Concert Reviews

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Mostly with Mahler the old problem is stood on its ahead. Performances, even those of the unfinished Tenth, have become so frequent than it can be difficult to recapture the...
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Palm Beach Opera began its 2026 season with a stellar production of La bohème, featuring an outstanding cast, director Peter Kazaras’s atmospheric staging, attractive sets and costumes, and excellent playing and choral singing under Vincenzo...
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The return of John Cranko’s outstanding 1965 ballet Onegin is cause enough for celebration among ballet-goers at Covent Garden who, with the exception of Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella over the festive...
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The concert began with Carl Nielsen’s Helios Overture, named for the charioteer of Greek myth who transports the sun across the sky each day. Nielsen described it as depicting “the sun...
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The New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players’ winter ‘mini season’   opened with a thoroughly charming performance of H.M.S. Pinafore, the fourth of the duo’s fourteen collaborations and their first breakthrough hit. This...
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The Philharmonic marked this Yuletide season with a screening of Chris Columbus’s 1990 comedy, Home Alone, accompanied by John Williams’s Oscar-nominated score telling the story of eight-year-old Kevin McCallister, who...
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English National Ballet takes up its annual Christmas residency at the London Coliseum with Aaron S. Watkin and Arielle Smith's production of Nutcracker which premiered last year to great acclaim....
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This thoughtfully planned, totally captivating recital opened with a dreamy rendition of the melancholic Taneyev Prelude, Daniil Trifonov then tearing headlong into the fiendish, frenetic Fugue. As he leaned low...
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One of the things Sir Antonio Pappano set out to do when he became Chief Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra was to explore the rich panoply of British music,...
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Glyndebourne is no stranger to Handel, nor to the Royal Albert Hall, with the company’s annual visit to the Proms. But this is the first time, I think, that its...
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Although nominally an opera seria like most of Handel’s other London operas of the 1720s and '30s, English National Opera's description of Partenope (1730) as a 'rom com' is closer to the mark. It has...
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Remember all those sepia-coloured photographs previous generations had stuffed away at the back of drawers or enclosed in finely-edged silver frames? Listening to much of the music which Elgar wrote...
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Marking the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is touring the composer’s piano music. Over the course of three hours with two intermissions this recital was ravishing. Bavouzet has...
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Sandwiched between a delightful revival of Frederick Ashton’s perfectly-conceived La Fille mal gardée and the Christmas sugar rush of The Nutcracker, a bizarrely formed triple bill from The Royal Ballet,...
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It’s surely not often we encounter Schumann and Stravinsky in the same concert. Strange bed fellows perhaps, but Sir Simon Rattle clearly believed in the pairing as the composers formed...
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It was with Mahler and the Philharmonia that the Royal Opera’s new music director first made a mark with London audiences. His Puccini may or may not be considered wholly...
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Two rare one-Act operas featuring stories of jealous, murderous lust, offer some fascinating juxtapositions – Der Wald (premiered 1902), Ethel Smyth’s second opera, but a late essay in Wagnerian Romanticism if more sensational...
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It's been quite a year for Mark-Anthony Turnage, with the widely acclaimed premiere of Festen at the Royal Opera House, and now the premiere of another opera, The Railway Children, his first work...
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Sofia Gubaidulina, Russian-born but resident in Germany for the last decades of her life, died in March of this year, so it is entirely fitting that a good many recent...
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When reviewing a debut concerto appearance by a young shooting-star there is always a complicating factor. These days technical proficiency can almost be taken for granted, given the rigorousness of...