Reviews of live performance

Photo: Richard Termine.
Daniil Trifonov at Carnegie Hall
This riveting recital paired a charming collection of Tchaikovsky miniatures with some of the most daunting works in the piano repertoire, performed with exceptional artistry and breathtaking technique. Daniil Trifonov approached...
Photo: Southbankcentre.co.uk
London Philharmonic/Vladimir Jurowski – Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
Tis the season to be bronchial was amply demonstrated at the end of this account of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, its closing pages almost hijacked by audience members intent on coughing...
Photo: Richard Hubert Smith
Welsh National Opera – Janáček’s The Makropulos Affair – Ángeles Blancas Gulin, Nicky Spence, David Stout; directed by Olivia Fuchs; conducted by Tomáš Hanus
Welsh National Opera was instrumental in bringing The Makropulos Affair (completed 1925, premiered the following year) to attention in the UK when they gave one of its first outings here in 1978...
Photo: carnegiehall.org
Hélène Grimaud at Carnegie Hall
For the first half of this recital, Hélène Grimaud revisited music explored in her 2018 album, Memory – eleven atmospheric miniatures by Debussy, Satie and Chopin, all resembling one another...
Photo: Richard Hubert Smith
Welsh National Opera – Annabel Arden’s production of Puccini’s La bohème – Jung Soo Yun, Elin Pritchard, Germán Enrique Alcántara; conducted by Pietro Rizzo
The revival of Annabel Arden’s production of La bohème for Welsh National Opera this autumn season neatly coincides with Floris Visser’s new production for Glyndebourne this summer and also on tour in...
Photo: London Philharmonic
London Philharmonic/Robin Ticciati – Bruckner Nine (four movements) – Simon Keenlyside/Vaughan Williams’s Mystical Songs.
Hard on the heels of a programme celebrating the LPO’s 90th-anniversary with music it helped premiere, this one began with another offering for the Vaughan Williams 150th-birthday year. The Five Mystical...
Photo: London Philharmonic Orchestra
London Philharmonic/Edward Gardner – Vaughan Williams & Tippett
The theme of migration marketed as ‘A Place to Call Home’ has been a handle for the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s current concert series. Two gigs in one here, the first...
Photo: English National Opera
English National Opera – Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life – Danielle de Niese, Frederick Ballentine & Michael Mayes; directed by Aletta Collins; conducted by Nicole Paiement
Jake Heggie has recently been gaining more attention in the UK, having achieved success in his native America for the wide range of his compositions. Dead Man Walking was seen at the...
Photo: Chris Lee
New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall – Stéphane Denève conducts Connesson, Roussel & Ravel – Vikingur Ólafsson plays Ravel’s G-major Piano Concerto
A smartly designed, extravagantly colorful program of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French music thematically linked to myth and fantasy. ‘Céléphaïs’, the first movement of Guillaume Connesson’s Les Cités de Lovecraft,written in homage to...
Photo: 8 Principals, Robert Knights
New Sussex Opera – Offenbach’s Belle Lurette – Monica McGhee, Paul Featherston and Robin Bailey; directed by David Foster; conducted by Toby Purser
Belle Lurette was Offenbach’s final operetta, written concurrently with The Tales of Hoffmann, and remained incomplete at his death in 1880 but was finished by Delibes, so that it could be given...
Photo: Steve J. Sherman
Sondra Radvanovsky & Anthony Manoli at Carnegie Hall 
Abandoning the conventional recital format and often speaking directly to the audience, Sondra Radvanovsky shared a poignant and deeply personal journey in this recital entitled ‘From Loss to Love’. She began...
Photo: Marc Brenner
Royal Opera House – Handel’s Alcina – Lisette Oropesa, Emily D’Angelo & Mary Bevan; directed by Richard Jones; conducted by Christian Curnyn
Handel’s magic opera Alcina (1735) has long been recognised as, in the composer’s musical setting at least, a more complicated work than a mere condemnation of a sorceress’s wanton desires, who uses...
Photo: Camilla Greenwell
Royal Opera House – Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia – Anne Marie Stanley, Jolyon Loy & Anthony Reed; directed by Oliver Mears; conducted by Corinna Niemeyer
Such is the sensitive nature of the topic at the centre of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia (1945-6, revised 1947) that it is couched more as a worthy historical narrative, than an...
Berliner Philharmoniker at Carnegie Hall – Kirill Petrenko conducts Andrew Norman’s Unstuck & Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp, with Noah Bendix-Blagley playing Mozart Violin Concerto K207
This second program in the Berliner Philharmoniker three-concert series at Carnegie. Andrew Norman’s Unstuck is a lively and adventurous ten-minute piece inspired by a sentence from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five – “Billy Pilgrim has come...
Photo: Chris Lee
Berliner Philharmoniker/Kirill Petrenko at Carnegie Hall – Mahler’s Seventh Symphony
Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, the only piece on the Berliner Philharmoniker program for this, the first of its three concerts at Carnegie Hall, received a riveting performance. Sometimes referred to as...
Photo: ENO 2022
English National Opera – Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard – Anthony Gregory, Heather Lowe, John Molloy & Alexandra Oomens; directed by Jo Davies; conducted by Chris Hopkins
Regarded by G&S enthusiasts as one of the more ingenious and well-crafted Savoy operas, The Yeomen of the Guard has perhaps been shunned somewhat by others on account of its dark plot...
Photo: David Monteith-Hodge
Guildhall School of Music & Drama – Opera Triple Bill – Massenet, Smyth & Rota
A 1920s cinema (amusingly called here La Scala Picturehouse) serves effectively as the common setting in Rodula Gaitanou clever amalgamation of these three rare one-Act operas, which are otherwise unrelated...
Photo: rayfieldallied.com
Glyndebourne Tour 2022 – Puccini La bohème – Luis Gomes, Alexandra Grigoras, Adam Marsden; directed by Floris Visser; conducted by Rory Macdonald
As the country slides into a recession (forecast to be the longest since records began) coming on top of the ‘cost of living’ crisis, Floris Visser’s new production of La...
Glyndebourne Tour 2022 – Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro – Alexander Miminoshvili, Soraya Mafi, George Humphreys, Nardus Williams; directed by Michael Grandage; conducted by Stephanie Childress
Michael Grandage’s production of Mozart’s perennial opera locates it in Seville where Beaumarchais’s original dramatic scenario is meant to be set. The typical Moorish-inspired interiors of the Alcazar and other...
Photo: The London Opera Company
London Opera Company – Tristan und Isolde
Once in a while a performance of Tristan und Isolde comes your way that knocks you for six – for me, the Yannis Kokkos staging in Glasgow in the 1990s,...
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