Reviews of live performance

Photo: Tristram Kenton
Having now been seen in various place around Europe, and receiving its third revival at English National Opera, Calixto Bieito's production of Carmen still conveys the opera's visceral, raw passions...
Photo: @KensingtonSO
The Kensington Symphony Orchestra is now in its sixty-seventh year. With its music director Russell Keable in the post for the past forty of them, this non-professional band has pulled...
Photo: anvilarts.org
As adventurous as Kirill Karabits is when planning repertoire for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, British music does not appear at the top of his to-do list. So far this season...
Photo: Geoffroy Schied
Two 'late' Piano Concertos by Mozart here but which are about as contrasting in mood and texture as any within the whole series. Mitsuko Uchida led the Mahler Chamber Orchestra...
Photo: Steve Sherman
In his first Carnegie Hall recital since 2015, Leif Ove Andsnes offered a thoughtful and sensitive program. The four pieces in the first half – centering on the themes of...
For this Schubert program, two seasoned chamber music artists – Wu Han and Paul Neubauer – teamed up with four recent alumni of the Society’s Program for extraordinary emerging artists.  Written...
Photo: Chris Lee
Yuja Wang has built a career on stunning displays of virtuosity. But tackling all five of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano-and-orchestra during one afternoon represented an audacious challenge over which, with...
Photo: London Philharmonic Orchestra
Elgar’s Second Symphony was the main event and not just because the LPO has given us both Symphonies within a week. At a time when our quest for national renewal...
Photo: London Philharmonic Orchestra
Edward Gardner’s ongoing Elgar Symphony cycle at the Royal Festival Hall was never intended to include the sketches for the Third Symphony as elaborated by Anthony Payne. We were promised...
Photo: Chris Lee
Wang Lu’s Surge, a commission by the League of American Orchestras to perform new works from six female composers, runs a mere six minutes, a mix of Chinese and Western-based...
Photo: newlondonoperagroup.org
New London Opera Group’s presentation of Vaughan Williams’s Hugh the Drover is a welcome and presumably late tribute to the composer in his 150th-anniversary year in 2022. He said that he wanted...
Photo: Chris Lee
Franz Welser-Möst conducted the two movements of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony in seamless alternation with three from Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, an attempt to show how the older Viennese master’s work...
Photo: ericlupianist.com
Eric Lu doesn’t give much away in his performance style, which is formal and a bit stern, from a serious young man who would not look out of place as...
Photo: seenandheard-international.com
If, in some sense, Schubert's three song-cycles can be taken as a trilogy (even if not intended as such when composed) then the first, Die schöne Müllerin (1823) represents youthful ardour and naivete...
Photo: Chris Lee
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Catamorphosis, is – in the composer’s words – inspired by “the fragile relationship we have to our planet” and its core “revolves around a distinct sense of urgency,...
Photo: www.lso.co.uk
Like many of Janáček's mature operas, Katya Kabanova is so rooted in the particularities of the time and place in which it is set – though such are the human interests at...
Photo: Steve Sherman
This concert opened with Ensō by Chinese-born Xi Wang. Composed this year on commission from the Philadelphia Orchestra, the fifteen-minute piece blends conceptual and musical elements from Chinese and Western...
Photo: Clive Barda
Although the events of Tosca occur in the middle of June, with the backdrop of Napoleon's victory at Marengo in 1800, and Jonathan Kent's production sets it with historical accuracy at that...
Photo: Chris Lee
For his New York Philharmonic debut, Klaus Mäkelä delivered a thoughtfully rendered program. Jimmy López Bellido’s sixteen-minute Peru Négro (2012) is based on traditional Afro-Peruvian music. It requires a large orchestra –...
Photo: English National Opera
What a strange and, serendipitously, oddly timed event this was. For one night only, a special performance from the currently beleaguered English National Opera of Britten’s Gloriana, a tribute to...
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