Concert Reviews

13790 1
When is a concert performance not a concert performance? When it’s at Grange Park Opera. Flippancy aside, there were many impressive aspects to this undirected version of Tristan and Isolde...
13789 1
Verdi’s Falstaff is one of the greatest ensemble pieces in the operatic canon, requiring ten well-integrated singers and a light-handed and -hearted conductor. The score is one of the most...
13788 1
Francesco Piemontesi’s ongoing series of Mozart’s piano music at Wigmore Hall included three Sonatas from a set of six written when the composer was in his late-teens, which Köchel consecutively...
13784 1
It’s hard to believe that this recital was Jonathan Plowright’s London Pianoforte Series debut at Wigmore Hall. From his substantial body of work for Hyperion and more recently his Brahms...
13781 1
What is a director to do with Il Trovatore? It is essentially an opera of tableaux with only momentary action, the story told in narrative, the characters reflecting on past...
13777 1
This final recital (sorry to miss the previous two), completing Julia Fischer and Igor Levit’s Wigmore Hall survey of Beethoven’s ten Violin Sonatas, performed in opus-number order, opened with the...
13775 1
The Pinchas Zukerman Summer Festival for this year ended with this programme of three undoubted masterpieces, opening (as before in this series) with a British work – the first of...
13772 1
Engelbert Humperdinck’s two immortal children have had to embrace any amount of indignity, analysis and dream therapy since they started to take opera-houses by storm in 1893. They must have...
13771 1
The Royal College of Music hosted the London Philharmonic Orchestra and its Young Composers initiative. The result was an enterprising concert of the new and the established. It proved very...
13770 1
Throughout Opera North’s ‘Ring’ cycle, Peter Mumford’s direction has sustained clarity and stature, and there has been an exceptional sense of development and momentum that has linked all the scenes...
13769 1
Having one’s cake and eating it is something to which virtually all the characters of The Marriage of Figaro aspire, with varying degrees of success, but is achieved more or...
13774 1
That this performance was headed “Jonathan Nott’s Farewell Concert” indicated much about an occasion as brought to an end the British conductor’s 16-year and highly successful tenure with an orchestra...
13780 1
The retirement from the stage of Sylvie Guillem left Sadler's Wells lacking a contemporary dance star whose shows could be exported (lucratively) around the world. The choice has been Natalia...
13768 1
No conflict has generated so many artistic responses than The Great War, and this commemorative concert, simply entitled “Somme”, was a tribute to the 19,000 British men who lost their...
13767 1
The mythic exchanges and monologues that shape Die Walküre usher in Siegfried’s more complex web of treachery and greed as the process of the waning of the gods gathers momentum....
13766 1
In a year that has already seen at least five new British operas premiered (The Devil Inside, Pleasure, 4.48 Psychosis, The Hogboon, In Parenthesis), another arrives hot-foot courtesy of Trinity...
13765 1
Andreas Scholl has been thrilling audiences with the purity of his tone for over two decades and for this Wigmore Hall recital he joined forces with Edin Karamazov. Their collaboration...
13763 1
A programme of Elgar, Tchaikovsky and Dvořàk may be thought a run-of-the-mill affair for the more sophisticated concert-goer – especially given London’s plethora of concerts – but there were undoubted...
13762 1
Krystian Zimerman sat at the pianoforte during Charles Ives’s Unanswered Question, which was very well realised: the mystical strings came from the distance of backstage, the probing (beautifully phrased) trumpet...
13761 1
It was inevitable – rightly so – that the centenary of the onset of the Battle of the Somme (by no means the most decisive event of the First World...