Concert Reviews

The Royal Opera – Puccini’s Tosca [Oksana Dyka, Roberto Alagna, Marco Vratogna; conducted by Oleg Caetani]
The more I see Jonathan Kent’s eight-year-old staging of Tosca (this is its sixth revival), the more it seems to merge into the Zeffirelli production, which, incubus-like, possessed the Royal...
Ariel String Quartet at 92nd Street Y at SubCulture – Haydn & Berg and Beethoven’s Opus 130 with Grosse Fuge
In the first of Joseph Haydn’s six String Quartets collected under Opus 76, the Ariel members exaggerated the music’s drama, as if they were playing Brahms. Surprisingly, this worked, and...
London Conchord Ensemble at Wigmore Hall – Mozart, Prokofiev and Schoenberg/Webern
The London Conchord Ensemble began this BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert at Wigmore Hall with one of Mozart’s sunniest works. The Oboe Quartet, dating from 1781, is thought to have...
Kensington Symphony Orchestra/Russell Keable at Milton Court – Berlioz, Tippett and Brahms
The original programme of Rachmaninov, Debussy and Lutosławski (his Third Symphony) having subsequently been considered too much for the compact design of the Milton Court Concert Hall – and postponed...
Noël Coward’s Ace of Clubs [Union Theatre, London]
The Union Theatre is one of London’s most distinguished fringe venues, particularly noted for its courageous staging of obscure musicals, so it is sad when one of its ventures fails...
The MET Orchestra/James Levine with Lynn Harrell at Carnegie Hall – Dvořák program
On the afternoon following the final performances of the Metropolitan Opera season, James Levine led the MET Orchestra in its third and final visit of the season to Carnegie Hall....
OAE with Matthew Truscott and Juliet Stevenson
The OAE is a flexible body so far as size is concerned. For this concert, what might be described as the orchestra’s nucleus, consisting of 15 players, took part. The...
Closer Than Ever [Jermyn Street Theatre]
Closer Than Ever is a collection of songs by David Shire and Richard Maltby that reflect various aspects of life and behaviour. It started as a portfolio by Maltby (with...
Paul Badura-Skoda at St John’s Smith Square – Chopin & Schubert
Paul Badura-Skoda (who is a young-looking 86 years of age) recorded the complete Beethoven and Schubert Piano Sonatas on period instruments at a time when this was quite rightly considered...
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo – Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice & Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra – Gil Shaham plays Bright Sheng’s Let Fly
Shorter orchestral works, ideal concert starters, have sadly fallen off the radar in recent times, even a masterpiece like Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897) – owing to Goethe and...
New York Philharmonic/Bernard Haitink – Webern’s Im Sommerwind and Beethoven’s Eroica – Leonidas Kavakos plays Berg
In one of his rare appearances as a guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Bernard Haitink demonstrated from the very beginning that even in this problematic hall he can...
The Power of Love – Apollo’s Fire/Jeanette Sorrell with Sandrine Piau – Vivaldi, Rameau and Handel
The ever-growing reputation of Apollo’s Fire – an ensemble based in Cleveland, Ohio – ensured a substantial and very appreciative audience for its concert at St John’s. Sandwiched between appearances...
LSO/Mark Elder with Anne Schwanewilms, Sarah Connolly & Lucy Crowe – Mozart’s Prague Symphony & Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier
This was the second of two Richard Strauss 150-anniversary concerts in which Mark Elder and the London Symphony Orchestra paired his music with that of his musical idol, Mozart. Like...
Philharmonia Orchestra/David Afkham with Carolin Widmann – Lindberg, Berg and Schubert’s Great C major
It probably seemed a good idea to preface a performance of Berg’s Violin Concerto with Magnus Lindberg’s Chorale, the composer basing his short work on ‘Es ist genug’ from J....
Olivier Dubois Company at Sadler’s Wells – Tragédie
Tragédie is a brute of a piece, a big, uncompromising work from the French choreographer du moment, Olivier Dubois. To get the least important aspect out of the way first,...
Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra/Yuri Simonov at Cadogan Hall – Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini & Fourth Symphony – Guy Johnston plays Shostakovich
It’s always instructive to hear orchestras play their native music: performance styles vary between countries, and pieces often sound very different accordingly. So it was with the Tchaikovsky mainstays offered...
Howard Hanson’s Merry Mount – Rochester Philharmonic/Michael Christie at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall’s “Spring For Music” series continued auspiciously with a splendid performance of an American opera too long relegated to the dustbin of music history: Merry Mount by Howard Hanson....
Il Giardino Armonico/Giovanni Antonini at Barbican Hall – Julia Lezhneva sings Handel
Julia Lezhneva is very much a rising-star, recently signed as an exclusive artist to Decca. Here she joined the period-instrument ensemble Il Giardino Armonico (founded in 1985) and its director...
So This, Then, Is Life – Simon Green & David Shrubsole at The Crazy Coqs
The Crazy Coqs has occasionally played host to offbeat acts, but none has surely been as courageously different and innovative as the programme Simon Green presents with his cabaret partner,...
OAE/Simon Rattle – Haydn’s The Creation
I’ve often thought that The Creation might be a strong candidate for being staged – along the lines, say, of Messiah or the Bach Passions. Imagine the fun a bold...
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