Concert Reviews

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Tanglewood Music Festival 2025 – Andris Nelsons conducts Puccini’s Tosca
In this superb concert presentation, the cast moved about in front of the orchestra, successfully telling the story with wonderful singing (from memory) and acting. The three principals at the...
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Buxton International Festival – Mozart’s The Impresario – with Richard McCabe, Nazan Fikret & Jane Burnell; directed by Christopher Gillett; conducted by Jane Glover
If there was ever any basis for the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, it was on the occasion of an amicable competition set up by Joseph II in 1786 (not...
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Buxton International Festival – Thomas’s Hamlet – with Gregory Feldmann, Yewon Han & Allison Cook; directed by Jack Furness; conducted by Adrian Kelly
‘No one but a barbarian or a Frenchman would have dared to make such a lamentable burlesque of so tragic a theme’ was one English critic’s verdict on Ambroise Thomas’s...
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Seong-Jin Cho at Tanglewood – The complete solo piano music of Maurice Ravel
This recital was a major event in Tanglewood’s celebration of the 150th-anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth, Seong-Jin Cho playing Ravel’s works for solo piano in the chronological order of their...
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Sir Bryn Terfel in Recital at Tanglewood 
Sir Bryn Terfel’s focus in the first half of this delightful recital was on the national identity and culture of his native Wales. With Bradley Moore at the piano, Terfel...
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Buxton International Festival – Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti and Poulenc’s La voix humaine – with Charles Rice, Hanna Hipp & Allison Cook; directed by Daisy Evans; conducted by Iwan Davies
Although these two works were written only seven years apart, Bernstein and Poulenc are probably not composers often thought of together. And yet the juxtaposition of these short pieces for...
7.12.25 Andris Nelsons conducts Ravels Piano Concerto in G with Seong Jin Cho Hlilary Scott 3 scaled
A Tanglewood Diary 2025 – Seong-Jin Cho plays both Ravel Piano Concertos and Andris Nelsons conducts orchestral works by Debussy
This BSO concert in the Shed featured four upbeat works, two by Debussy bookending Ravel’s two piano concertos, offered as part of the ‘Maurice Ravel at 150’ celebration. To begin,...
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A Tanglewood Diary 2025 – Romeo and Juliet – The BSO combines Prokofiev’s music and Shakespeare’s play
On Wednesday afternoon, as a prelude to this evening’s concert, Tina Packer, the founding artistic director of Lenox-based Shakespeare & Company, moderated a discussion with the creative team of this...
7.12.25 Andris Nelsons conducts Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun Hilary Scott scaled
A Tanglewood Diary 2025 – Prelude Concert – Ravel and Fauré
This early evening concert was the first of many on this summer’s Tanglewood schedule to include music of Maurice Ravel in commemoration of the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of his birth. Mezzo-soprano...
7.9.25 Full audience at Stephanie Blythes masterclass coaching Carmen Edano Hilary Scott scaled
A Tanglewood Diary 2025 – Open Workshop with Mezzo-Soprano Stephanie Blythe
In an afternoon masterclass in Studio E, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe worked with four Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellows, part of the interplay between Fellows and faculty that is a central...
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A Tanglewood Diary 2025 – The Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra – Smetana and Brahms
In this concert in the Koussevitzky Shed, the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, comprised of Instrumental Fellows, performed works by Bedrich Smetana and, Johannes Brahms. Conducting Fellows Leonard Weiss and Yiran...
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A Tanglewood Diary 2025 – Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Concert
Sunday evening’s concert in Studio E spotlighted six Vocal Fellows, the first four of whom were ably accompanied on piano by an Instrumental Fellow. Closing the program, three Fellows –...
7.6.25 Andris Nelsons conducts Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 with Yefim Bronfman Hilary Scott 1 scaled
A Tanglewood Diary 2025 – BSO Matinee Concert with Yefim Bronfman – All-Beethoven
6th July Today was a doubleheader for me. The BSO’s all-Beethoven matinee concert in the Koussevitzky Music Shed was followed in the evening by a concert of vocal music in...
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Longborough Festival 2025 – Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande – with Karim Sulayman, Kateryna Kasper & Brett Polegato; directed by Jenny Ogilvie; conducted by Anthony Negus
Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande is famously and beautifully a sparse opera, adapting the Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck whose drama is structured not so much as a continuous narrative as...
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The Grange Festival 2025 – Rameau’s Les Indes galantes – with Laurène Paternò, Ana Quintans, Alasdair Kent & Andreas Wolf; directed by Bintou Dembélé; conducted by Leonardo García-Alarcón
Despite containing what is probably Rameau's best known single piece of music (the keyboard piece Les Sauvages, arranged as the vocal ensemble ‘Forêts paisibles’) this is claimed to be the...
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Royal Opera House – Handel’s Semele – with Pretty Yende, Ben Bliss & Alice Coote; directed by Oliver Mears; conducted by Christian Curnyn
For Handel’s Semele (1744) Oliver Mears and designer Annemarie Woods draw inspiration from the films of Luis Buñuel for their surreal horror. Cross that with The Marriage of Figaro and...
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Quadrophenia – A Mod Ballet
To say that expectations were running high for this new dance version of the extraordinary 1979 film Quadrophenia would be to understate the atmosphere in the audience before the beginning...
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Grange Park Festival 2025 – Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra – with Simon Keenlyside, James Creswell & Elin Pritchard; directed by David Pountney; conducted by Gianluca Marciano
With an assured economy of means, David Pountney's production of Simon Boccanegra (in its standard 1881 revision) grippingly evokes the time and place of the mediaeval republic of Genoa in which...
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Grange Park Festival 2025 – Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa – with David Stout, Luciano Batinic & Sara Fulgoni; directed by David Pountney; conducted by Mark Shanahan
Ivan Mazeppa (or Mazepa) was hetman (regional governor) of Ukraine towards the end of the 17th century, initially enjoying the support of Peter the Great, before throwing in his lot...
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Opera Holland Park 2025 – Lehár’s The Merry Widow – with Paula Sides, Alex Otterburn, Henry Waddington & Rhian Lois; directed by John Savournin; conducted by Anna Castro Grinstein
John Savournin’s production of Lehár’s The Merry Widow (1905) – a score particularly known and loved for its evocation of bittersweet nostalgia and sentiment – moves the action to the...