Concert Reviews

Longborough Festival Opera – Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre. Photograph: Jorge Lizalde
Longborough Festival Opera – Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre
The grand scale of a Wagner music drama may seem an improbable undertaking so soon into the gradual easing of England’s Covid-19 lockdown restrictions. But Longborough has extensive experience in...
21st-Century Choreographers. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The Royal Ballet – 21st-Century Choreographers – Christopher Wheeldon, Kyle Abraham & Crystal Pite
It is hard to imagine a more downbeat, low-key, dispiriting evening with which to mark the return to the stage of a great ballet company.  The underlying concept of the...
English National Ballet at Sadler’s Wells – Reunion – Senseless Kindness; Laid in Earth; Take Five Blues; Echoes; Jolly Folly
It is hard to imagine a more feel-good evening at the ballet – English National Ballet’s return to stage performance on the very first day of social easing and the...
BCMG - Back to the Beginning
BCMG: Back to the Beginning
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group has not been idle over the phases of lockdown, this concert – recorded at CBSO Centre with the musicians (other than clarinettist Mark O’Brien) wearing facemasks...
Michael Seal. photographs © Eric Richmond 2016
CBSO Beethoven’s Seventh
This latest in the City of Birmingham Symphony’s online concerts was centred on dance – whether that of Scottish traditional music, eastern European gypsy music, or merely those rhythms such...
Ben Gernon. Credit: Petra Hajská/Czech Philharmonic
CBSO French Connections
There may have been no musical car chases in this first online concert of 2021 by the CBSO, but neither was there any lack of eventfulness during a programme that...
Morton_Feldman
A Morton Feldman Celebration
The current decade will see a plethora of anniversaries marking the centenary of composers influential on both sides of the Atlantic, and while that for Morton Feldman is still five...
Jerwood Hall, LSO St Luke’s, London
LSO/Simon Rattle – Stravinsky
The abundance of works for smaller forces makes Stravinsky’s output ideal for concerts that need to observe social distancing necessities, such as this concert – given just in time to...
Steven Osborne, London 30 May 2013 (c) B Ealovega
Steven Osborne and the Aurora play Mozart and Shostakovich
There was an odd sense of reversal of fortune at work in this chamber music concert, all down to Steven Osborne’s role in the programme’s two main works. In Ignaz...
Yasmine Naghdi as The Sugar Plum Fairy and Matthew Ball as The Prince in The Nutcracker, The Royal Ballet © 2017 ROH. Photographed by Karolina Kuras
The Royal Ballet – Peter Wright’s production of The Nutcracker conducted by Koen Kessels – Laura Morera, Federico Bonelli, Anna Rose O’Sullivan & Claire Calvert
It has been a long time coming, but three cheers for The Royal Ballet for finding a way to present its famed production of The Nutcracker at a time when...
Alpesh Chauhan - Credit - Patrick Allen + Opera Omnia
CBSO, Alpesh Chauhan & Stephen Hough
The last of the City of Birmingham Symphony’s online concerts in 2020 saw former associate conductor Alpesh Chauhan at the helm for a programme largely of Mendelssohn but opening with...
Beethoven: 250 Years Young
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s online events continued with this chamber programme marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in unexpected yet diverting fashion, two earlier works bookending a...
Mirga-Grazinyte-Tyla Photo Frans Jansen
CBSO Brass & Strings
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s online concerts continued with this unlikely yet, in the event, arresting sequence in which a brass band staple was followed by two works for...
CBSO Beethoven Septet
Although only now being relayed, this was actually the first event undertaken by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra after the first lockdown earlier this year and there could be...
Mirga-Grazinyte-Tyla Photo Frans Jansen
CBSO – Centenary of the First Concert at Town Hall
Two months ago, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra gave a concert for the centenary of its first performance. Tonight, the orchestra marked the 100th anniversary of its first symphonic...
Mirga-Grazinyte-Tyla Photo Frans Jansen
Mirga & the CBSO
Another lockdown may be imminent, but its timing at least enabled the City of Birmingham Symphony to make a return to its home venue for a programme which, in one...
Southbank Centre Inside Out - BBC Concert Orchestra CR Southbank Centre_BBC_Mark Allan
France, Finland and Fiesta
The BBC Concert Orchestra is no stranger to diverse programming – this evening’s concert, its first in the Royal Festival Hall for over six months, playing to its collective strengths...
Michael Seal © Eric Richmond 2016
CBSO – LIVE at the Centre – A Toast to the Twenties: English Brass
This afternoon’s programme of English music for brass, second in the City of Birmingham Symphony’s post-lockdown concerts, opened with the no-nonsense ceremonials of a fanfare for Princess Margaret’s wedding by...
Roderick-Williams-2-Groves-Artists
Roderick Williams directs the OAE at Royal Festival Hall – Telemann, Bach, Handel [live BBC Radio 3 broadcast]
This was certainly a programme of two halves, one sacred, the other profane, but both dealing with resignation and acceptance, whether wearied or joyful. Without an audience in the Royal...
stephen kovacevich © David Thomas + EMI Classics
Stephen Kovacevich at Wigmore Hall – Bach and Schubert
Few artists have had such a long association with Wigmore Hall as Stephen Kovacevich. He made his European debut there almost six decades ago, a couple of years into his...
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