A month in Classics: March
Our guest classical music picker, Huw Lewis selects some highlights for this month and spotlights the chance to hear Bach on a big stage
Who is the composer we least hear live, compared to their place in the pantheon of musical greats?
I would hazard a guess the (surprising) answer is JS Bach.
Two concerts on successive days, at The Glasshouse and then across the river at King’s Hall in Newcastle, stand to redress the balance this March.
Between them they span the huge breadth of Bach’s writing from chamber works to choral masterpieces and provide a tantalising opportunity to deep dive the daddy of them all.
Bach’s relative absence from the concert stage has less to do with his enduring popularity (unquestionable) than his slightly awkward place in the development of European music.
Born in 1685 and dying in 1750, Johann Sebastian packed an awful lot of writing into his 65 years; there are more than 1,000 compositions listed in his name. But Bach was writing at a time when what we would recognise as a modern orchestra had yet to emerge, let alone many of the instruments we take for granted as part of it.
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While the 30 ‘orchestral works’ listed in the huge catalogue are packed with banging tunes and indelible harmonies they don’t fit easily alongside the later repertoire that makes up the typical concert season for logistical reasons – the ensembles they are written for are too small and out of kilter in their choice of instruments.
Ironically, it was the authentic music movement which set out to champion Baroque composers that did for Bach on the mainstream concert stage. For much of the 20th century you could expect a Brandenburg Concerto or organ toccata to pop up at regular intervals lavishly re-scored for massive symphonic forces warming up to play Brahms or Mahler.
Since this became frowned upon Bach has been pushed towards the margins of live performance while remaining enormously popular on disc.
For that reason you should make a point of getting to Maria Włoszczowska’s friday night concert with the Royal Northern Sinfonia on March 21. The RNS’s Artistic Partner will be performing two of Bach’s violin concertos as soloist while leading appropriately scaled forces on modern instruments through choice orchestral extracts from a handful of his 224 church cantatas.
The concert reaches a climax Włoszczowska taking on the terrifyingly virtuosic 12-minute solo Chaconne from the D-Minor Solo Partita. One star violinist filling the huge spaces of Hall One at The Glasshouse. I can think of few better incentives to go see music performed live.
The following night (March 22) at King’s Hall at Newcastle University the Newcastle Bach Choir gear up for Easter with a programme of choral works.
This then, is a more familiar way to find Bach live – through choral works dusted off for religious festivals. Intriguingly though, this choir is steering away from the two famous Passions and instead will perform the unfairly overlooked Easter Oratorio, alongside the barnstorming Magnificat and Cantatas 42 and 50. It should also be a treat.
Five more concerts to put a spring in your step this March
No music is more likely to bring a smile to my face than a Haydn string quartet. These are almost always remorselessly smart, witty and optimistic works and Spanish visitors Cuarteto Quirago bring one of the best to The Glasshouse on March 8 as part of the Newcastle International Chamber Series. Also on the bill are Beethoven and Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera.
Flute, piano and cello is a combination that a surprising number of composers have written for since Haydn’s day. The Marsyas Trio perform a concert of works entirely by women composers at Alnwick Playhouse on March 9. Farrenc, Musgrave and Hilary Tann’s In the Theatre of Air, which the group have recorded, feature on the bill.
The big orchestral highlight of the month is the London Philharmonic performing Mahler’s Fifth Symphony under the baton of Robin Ticciati on March 16. The Glasshouse website points out that Mahler divides opinion – but this piece should not. It is brilliantly structured on an epic scale (and I say that having once fallen asleep in the same composer’s Sixth Symphony). Schumann’s Piano Concerto in the first half makes for a spectacular night.
Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto is arguably his masterpiece even if it’s the Second we know better from its defining role in the film Brief Encounter. The Durham University Palatinate Orchestra bring it to the cathedral on March 19 with soloist Henry Hiscock on a programme of big sounds by Wagner, Delius and Purcell: The Englishman’s Funeral Music for Queen Anne was adapted for primitive synthesisers by the film director Stanley Kubrick in A Clockwork Orange and has been open to abuse (in the best possible way) ever since.
North East composer Benn Lunn’s Sonnet will be performed by the full-strength Sinfonia at concerts in Middlesbrough and Gateshead on April 3 and 4 under conductor Stephanie Childress. The main events at both will be Beethoven’s tight, perfect First Piano Concerto and Dvorak’s firework-packed New World Symphony.