Concert Reviews

Britten Centenary Concert at Wigmore Hall – Takács play the String Quartets
There are three numbered works forming the main body of Benjamin Britten’s contribution to the string quartet medium, and they were played here in chronological order by the Takács Quartet...
Once Upon a Mattress [Union Theatre]
When Once Upon a Mattress opened at the off-Broadway Phoenix Theatre in 1959 it established two things – that Mary Rodgers, daughter of composer Richard Rodgers, was a talented tunesmith...
Britten Centenary Concert at Wigmore Hall – Song-Cycles & Folksongs
Benjamin Britten’s febrile and fertile relationship with poetry was honoured in this marathon and luxuriously casted recital. The composer’s uncanny ability to illuminate words resulted in some of his most...
Philharmonia Orchestra/John Wilson – Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow
Packed with hummable tunes and an infectious effervescence, Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow is the product of a grim financial period in Austrian history, its initial popularity due to its...
Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along [Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre]
Stephen Sondheim’s musical version of the Kaufman & Hart play first appeared in New York in 1981. It was not a hit and it has been chasing success ever since....
Britten Centenary Concert at Wigmore Hall – The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, A Charm of Lullabies, Winter Words
Despite his commitment to the genre Benjamin Britten wrote few individual songs, preferring collections instead. Each of the concerts in the early stages of Wigmore Hall’s Britten 100 celebrations, of...
University of Bristol Symphony Orchestra/John Pickard – Hamish MacCunn, Havergal Brian & William Walton
Concerts by John Pickard and the University of Bristol Symphony Orchestra tend to feature more than the occasional unexpected piece to liven up the increasingly moribund concert repertoire, and here...
New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players – The Sorcerer
The New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players has amassed an impressive following in New York for its special genre. Albert Bergeret is the company’s founder, artistic director and general manager,...
Royal College of Music – Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea
Monteverdi’s shabby little shocker in high places is a sitting duck for radical rethinking, and to update it to the dark days of communist Russia does as well as any...
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Jiří Bělohlávek – Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony – Francesco Piemontesi plays Schumann
Time was when a Mahler symphony was a novelty and the longer ones tended to wholly occupy a concert. In many ways Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony is so complete – from...
London Philharmonic/Vladimir Jurowski – Ekklesiastische Aktion & Ein deutsches Requiem
Once upon a time concerts were all about sound, their aspiration to theatre extending no further than the residual pleasure of watching musicians ply their trade. The visual rot set...
English National Opera – The Mikado
Jonathan Miller's 1930s seaside-hotel setting of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado makes a familiar return to English National Opera. Just over 127 years since its record-breaking premiere of 672 performances,...
Britten Centenary Concert at Wigmore Hall – The Canticles
The Wigmore Hall’s celebration of Benjamin Britten’s centenary (which falls in November next year) continued with the five Canticles, the religion-biased works that range in scale, all of them closely...
Boy Meets Boy [Jermyn Street Theatre]
The delightful show is thirty-seven years old. It was successful off-Broadway in 1975 but never came to London. In 1986, when Stefan Bednarczyk found a recording of the show, he...
New York Philharmonic/Alan Gilbert – Stucky and Rachmaninov – Gil Shaham plays Barber
Alan Gilbert, prior to the New York Philharmonic’s performance of Steven Stucky’s Symphony, asked the composer about the relevance of using this title today. Stucky responded that it is the...
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Rory Macdonald – Tallis Fantasia, The Walk to the Paradise Garden, Sibelius 5 – Natasha Paremski & Mike Allen play Shostakovich
This programme was reminiscent of those played fifty years or more ago. Today we seem obsessed with concepts so the variety of musical styles at this invigorating concert came as...
LSO/John Eliot Gardiner – Walton 1 – Sunwook Kim plays Beethoven
Edward Nesbit’s Parallels and William Walton’s First Symphony both underwent extensive gestation periods. Walton’s work was initially performed as its first three movements by the LSO in December 1934 before...
London Philharmonic/Vladimir Jurowski – Fidelio, Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, A Survivor from Warsaw, Julius Fučik, Beethoven 5
Beethoven, Schoenberg, Nono – a stimulating coming-together; and – for Schoenberg and his disciples (including son-in-law Luigi Nono) – why shouldn’t all twelve notes of a scale be used and...
Secret Love: Karen Oberlin tribute to Doris Day at The Crazy Coqs
Karen Oberlin’s homage to Doris Day delivers a tribute which in some ways is unexpected. A fervid admirer of the singer and actress, Oberlin’s way with a song is just...
David Hill conducts Britten’s War Requiem with The Bach Choir and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
David Hill prefaced this performance of War Requiem with an eloquent and moving tribute to the late Sir Philip Ledger, then proceeded to conduct a heartfelt account of Britten’s choral...
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