Reviews

A lovely brisk day, sunlight filling ACCA’s café, an engaging brief talk by Jessie Grimes: everything augured well for this concert by the Jacquin Trio. Yet I found myself slightly thrown for a moment or two. It was partly that Schumann opens his Märchenerzählungen with quirky little More

Enlightenment from inside a darkened room. It was given by Johannes Marmen to a large proportion of the Coffee Concerts audience, of whom 205 turned out early on Sunday to hear his young group make their debut in the series.

Such a high More

What joy to be restarting another coffee concert series, on an unusually warm October morning with golden leaves falling in bright sunshine. The Marmen Quartet is new to us, having formed as recently as 2013 at the Royal College of Music. They gave an extraordinary More

Watching four different bodies combine on stage is one of the fascinations of seeing small-scale ensembles perform in chamber music concerts. We can’t know freely their actual personalities but we can search for clues in how they perform. Our eyes are drawn in all directions.

Here was another example in the frequent flow of Coffee Concert debut-making groups already operating at high level. This time, Quatuor Arod from Paris – intriguingly More

When you set out to go to a concert featuring well-known quartets by Haydn and Beethoven, you might be forgiven for thinking that you know what to expect. With Quatuor Arod you would be wrong. They take well-known pieces and play them as though More

A few weeks ago on BBC Radio 3’s Record Review, a Saturday morning, there was music for piano, violin and cello by Takemitsu. A Japanese composer, long influential over European composers, gently telling us of his homeland’s serene beauty, and encouraging Western ears to tune into its physical and emotional ambience, in a piece called Between Tides.

Presenter Andrew McGregor noted special qualities More