2024-25 Concert Reviews

Prestfelde School's  Blackburn Theatre was the venue for the penultimate concert of a very successful season promoted by Shropshire Music Trust. Clarinet player Julian Bliss led a septet through a programme of jazz, swing and Latin American music which left their audience spell bound.

If you closed your eyes at Shrewsbury School’s stunning Barnes Theatre on the evening of Friday 25th April, you could easily believe that Joni Mitchell’s band for the ‘Shadows and Light’ tour of 1979, featuring Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays, Michael Brecker, Jaco Pastorius and Don Alias had just taken to the stage, so faithfully does this outstanding 7-piece band ‘Hejira’ celebrate and honour Joni’s works, chosen mainly from her ‘jazz era’, spanning the period from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s.

This was a homage to a giant of 20th century performance that was like no other. Summoned by the famed artistry of Benjamin Appl and James Baillieu, the spirit of baritone, conductor and über musician Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau moved with power and grace through the circular spaces of St Chad’s leaving none of the audience untouched. What a coup for the Shropshire Music Trust to book this pair, whose stunning musicality and intricate and in-depth programme had previously wowed London audiences, for a concert that combined affectionate celebration, biographical exploration through an exquisite selection of lieder – and the show-stopping talents of two of the best exponents of art song alive today.

The finest live musical experiences cultivate a silence that immediately supersedes them in which the quality of attention and engagement of the whole room rivals the quality and complexity of emotion of the music itself. The experience lives on. Such a moment hung in almost timeless suspension at the end of the Dante Quartet’s unforgettable performance of Shostakovich’s great and moving 8th String Quartet, dedicated to “the victims of fascism and war”. Following its dyspeptic fury, the exquisite contrapuntal effects, its introspective, intense and glacial harmonies, the aftermath, for seconds, for an age – for our age – glowed with awe, tragedy, tenderness, and wonder amid the embers, a slow processing of the darkening weight of the world as we find it. It was an act of witness in which we were all involved. This is what the best live music does. And the Dante Quartet are among the greatest live artists who do it. How fortunate we were, packed in the Maidment Auditorium, to be so totally enwrapped in this fascinating musicianship of the very highest quality.