Concert Reviews

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Vasily Petrenko and the RPO in Hisaishi & Scriabin
A curious programme with which to bring down the curtain on a successful season. Vasily Petrenko began with one of his well-intended homilies, promising us an evening of extremes but...
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John Wilson at The Grange Festival 2026: Celebrating Sinatra
Audience members had come from far and wide, making a kind of pilgrimage to this unlikely, austerely magical venue set in the Hampshire countryside. In recent years John Wilson and...
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Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse in Paris – Alexandre Kantorow plays Beethoven, and Tarmo Peltokoski conducts Mahler
Asked to name any conductor outside the UK and the chances are you’ll head straight to Finland for an answer. Twenty-six-year-old Tarmo Peltokoski has been at the helm of the...
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Romsey Chamber Music Festival Finale
The elements were no less a presence in the final concert of this week-long festival and provided the thematic ‘glue’ to an otherwise seemingly unrelated sequence of music. Proceedings began...
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Romsey Chamber Music Festival 2
Jennifer Higdon’s six-minute Fiery Red forms the second part of her two movement Piano Trio (a 2003 commission) and continues her preoccupation as to whether colour can convey mood. Whatever...
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‘Fire and Ice’ – Romsey Chamber Music Festival
Once again, Laura Rickard curated this week-long festival of a dozen or so events, this year turning her attention to the elements: earth, air, fire and water. For the first...
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Glyndebourne Festival 2026 – Puccini’s Tosca – Caitlin Gotimer, Matteo Lippi & Vladislav Sulimsky; directed by Ted Huffman; conducted by Robin Ticciati
It’s been a year of firsts as far as Tosca is concerned: the Royal Opera House having begun the present season back in September with its first new production of...
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Gentleman Jack
Like a breath of bracing Yorkshire air, Northern Ballet’s brand-new Gentleman Jack swept into Sadler’s Wells, bringing a truly refreshing new narrative to the stage: the story of the ‘first...
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Vasily Petrenko and the RPO in Wagner and Taneyev
A very personal programme this, hardly one to attract crowds and very different in tone from the team’s multi-media take on Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie for the Southbank’s Multitudes festival. Both the RPO’s advance...
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Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Enyi Okpari with Martin James Bartlett at Lighthouse
Arnold Bax’s lavishly scored Tintagel was inspired by a holiday romance with pianist Harriet Cohen whilst visiting the north Cornish coast in 1917. Whether an evocation of Atlantic rollers, the castle-crowned cliff...
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Wozzeck: Wretches like us
London’s South Bank Centre is following up 2025’s series of multimedia events with a further sequence entitled ‘Multitudes’. While inclusivity and genre-bending can sometimes amount to little more than an...
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Don Quixote
Cuban ballet superstar-turned company director Carlos Acosta brings his second production of Marius Petipa and Ludwig Minkus’ Spanish romp Don Quixote to Sadler’s Wells. His first was for his former...
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Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie with animation – RPO/Petrenko with Stephen Osborne
As part of the Southbank Centre’s ‘Multitudes’ festival, pairing music with works in other art forms, this concert brought together Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-symphonie with a new film animation by 1927 Studios. One...
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Welsh National Opera – Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman – with Simon Bailey, Rachel Nicholls & James Creswell; directed by Jack Furness; conducted by Tomáš Hanus
In Jack Furness's new production of The Flying Dutchman for Welsh National Opera, Senta becomes the drama’s focus, even before she is born. Her mother's difficult labour pains are choreographed as the backdrop to the...
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Pyotr. I. Tchaikovsky / Sergei Prokofiev / Georges Bizet
Would one expect a stylish and idiomatic performance of a late Beethoven piano sonata from a pianist who had spent the best part of a year playing Ligeti? Or a...
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Voices from Finland
Advance publicity promised not only ‘Sibelius in the raw’ but also ‘one of modern Finland’s most original young voices’. One wonders whether Lotta Wennäkoski was flattered or put out by...
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Kurt Weill – Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
This statement opera, playing for 2 hours 40 minutes including a single intermission in its present incarnation, grew out of a more modest Mahagonny-Songspiel lasting little longer than tonight’s interval. The bigger stage...
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The Wooden Prince and more from the LPO and Edward Gardner
A short homily from the conductor, required to explain that the interval had moved from that advertised in the printed programme, served also to introduce the music of Vítězslava Kaprálová...
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Bohemian Rhapsodies from the LPO and Edward Gardner
A clever if geographically suspect marketing conceit unites two concerts in the LPO’s ongoing season. This was the first: four 20th-century pieces from central and eastern Europe which, to continue...
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Petrenko conducts the RPO at the RFH
The RPO is going from strength to strength these days and there was no mistaking the enthusiasm of players and audience despite the customary noises off: bronchial intrusions, mobile phone...