Wednesday, December 17

Author: Mark Humphreys

Sheku Kanneh-Mason performs Weinberg – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
North West

Sheku Kanneh-Mason performs Weinberg – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

I don’t know how many people my age will remember what they were doing on their 25th birthday.  I certainly don’t – probably some real ale bar in Oxford with sticky floors and beer at £2 per pint.  But Shekhu Kanneh-Mason, superstar cellist and the third of seven ridiculously talented musician siblings, may well remember the rapturous reception (and impromptu rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’) he received from the audience at Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall last night on the occasion of his reaching a quarter-century. The curtain-raiser was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade for Orchestra.  Born in London in 1875 to an English mother and Sierra Leonean medical student father, Samuel was named after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  When the Three Choirs Festival wished to ...
Domingo Hindoyan’s Bruckner – Liverpool Philharmonic
North West

Domingo Hindoyan’s Bruckner – Liverpool Philharmonic

This week, Liverpool’s famous youthful talent took to a prestigious stage and celebrated great success with a charismatic grey-haired leader.  No, not Carabao Cup-winning Liverpool FC with their academy starlets under Jurgen Klopp, but the Liverpool Philharmonic Youth Orchestra under former percussionist and ‘the scouser in our team’ Sir Simon Rattle. But on Thursday night it was the seasoned pros of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra who celebrated the music of two composers who showed that talent can materialise at either end of the age spectrum.  On the one hand, the Violin Concerto by prodigious child prodigy-turned-Hollywood-star-composer Erich Korngold, and on the other the monumental Seventh Symphony by Anton Bruckner, who was in his late 50s by the time he bega...
Grieg’s Piano Concerto – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
North West

Grieg’s Piano Concerto – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

“Easy on the banjos!” warned Eric Morecambe when André Previn (or Andrew Preview) famously attempted to conduct the Grieg Piano Concerto in the classic 1971 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special.  The one time I ever saw a banjo on stage with the RLPO my Facebook post quoting this zinging one-liner garnered precisely zero likes.  It must be a generation thing. For this 2024 performance, Liverpool welcomed back its prodigal son and former Chief Conductor, Vasily Petrenko. Turning from the podium, orchestra poised to start, to acknowledge an errant mobile phone ringtone with a wry raise of the eyebrow, he held the audience in the palm of his hand - comic timing worthy of the much-missed double act themselves. First on the programme was Bohuslav Martinů’s La Bagarre, composed w...