So the credits rolled with all the bombast familiar from the Met’s cinema relays, and it was over to Peter Mattei, live from his summer house in the Stockholm archipelago, singing Don Giovanni’s serenade with the camera jammed at a wonky angle and what looked like a dog (but might have been a cushion) snoozing on the floor behind him.

It costs a lot of money to look this cheap: Metropolitan Opera’s At-Home Gala reviewed

Thursday

23 Apr 2020
Richard Bratby

From Middlemarch to Mickey Mouse: a short history of The Spectator’s books and arts pages

The old masters: how well they understood. John Betjeman’s architecture column ran for just over three years in the mid-1950s. Yet during that short run he experienced the moment that comes, sooner or later, to every regular writer in The Spectator’s arts pages. ‘It is maddening the way people corner one and make one discuss politics at the moment,’ he wrote on 23 November 1956, clearly as bored of the Suez crisis as the rest of us were, until recently, by Brexit: Because I write in this paper, people assume that I share its Editor’s views about Suez… But I don’t know what the views of this paper about Suez are, because I never read the political stuff in front. I take the Spectator to see whether there are any misprints in this column and for the book reviews and for dear old Strix and the angry letters.

From Middlemarch to Mickey Mouse: a short history of The Spectator’s books and arts pages

Thursday

16 Apr 2020
Richard Bratby

The marvel of Mozart’s letters

It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premièred his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766 and as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (ten) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’. Mozart’s letters deliver many such jolts — reminders that, however directly we might feel that Mozart’s music speaks to us, he’s not a man of our time.

The marvel of Mozart’s letters

Saturday

4 Apr 2020
Richard Bratby

The joy of Haydn’s string quartets – here are the best recordings

As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his back garden. Napoleon’s armies were closing on Vienna, and Haydn’s suburban home was in the line of fire. His valet recorded that the bedroom door blew open and every window in the house rattled. Shaking violently, the 77-year-old composer’s first thought was for his household, which at that point comprised six servants and a talking parrot who addressed him as ‘Papa’. ‘Children, don’t be afraid, for where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you,’ he shouted. This was nothing particularly new. Over a long life Haydn survived smallpox, saw his house burn down (twice) and narrowly escaped castration at the hands of an overenthusiastic choirmaster.

The joy of Haydn’s string quartets – here are the best recordings

Saturday

28 Mar 2020
Richard Bratby

Bleak humour, resourcefulness and wit: Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Quarantine Soirées reviewed

There’s a certain merit in bluntness. ‘Quarantine Soirées’ was what the Budapest Festival Orchestra called its response to the crisis, and if the name conveyed a certain bleak Magyar humour, the resourcefulness couldn’t be faulted. Elsewhere, orchestras were still talking optimistically about broadcasting concerts from empty halls, and (even more optimistically) about persuading online viewers to pay for them. Realising that any activity that brings 90 musicians into close proximity was probably running out of road, the BFO’s music director Ivan Fischer announced that ‘this is not the time for orchestral music’ and launched a programme of chamber recitals by the orchestra’s players, livestreamed from their rehearsal hall.

Bleak humour, resourcefulness and wit: Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Quarantine Soirées reviewed

Saturday

21 Mar 2020
Richard Bratby

Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers: the raucous world of 19th century British music

For a patriotic German in the decades before Bismarck, Britain’s power was an object of envy. But there was one thing, at least, that you could always hold over the Anglo-Saxons on their foggy little island. On 1 January 1837, Robert Schumann sat down in Leipzig to hear a new piano concerto by the 20-year-old William Sterndale Bennett. ‘An English composer; no composer,’ commented his neighbour, smugly, before the music started. Few 19th-century German music-lovers failed to point out that the land of Shakespeare had somehow failed to produce a single really significant composer since the late 17th century. We know how that story ended; and if you want to explore the flowering of the British musical renaissance, it’s never been easier.

Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers: the raucous world of 19th century British music

Saturday

7 Mar 2020
Richard Bratby

If your instinct is to undermine Beethoven, you’re directing the wrong opera: Fidelio reviewed

‘People may say I can’t sing,’ said the soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, ‘but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.’ There were groans of dismay as an official walked out before the start of the Royal Opera’s new Fidelio: Jonas Kaufmann was not feeling on top form, but he was going to perform the role of Florestan regardless, and begged our indulgence. The mind plays tricks and after an announcement like that it’s hard to be entirely sure whether you’re hearing a skilfully proportioned interpretation or a singer dialling it down. But let the record show that Kaufmann did sing, and if you’ve booked for this production on the strength of that magic name alone, you can breathe easy. And indisposed or not, there’s no mistaking that endless, unfurling stream of black-and-gold tenor tone.

If your instinct is to undermine Beethoven, you’re directing the wrong opera: Fidelio reviewed

Saturday

29 Feb 2020
Richard Bratby

Eurotrash Verdi: ENO’s Luisa Miller reviewed

Verdi’s Luisa Miller is set in the Tyrol in the early 17th century, and for some opera directors that’s a problem. After all, they’re busy people. They probably never had time to read Wolf Hall, or to speak to any of the 100 million people worldwide who watched Game of Thrones. It’s self-evident to them that modern audiences will be unable to empathise with anything involving swords, castles or feudal hierarchies. Which is why they work hard to imagine new contexts that can make these hopelessly dated dramas address contemporary life as we live it, right here, right now. Counts, village maidens and men in ruffs? Baffling. But a clown strapped to a gyrating crucifix being stabbed with arrows by a group of dancers in flesh-coloured swimming caps and black fetish wear? Now that’s relatable.

Eurotrash Verdi: ENO’s Luisa Miller reviewed

Saturday

22 Feb 2020
Richard Bratby

Weill’s Broadway opera is made for telly: Opera North’s Street Scene reviewed

It’s a sweltering night in Manhattan, circa 1947, and on the doorstep of a brownstone tenement three women are waiting for their menfolk to return. There’s plenty to gossip about. The Hildebrands upstairs are being evicted tomorrow, and the Buchanans are expecting a baby. And what’s the deal with Mrs Maurrant and Steve the milkman? Old Mr Kaplan reads the newspaper and denounces the bourgeoisie. A kid cadges a dime and big, kind Lippo Fiorentino arrives home from work with ice creams for everyone. At which point it becomes fairly safe to conclude that the America of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene is not the America of his Mahagonny. Forget the acid harmonies and hard-left caricatures of his Berlin collaborations with Bertolt Brecht.

Weill’s Broadway opera is made for telly: Opera North’s Street Scene reviewed

Saturday

15 Feb 2020
Richard Bratby

Are we going to have to start taking Calixto Bieito seriously? ENO’s Carmen reviewed

Calixto Bieito’s Carmen: three words to make an opera critic’s heart leap. Until quite recently, Bieito was the operatic provocateur of the century — the director who opened Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera with a row of men defecating on stage, and who presented Mozart with a side order of torture porn. Veterans of his Carmen told of fellatio and gratuitous nudity; it all sounded very promising. Add the malicious pleasure of seeing what unrevivable horrorshow ENO had lumbered itself with now — what steaming paella of body fluids it was about to dish up to an audience who’d paid for an evening of good tunes and sultry senoritas — and the review practically writes itself. In retrospect, the fact that this show has been in ENO’s repertoire since 2012 should have been a red flag.

Are we going to have to start taking Calixto Bieito seriously? ENO’s Carmen reviewed

Saturday

8 Feb 2020
Richard Bratby

Inspired programming and a proper celebration: Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender reviewed

Beethoven wears a feather boa and pink shades. He wrangles an electric guitar. A red lightning flash streaks across that familiar, scowling face. ‘Genius before Elton. Radical before Prince. Iconic before Bowie’ proclaimed the posters for the Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender, and apparently there’ve been complaints about them, which probably means that they’ve got the tone about right. Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Beethoven still has a way of driving all the right people round the bend. US campus musicologists have called for his music to be suppressed (you’d think that champions of inclusion would support a year-long celebration of a disabled composer, but it seems not. Wrong chromosomes). Last month, EU groupies tried to co-opt him to the Remain cause and ended up putting the permatanned Dutch cheesemonger André Rieu at number one, in a slightly unfortunate self-own.

Inspired programming and a proper celebration: Barbican’s Beethoven Weekender reviewed

Saturday

1 Feb 2020
Richard Bratby

The joy of Radio 3’s Building a Library

So, you’ve fallen in love with a piece of classical music and you want to buy a recording. The problems begin when you hit Amazon. Any reasonably established classic will have been recorded numerous times: do you go for the performer you’ve already heard of? The crackly vintage recording with the gushing five-star reviews? Or the budget-priced unknown with the vaguely Slavic name; after all, it’s the same music. Isn’t it? Radio 3’s Building a Library sorts it out so you don’t have to. Tucked away within Record Review each Saturday morning, the format is simple: every week, the BBC details a critic to listen to as many recordings of a given work as is humanly possible. Then they present their findings, playing one recording off against another before settling on a single recommendation.

The joy of Radio 3’s Building a Library

Saturday

25 Jan 2020
Richard Bratby

The audience were in tears: Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall reviewed

‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show you someone who’s never tried to sell tickets for the Op. 9 string trios. Even Mahler, the blockbuster concert phenomenon of the past four decades, has his limits. Audiences love him, sure. But in 2011, when several orchestras performed complete Mahler cycles, the limits of that love became embarrassingly clear. The Second and Eighth symphonies — roof-raising choral spectaculars — promptly sold out. The gentle Fourth and the knotty, reconstructed Tenth: not so much. As for his songs, forget it. Well, that’s lieder for you. For most Anglophone music lovers, the entry barriers to the world of German song — a near-native understanding of Schiller, Goethe and Heine, just for starters — can feel impossibly high.

The audience were in tears: Christian Gerhaher/Gerold Huber at the Wigmore Hall reviewed

Saturday

18 Jan 2020
Richard Bratby

Warmth, energy and gripping momentum: Stephen Hough’s Wigmore Hall residency reviewed

In the summer of 1878 Johannes Brahms finally succeeded in growing a beard. It was his third attempt. ‘Prepare your wife for the grisly spectacle, for something so long suppressed cannot be beautiful,’ he wrote to a friend, and by all accounts he wasn’t wrong. Clara Schumann pleaded with him to shave it off. She’d have remembered Brahms as the golden-haired 20-year-old who had arrived on her doorstep in September 1853, glowing with genius; in the words of her husband Robert, ‘a young blood at whose cradle graces and heroes stood guard’. For modern listeners, though, the beard has long since conquered — as if, like one of Philip Pullman’s daemons, it somehow embodies Brahms in his gruff and hairy definitive form.

Warmth, energy and gripping momentum: Stephen Hough’s Wigmore Hall residency reviewed
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