Review: Nicholas Daniel and Britten Sinfonia in Tavener’s Kaleidoscopes at Milton Court

‘Adams’s ‘shaking’ recalls the ecstatic trances of the early Shakers, and segued neatly into Tavener’s oboe concerto, Kaleidoscopes, with its celestial, high-trilling solo part. Daniel stood in the centre of four string quartets, directing and performing this virtuoso tour de force with extraordinary focus and grace. Kaleidoscope shares the symbolic four compass-point arrangement with Tavener’s Flood of Beauty premiered by the Britten Sinfonia and New London Chamber Choir under Martyn Brabbins on Sunday night. But where Flood was a grandiose, and often congested, 100-minute-deluge of music, in Kaleidoscopes’s tight, ritualistic structure every subtlety of texture and harmony was clear, windows opening on dissonant bursts of John Zorn-like mania, shut suddenly by controlled rhythmic dances and mysterious episodes of luminous dissolution, a gradual coalescing towards some vast Mozartian cadence, its final reward.’

Helen Wallace, BBC Music Magazine, October 2014

Read this review in full online: www.classical-music.com/blog/britten-sinfonia-milton-court