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This week, our critic cues up Opera North’s podcast, takes in Ryedale’s streaming festival and revisits an archived Proms performance with Riccardo Chailly
I’ve been enjoying the Ryedale festival this week, which has moved online, streaming one concert a day from beautiful North Yorkshire venues on its new RyeStream platform. There are lovely things here. Soprano Rowan Pierce, singing by candlelight with pianist Christopher Glynn at All Saints’ Church in Helmsley, gives us a lockdown programme that opens with Purcell’s O Solitude and closes with the quiet optimism of Strauss’s Morgen! Isata Kanneh-Mason places Beethoven alongside Barber and Gershwin in a compelling recital from the same venue, while there’s a concert by the South African cellist-singer-composer Abel Selaocoe that juxtaposes African songs with riffs on Bach, astonishingly performed and utterly mesmerising.
In the Castle Howard chapel, meanwhile, baroque violinist Rachel Podger enthusiastically introduces and plays Biber, Vilsmayr and Bach. The castle’s long gallery is the venue for a superb recital by Matthew Hunt and Tim Horton, which flanks Jörg Widmann’s witty solo clarinet Fantasie with works for clarinet and piano by Schumann – the Fantasiestücke, ravishingly played – and John Ireland. The festival is available free on demand or by donation until 16 August. Continue reading...