JuliusDrake

Press

• La Voix Humaine with Mercedes Gancedo

  Turina Space, Seville

  Feb 2025

  • Life Victoria Barcelona and the Victoria de los Ángeles Foundation presented in Seville their show structured around two lyrical monologues by Francis Poulenc, accompanied by three songs and a piano piece, with the luxurious participation of Julius Drake on the piano, a guarantee of quality and musicality... ...On the other end of the phone, a masterful Julius Drake who seemed to be talking to Ella. Just to see and hear him make a character out of the piano was worth attending this show.

    • Scherzo
    • 24 March 2025

• Oxford International Song Festival Recital with Nicky Spence

  Oxford International Song Festival

  Oct 2024

  • The finale, on Saturday at SJE Arts, opened with Gabriel Fauré’s La bonne chanson, settings of poems by Paul Verlaine for voice, piano and string quintet. Spence, joined by Julius Drake (piano), the Piatti Quartet and Leon Bosch (double bass), revelled in the delicate, impressionistic textures of the nine songs, so adored by Marcel Proust, though others thought the whole cycle, and its odd instrumentation, mad. On the night we would turn our clocks back, Spence gave particular zest to the last song, L’hiver a cessé (Winter Is Over), full of dreams of long days and blue skies. In the second half of the recital, with Drake game and willing on piano, the Scottish tenor displayed his unstoppable and expansive energy, adaptability and wit, from Ravel and Poulenc to John Dankworth, Victoria Wood and Stephen Sondheim. When he sang Richard Strauss – Zueignung and Cäcilie – he reminded us of his gifts for the long phrase, and for powerful expression, in whichever language. Tom Lehrer’s Masochism Tango had Spence rotating and boogying across the stage, bristling and masterful. In the midst of all came Noël Coward’s Any Little Fish. Only Nicky Spence could persuade a self-respecting Oxford audience to buzz, quack, woof, moo and coo along. It was over too soon.

    • The Guardian
    • 02 November 2024

• Fauré Song Gala

  Wigmore Hall, London

  Sep 2024 - Sep 2024

  • It was a selection with few duds... Yet the lingering highlights came from Gens and Degout, he wonderfully subtle in some of Fauré’s best-known songs, Après un Rêve and Mandoline, she exquisitely sensitive in La Lune Blanche Luit Dans les Bois from La Bonne Chanson, and especially in the later more elusive songs, such as Paradis from the cycle La Chanson d’Eve. The two joined forces for the duet Puisqu’ici-bas, and then all four singers came together to double up on another duet, Pleurs d’Or, in which Drake and Manoff shared the piano part, too. It was a beautifully conceived, finely executed centenary tribute.

    • The Guardian
    • 15 September 2024

• Schumann: Works for Oboe and Piano

  Aug 2024

  • But it’s a measure of the care and sensitivity that Daniel and Drake bring to everything they play that there is never any sense of awkwardness or falseness. Schumann’s lyricism flows beautifully from Daniel’s oboe in every phrase – and even in works such as the Adagio and Allegro Op 70, originally written for horn but also frequently played, like the Pieces in Folk Character Op 102, as a cello piece – and the changes of register never jar. This duo are by no means the first to assemble a disc of Schumann’s music for oboe – most famously there’s a collection on Philips from the great Heinz Holliger, partnered by Alfred Brendel, no less – but this one is pure delight from first note to last.

    • The Guardian
    • 15 August 2024

• Schubert: Winterreise

  Ustinov Studio, Bath

  Jun 2024

  • Against this stark background, Bostridge and Drake carefully ratchet up the cycle’s intrinsic drama, unconstrained by the parameters of a recital realising a far wider range of dynamics and instrumental colour than usual. The piano felt like a whole orchestra, descriptive and evocative; Drake’s magisterial command of tonal inflections allowing him to invest Schubert’s transitions from minor to major mode and major to minor with acute emotional point, with Bostridge bringing to the illusory, dreamlike, incursions into the major an almost ecstatic air of delusion.

    • The Guardian
    • 12 June 2024

  • Pianist Julius Drake, with perfect timing and changes of tone from full orchestral to pianissimo, formed an ideal partnership with Ian Bostridge. Between them they make this a memorable musical experience for any audience.

    • The Fine Times Recorder
    • 13 June 2024

  • The performers took their respective instruments to the limits: Drake’s piano-playing hectic, majestic and sentimental by turns, and always responsive to the voice.

    • Bath Echo
    • 13 June 2024

• Gerald Finley: “Die Schöne Müllerin”

  • To hear the pianist Julius Drake play Die Schöne Müllerin is to ponder whether Schubert’s work is actually a song cycle for piano with vocal accompaniment, instead of the inverse. On a new recording with the Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, Drake doesn’t pull focus from the vocalist so much as he pursues independent ideas that flow harmoniously alongside Finley’s warm singing. The piece justifies this approach: a babbling brook figures prominently in the text and in the keyboard writing, and the final two songs are sung from its perspective. The performers barrel through the opening songs, all robustious and happy-go-lucky, as the narrator, a miller, follows a stream to the maid he loves. Newly awakened to his feelings, Finley’s miller sounds exuberant, vulnerable, and unprepared for the heartbreak to come. Drake weaves his parts crisply, as if they were a counterpoint by Bach—whose name, incidentally, means “brook” in German.

    • Oussama Zahr, The New Yorker

• Gerald Finley: Night and Day Tour

  Middle Temple Hall, London

  Nov 2023

  • In Heine’s contributions to Schwanengesang, Drake the Schubertian demonstrated his prodigious understanding not just of the music’s idiom but of its textual subtleties. Take the ‘cuckoo’-like descending chords that recur in Ihr Bild: at first they evoked a smile; later under Drake’s touch they became tears. The lilting charm of Das Fischermädchen gave way to the chilling arpeggios of Die Stadt, a desolate song that shares a musical terrain with Nebensonnen from Winterreise. Der Doppelgänger was even bleaker and Drake’s piano bit the air with some astonishing discords.

    • Bachtrack
    • 26 November 2023

• Hidden treasures from Gustav and Imogen Holst

  Wigmore Hall, London

  Jan 2022

  • Drake conjured myriad pianistic moods with a masterly touch, and (Elizabeth) Watts was majestic in tone and approach, especially in the big moments.

    • Richard Morrison, The Times
    • 04 January 2022

• BBC Radio 3 Special Broadcasts

  Wigmore Hall

  Jun 2020

  • Small-scale works take on new and surprising qualities when listened to with this level of concentration, as if the emotions are suddenly being presented in pop-up form. Schumann fared particularly well; not just in Hough’s defiant opening concert, but in a group of dryly named Canonic Études performed by the oboist Nicholas Daniel and the pianist Julius Drake on Thursday. Winsome melodies acquired a stinging payload of melancholy; rippling piano figuration slipped downwards through Drake’s fingers, and away into nothingness.

    • Richard Bratby, The Spectator
    • 13 June 2020

• The Diary of One Who Disappeared

  Zankel Hall

  Feb 2019

  • Mr. Drake played commandingly, including a piano solo depicting the consummation of this impulsive love — fitful music of hurtling chords and steely harmonies.

    • Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times
    • 25 February 2019