Concert Reviews

15221 1
Spring came early courtesy of the London Philharmonic, but not without the violent upheaval of Winter as the year-long “Changing Faces: Stravinsky's Journey” series continued, here with Juanjo Mena leading...
15223 1
This performance of Wagner’s Parsifal was the three-hundredth in the Met’s history. François Girard’s 2013 production is a masterstroke. His humanization of this medieval story of religious awakening and redemption...
15220 1
The workings of the opera world are impossible to fathom. Here is Jake Heggie’s and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking, first performed in San Francisco in 2000, subsequently played some...
15224 1
If Ashley Riches’s and Joseph Middleton’s recital was rather more lightweight than some of the Wigmore Hall Monday lunchtime series, you might not have guessed it from the opening Schubert...
15217 1
For a concert whose two major works relate to, or imply, some journey or travel, it was an amusing false start that Daniel Harding’s best foot was definitely not set...
15214 1
Dukas, let alone Goethe, couldn’t have envisaged Walt Disney’s Fantasia, and that the Sorcerer’s Apprentice would be cartooned by Mickey Mouse, no more than Jacques Offenbach could have anticipated his...
15213 1
First seen in 2006 and now in its ninth revival, Jonathan Kent’s direction of Tosca is a no-frills, conventional presentation. Part of its success is due to the late Paul...
15211 1
The mercurial, magisterial, miraculous, mysterial Patricia Kopatchinskaja was in town for a Wigmore Hall happening. Her search for liberté, her tumultuous desire to reach not just beyond the notes but...
15210 1
Hugo Wolf’s Lieder output is usually heard in venues that are smaller and perhaps acoustically better suited to the art of song than the Barbican Hall. Transcending its size Diana...
15209 1
The Frenchman is Darius Milhaud, the American being George Gershwin. Musically they travelled richly to each other’s countries, as did this DSO webcast to an Englishman in London, staying awake...
15212 1
Riccardo Muti led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a richly entertaining concert that showed off their strong rapport – Muti’s contract as music director has been extended through 2022. The...
15206 1
Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -Leben has been criticised for its male perspective on the intimacies of the female heart, but Ruby Hughes at Wigmore Hall dispelled any such doubts with...
15205 1
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony can be a difficult piece to bring off, often seeming disjointed. Here it emerged resplendent but above all quite unusually coherent, a trajectory from darkness to light,...
15204 1
Virtually every evening at St Martin-in-the-fields in Trafalgar Square there are concerts, mostly of popular pieces – The Four Seasons, Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and...
15207 1
John Luther Adams, born 1953, writes for many media, including television and film, utilizing voice, acoustic instruments, orchestra and electronics. Given his profound interest in the natural world (he lived...
15216 1
”If you say it often enough, then it must be true”. Following this dubious maxim, The Royal Ballet insists that Christopher Wheeldon’s The Winter’s Tale is a “modern classic”, that...
15203 1
Professional productions of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe are relatively infrequent. The temptation to update and make the butt of the political jokes more topical must have been immense, and that...
15202 1
Felix Mendelssohn’s sawn-off version of Bach’s St Matthew Passion removes the more-reflective arias and half-a-dozen chorales for the groundbreaking 1829 performance in Berlin. Certainly Mendelssohn’s reductions make for a more...
15201 1
This second LSO evening featuring Elgar’s completed Symphonies under Sir Mark Elder included a searing account of No.2 that made it difficult to believe the work misfired at its premiere....
15200 1
Singers often strive to create a narrative out of Schubert’s Schwanengesang to match those of Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin, and the strength of this soul-searching from Julian Prégardien and...