Concert Reviews

LSO Composer Focus: Thomas Adès (2) – Asyla – Adès conducts Franck’s Symphony & Christian Tetzlaff plays Sibelius’s Violin Concerto
Anyone present in Symphony Hall, or glued to BBC Radio 3, on 1 October 1997, when Simon Rattle conducted the CBSO in the premiere of Thomas Adès’s Asyla will, I...
The Royal Opera – Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov – Bryn Terfel – directed by Richard Jones; conducted by Antonio Pappano
Richard Jones’s productions, in my mind, are – in part – synonymous with wallpaper. They tend to sport sets that include at least one memorable wall of patterned design forming...
Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel at David Geffen Hall – Mahler’s Third Symphony
This performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony will live in the memory as a truly great event. From the horns that usher in the drama of the sprawling first movement and...
Kensington Philharmonic Orchestra/Mark Fitz-Gerald – Der Freischütz Overture & Brahms 1 – Naomi Anderson plays Mozart, Matthew Kettle plays Bartók
A concert with two very different Concertos may seem to rather over-egg the pudding, but in this instance it worked particularly well, not least because they could hardly be more...
LSO/François-Xavier Roth – Ligeti’s Atmosphères & Berio’s Sinfonia and the premiere of Elizabeth Ogonek’s Sleep & Unremembrance
Stepping in for a indisposed colleague, I was sadly unable to attend the early-evening St Luke’s concert of music by Darren Bloom (premiere), Thomas Adès and Schoenberg, nor the following...
Kensington Symphony Orchestra/Michael Seal – Britten’s Gloriana & Shostakovich 10
A subtle and fascinating piece of programme-planning, this, combining the two masterpieces each of these contemporaneous composers gave to the world in 1953 – composers who met for the first...
Seong-Jin Cho plays Chopin at St John’s Smith Square
Born in Seoul in 1994 and a student of Michel Beroff at the Paris Conservatoire, Seong-Jin Cho won the seventeenth Warsaw International Chopin Piano Competition last year, to my mind...
Midori & Özgür Aydin at Wigmore Hall – Liszt, Elgar, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss
In over fifty years of concert-going I don’t think I have attended one with music by Elgar and Schoenberg sharing the limelight. The opportunity of hearing Elgar’s illusive lyricism in...
Bach Secular and Sacred – Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/John Butt – Sinfonia from Cantata 42, Lutheran Masses, Brandenburg Concerto No.2
Another thirtieth-anniversary concert for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, long celebrated for its catholic scope and surprising range. A programme of J. S. Bach – in Sacred and...
English Touring Opera at Hackney Empire – Donizetti’s Pia de’ Tolomei – Elena Xanthoudakis, Luciano Botelho, Grant Doyle; directed by James Conway; conducted by John Andrews
On BBC Radio 4’s Front Row last Friday (March 4), English Touring Opera’s general director James Conway revealed that, instead of the originally planned concert performances, the set for his...
Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra/Vasily Petrenko at Cadogan Hall – Grieg’s Lyric Suite & Shostakovich 5 – Henning Kraggerud plays Tchaikovsky
The Zurich International Orchestra Series at Cadogan Hall has brought us some excellent ensembles which would otherwise not now have a platform in London apart, possibly, the BBC Proms. However,...
Evgeny Kissin at Barbican Hall – Mozart K330, Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata, Brahms Intermezzos, Albéniz’s Suite española, Larregla’s Viva Navarra!
There has never been any doubt as to Evgeny Kissin’s transcendental technique: previous London recitals have instead questioned, to this reviewer’s mind at least, his ability to connect emotionally with...
LSO Composer Focus: Thomas Adès (1) – Polaris, Brahms, Tevot – Anne-Sophie Mutter plays Brahms’s Violin Concerto
Thomas Adès has been active as a conductor from the outset of his career, and his current brace of concerts with the LSO provides an overview of his major orchestral...
London Philharmonic Orchestra/Vladimir Jurowski – Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau/The Mermaid – Marc-André Hamelin plays Rachmaninov
Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau (based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story The Little Mermaid) last swam in London Philharmonic waters in January 2008 under Emmanuel Krivine. Vladimir Jurowski was now the conductor....
Figures Féminines: Insula Orchestra/Laurence Equilbey at Philharmonie de Paris – Beethoven – Eroica Symphony and Nicholas Angelich plays the Fourth Piano Concerto [live webcast]
Laurence Equilbey has for some years been an inspiring voice in the French choral and ‘period’-instrument movement, noted for her innovative programming, challenging music-making and charged temperament. Her platform manner,...
London Handel Festival 2016 – Ariodante – Katie Coventry, Sofia Larsson; directed by James Bonas; conducted by Laurence Cummings
Ariodante is one of a clutch of masterpieces Handel composed in the mid-1730s which deservedly retain a foothold on the stage. Laurence Cummings led a brisk interpretation of it to...
International Women’s Day: Emily Pailthorpe, BBCSO & BBC Singers – Helen Grime, Libby Larsen, Thea Musgrave, Sally Beamish, Alissa Firsova, Joanna Marsh, Roxanna Panufnik, Victoria Borisova-Ollas & Judith Weir; conducted by Jessica Cottis & Grace Rossiter
Reviewed from live BBC Radio 3 broadcast... This BBC Symphony Orchestra/BBC Singers studio concert, given to mark International Women's Day, opened with Helen Grime’s Virga, a weather phenomenon and a...
Philharmonia Orchestra/José Serebrier – First World War Commemoration Concert – Jennifer Pike A Lark Ascending, Sol Gabetta Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and the premiere of John Powell’s A Prussian Requiem
“An evening of music commemorates the First World War” claimed the pre-concert blurb, meaning that one had to take this programme as one found it, with two very familiar pieces...
Barnes Music Festival 2016 – Opening Concert – music by Howard Goodall, David Vaughan and Roxanna Panufnik
Barnes may seem like a typically quaint and sleepy English village, but this small Thames-side district of Richmond certainly packs a punch in terms of the number of important composers...
English Touring Opera at Hackney Empire – Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride – Catherine Carby, Grant Doyle; directed by James Conway; conducted by Martin André
Gluck is the composer of whom Handel remarked “my cook knows more counterpoint than Gluck does”, and the scores do indeed look very ‘vertical’, with simple harmonies to match. However,...
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