Concert Reviews

Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music – Opening Concert: Bach Mass in B minor/Herreweghe
To judge by the capacity crowd and buzzing atmosphere at St John's, this opening-night concert of the 2011 Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music was a hot ticket. The reason was...
Joanna MacGregor at City of London School
This recital inaugurated City of London School's new Steinway Model D piano. Earlier in the day Joanna MacGregor had given a masterclass, which was relaxed, informative and greatly appreciated by...
Orchestra of the Swan at Cadogan Hall [The Italian Girl in Algiers … Jupiter Symphony … John Lill plays Beethoven]
Orchestra of the Swan is based in Stratford-upon-Avon and has leanings to Birmingham. It nips around the English festivals, comes to London, and tours abroad. New music is a common...
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Zukerman – Beethoven
Do we really want to hear great instrumentalists conduct? The answer, in Pinchas Zukerman’s case, seemed initially to be "certainly not" given the frankly boring rendition of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture....
The Metropolitan Opera – Ariadne auf Naxos
With just a week remaining in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010-11 season, Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos is being given only three performances. The Met’s principal guest conductor, Fabio Luisi, known...
Mikhail Rudy at Wigmore Hall
Mikhail Rudy is now in his late-fifties and rarely appears in London. For this Wigmore Hall recital he started with Scriabin. The opening Study was rather stiff and loud. In...
Kensington Symphony Orchestra – Lutosławski & Mahler
It was a great idea to programme the Lutosławski (settings of the children's poems by Robert Desnos and their silly and surreal words) with Mahler's Fourth Symphony, which ends with...
Arditti Quartet at Queen Elizabeth Hall [Saariaho, Saxton & Birtwistle]
Long associated with the most radical music for the string quartet medium, the Arditti Quartet has never been merely about experimentation for its own sake and this programme demonstrated three...
de Havilland Philharmonic at Weston Auditorium – Elfyn Jones’s The Journey & Dvořák’s New World Symphony
It is a refreshing experience to encounter a contemporary full-length symphonic work that embraces rather than rejects traditional compositional techniques of Western music. Tonal, melodic and formally structured, Elfyn Jones’s...
Philharmonia Orchestra – Maazel: Mahler Cycle 2011 [6/10 … Symphony 3]
Lorin Maazel and the Philharmonia Orchestra continued their traversal of Mahler's symphonies with an outstanding account of what one might call his 'Pastoral' Symphony, the Third; such sustained concentration over...
ROH2 – Clemency
With the same sort of Christian provenance that generated “Parthenogenesis” (centred round an unnatural/miraculous birth), James MacMillan and his librettist Michael Symmons Roberts have turned to another miraculous delivery in...
New York Philharmonic/Gilbert [Eroica Symphony … Lisa Batiashvili plays Bartók]
Bartók’s Violin Concerto No.2 was long known as the (as in only) such work. After the composer’s death, the unpublished score of an earlier violin concerto was discovered, written for...
English National Opera – The Damnation of Faust
It is, quite probably, Berlioz’s fault. Designating your work a ‘dramatic legend’ and rendering it as a theatrical spectacle outside the confines of the opera house was always going to...
Carnegie Hall’s 120th-Anniversary Gala – New York Philharmonic/Gilbert [Emanuel Ax, Gil Shaham, Yo-Yo Ma & Audra McDonald]
This concert celebrating the 120th-anniversary of Carnegie Hall featured the New York Philharmonic, the successor of the Symphony Society of New York, which had performed at the Hall’s inaugural in...
Composer Portraits: Joan Tower [Curtis 20/21]
Born in New York in 1938, Joan Tower spent part of her youth in Bolivia, where she developed a love of native rhythms and percussion instruments. After receiving a doctorate...
LSO/Roth [Cuban Overture … Billy the Kid … Wayne Marshall plays Rhapsody in Blue … Tim Garland premiere]
Mixing musical styles can be difficult to pull off, but the London Symphony Orchestra showed how to do it with a programme of hybrids and an intriguing new work. Tim...
Philharmonia Orchestra – Maazel: Mahler Cycle 2011 [5/10 … Symphony 5 … Sarah Connolly & Matthias Goerne sing Des Knaben Wunderhorn]
Six songs from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn”, then the Fifth Symphony, in which the creative impulse of the young Mahler was itself becoming a tool of his more adult subconscious –...
The Royal Opera – Werther
Before this first-night performance there was a keen sense of anticipation in the house, presumably centred round the return of Rolando Villazón and Sophie Koch – both presenting the respective...
The Metropolitan Opera – Orfeo ed Euridice
“Orfeo ed Euridice” is a historically important work, Gluck’s reforms setting opera on the path along which it evolved through Mozart and Wagner. Gluck emphasised the importance of drama, replacing...
OAE/Goodman [Mozart & Schubert symphonies … Artur Pizarro plays Beethoven]
This concert by Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment was planned for Sir Charles Mackerras who passed away last July. The high esteem in which he was held was evident...
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