Concert Reviews

Ryoichi Hirano and Laura Morera in Anastasia Act III, The Royal Ballet ©2023 Alice Pennefather
Thorvaldsdottir, Bernstein & Martinů @ The Royal Ballet
A final mixed bill from The Royal Ballet to close their dull 2022/23 season which does little to raise the spirits; not only does the company seem allergic to the...
Photo: Thomas Smith @drtels
Sullivan – The Grand Duke – A comic opera in two acts to a libretto by William Schwenck Gilbert
It’s a brave company that takes on a piece with a reputation as the ‘flop’ of a loved creative partnership with a full staging, albeit with reduced orchestration. The final...
Nicholas Lester (Guglielmo); Kitty Whately (Dorabella); Samantha Clarke (Fiordiligi); Alessandro Fisher (Ferrando) - Così fan tutte – The Grange Festival - Photo © Craig Fuller
The Grange Festival 2023 – Mozart’s Così fan tutte – Samantha Clarke, Kitty Whately, Alessandro Fisher & Nicholas Lester; directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans; conducted by Kirill Karabits
Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production opens this year’s Grange Festival, and encompasses both the traditional and the new, in its alert, pertinent engagement with Mozart’s opera. It is set at exactly the...
Photo: oae.co.uk
Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida – Sophie Bevan, Benjamin Hulett, Simon Butteriss & Catherine Wyn-Rogers; OAE conducted by John Wilson
Gilbert & Sullivan fans generally regard Princess Ida (1884) as one of the duo’s finest achievements, a sequence within its inspired score in particular earning it the plaudit ‘a string of pearls’...
Photo: lfo.org.uk
Anthony Negus conducts Longborough Festival’s staging of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, directed by Amy Lane
The point is often made that the only props needed to stage Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle are a spear, a sword, a Tarnhelm and the Ring. To that list Amy Lane has added...
Joe Chalmers – Savitri © Guildhall School David Monteith-Hodge (Photographise) June 2023
Guildhall School of Music & Drama – Opera Double Bill – Gustav Holst’s Sāvitri & Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert
Two chamber operas, both concerning encounters with death and set within a forest with all the symbolism that that entails, but with rather different conclusions, though a moral may be...
Photo: BBC/Mark Allan
Dennis & Gnasher Unleashed – BBC Concert Orchestra
The Beano is 85-years old on 30 July, and since November 2017 its immortal creations, Dennis and Gnasher have starred in their own animation on CBBC Dennis & Gnasher: Unleashed....
New York Philharmonic – Jaap van Zweden conducts Julia Wolfe’s unEarth, and Frank Huang plays Sibelius’s Violin Concerto
Wu Tsai Theater, David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City Julia Wolfe’s unEarth was the featured work in the New York Philharmonic’s on-going series exploring climate change and exploiting...
Photo: Charlie Raven
Bowie Experience – all the hits from A to Ziggy
It is hard to place this ensemble piece – tribute act or authentic mimicry it is neither, but more an homage to one of the great musicians who, for over...
Photo: Camilla Greenwell
The Royal Opera – Verdi’s Il trovatore – Riccardo Massi, Marina Rebeka, Ludovic Tézier & Jamie Barton; directed by Adele Thomas; conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano
The Royal Opera House has jettisoned Barrie Kosky’s cabaret-style Carmen in favour of a new production next season. But its basic conception of a staircase with the ensemble slinking over it incessantly...
Photo: Chris Lee
Renée Fleming & Evgeny Kissin at Carnegie Hall
In this exquisite recital Renée Fleming and Evgeny Kissin came together in a carefully curated program showcasing Romantic song along with a selection of piano solos. The soprano was wonderfully...
Photo: carnegiehall.org
Joshua Bell & Daniil Trifonov at Carnegie Hall
Originally scheduled for February 28, but postponed when Joshua Bell tested positive for Covid, Bell’s showier performance style contrasted intriguingly with Daniil Trifonov’s more understated manner.   In Beethoven’s first of...
Photo: Craig Fuller
Opera Holland Park 2023 – Verdi’s Rigoletto – Stephen Gadd, Alison Langer & Alessandro Scotto di Luzio; directed by Cecilia Stinton; conducted by Lee Reynolds
Although Boris Johnson has now been out of Downing Street for nearly a year, his misdeeds in office again pose (with depressing, unsurprising predictability) a problematic legacy for the Government...
Photo: theater-bonn.de
Theater Bonn – Schreker’s Der singende Teufel – Mirko Roschkowski, Anne-Fleur Werner & Tobias Schabel; directed by Julia Burbach; conducted by Dirk Kaftan
The Austrian composer Franz Schreker worked for much of his professional career in the shadow of Richard Strauss, and in a similarly late-Romantic vein in his compositions, especially his operas....
Photo: Chris Lee
New York Philharmonic – Marin Alsop conducts Barber and Prokofiev – Joseph Alessi plays Chick Corea’s Trombone Concerto
Chick Corea’s final work received its first US performance. Joseph Alessi, who delivered its world premiere with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in August 2021, and at whose instigation Corea’s...
Photo: lamonnaiedemunt.be
La Monnaie – Saint-Saëns’s Henry VIII – Lionel Lhote, Marie-Adeline Henry, Nora Gubisch & Ed Lyon; directed by Olivier Py; conducted by Alain Altinoglu
As La Monnaie knows, the Tudors incite interest in any dramatic retelling about them, having just mounted a conflation of three Donizetti operas concerning that dynasty. It is curious, then,...
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
Glyndebourne Festival 2023 – Mozart’s Don Giovanni – Andrey Zhilikhovsky, Mikhail Timoshenko, Venera Gimadieva & Ruzan Mantashyan; directed by Mariame Clément; conducted by Evan Rogister
Mariame Clément’s new production of Don Giovanni for Glyndebourne feels like something we have seen before, with its edifice of doors on two tiers and stairs spiralling down in what seems to...
KSO at Cadogan Hall © Sim Canetty-Clarke
Kensington Symphony Orchestra – Russell Keable conducts Mahler Three
Earlier this year Russell Keable conducted the KSO, cast and chorus in a searing performance of Peter Grimes, and now an equally convincing account of Mahler’s great chain-of-being Symphony No.3. You...
Photo: Erika Hebbert
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Anvil
The OAE has long been aiming to educate audiences. Attempts to enlighten us on this occasion were both instructive and haphazard. Notes and spoken introductions were partially informative but failed...
Photo: Tristram Kenton
Royal Opera House – Berg’s Wozzeck – with Christian Gerhaher, Anja Kempe & Peter Hoare; directed by Deborah Warner; conducted by Sir Antonio Pappano
Following her acclaimed production of Peter Grimes for the Royal Opera House, as well as two other Britten operas before that with similarly troubled protagonists, Deborah Warner now turns her attention to Wozzeck,...
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