Concert Reviews

Joby Talbot – Path of Miracles
From its opening eerie rising glissando (a Taiwanese singing effect called pasiputput) for the gentlemen of Nigel Short’s Tenebrae, to the final distribution of the pilgrims having reached Finisterre, west...
The Lindsays – Beethoven 6
The end of this concert signalled the end of an era, that of an ensemble willing to accord Beethoven – and particularly the ‘late’ string quartets – the awe, passion...
The Lindsays – Beethoven 5
In the penultimate concert of its valedictory Beethoven cycle, The Lindsays gave typically committed and searching accounts of examples from the composer’s ‘early’, ‘middle’ and ‘late’ periods. This is music...
Verdi Requiem
Verdi’s Requiem was written under intense emotions provoked by the deaths of Rossini (in 1868) and Manzoni (1873), Italy’s greatest novelist at that time. Since then it has received many...
Park Lane Group
The enterprising Park Lane Group ended its 49th season and heralded the new one. As befits a significant anniversary, Director John Woolf unveiled some innovative plans. The closing “Monday Platform”...
Westminster Philharmonic Russian Night
St John's Church in Waterloo was commissioned in 1818. It is built in the Greek Revival style, with a portico, six Doric-style columns and a tower/spire later but reminiscent of...
Shadowtime
"What is worse, the physical elimination of a revolutionary, or the burial of his ideas under a mountain of bullshit?" So ran a sentence from a communiqué issued by the...
Mostly Mozart
Major-key Mozart, an idyllic summer evening, a full house, and a well-loved combination of conductor and orchestra. It would be idle to pretend, however, that the terrorism of two days...
The Royal Opera – Die Walküre
Wagner's ‘Ring’ cycle has probably attracted more philosophical comment than any other piece of music. There have been numerous interpretations of its meaning ranging from Marxism versus capitalism to a...
Steve Reich
Placed, somewhat arbitrarily, at the end of the Almeida Opera season this year were two concerts of early works by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, a collaboration with Tate Modern’s...
Mostly Mozart – Haydn’s Creation
Following the horrible happenings in London on Thursday, 7th July, the Barbican management decided to make this, the opening concert of the “Mostly Mozart” series, a free event.Whilst not a...
LSO Vengerov Rostropovich / Podgaits Premiere
Maxim Vengerov and Mstislav Rostropovich have been an effective partnership in their recordings of Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Britten for Teldec and EMI. However, Beethoven’s concerto is some stylistic distance from...
Aldo Ciccolini
I came to this recital with some trepidation. Romantic and Impressionist pieces too often degenerate into a bombastic succession of meaningless notes. Few pianists realise that the most musical performances...
Hallé Bruckner 7
Taking the description literally that Bruckner's symphonies are“cathedrals in sound”, the City of London Festival made a bold move by programming Bruckner's Seventh Symphony in the cavernous surroundings (now looking...
Don Byron Quartet/Dave Holland Big Band
Don Byron strode onto the Barbican stage and, wasting no time on pleasantries, ripped straight into Charlie Parker’s fearsome “Donna Lee”; with a whisper of ride cymbal, his quartet swung...
Independence Day Concert
Wind-band concerts can become bland unless you are an aficionado or a member of the band itself. Perhaps this is something to do with the lack of variety and colour...
The Soldier’s Tale
In an 11-venue tour emulating Stravinsky and his collaborator’s original plan to compose a work that could easily be toured, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields have teamed...
The Lindsays – Beethoven 3 & 4
The Wigmore Hall is fortunate that the majority of its audiences comprise seasoned concert-goers that are aware of what is an acceptable standard of behaviour. Nevertheless during the second of...
Egberto Gismonti / Anouar Brahem
The Brazilian composer and multi-instrumentalist Egberto Gismonti would be more famous if he were easier to pigeon-hole. Despite his early studies with Nadia Boulanger and Jean Barraqué, his music is...
Robert Hugill Premieres
I had more than a few doubts about this concert prior to the event. With at least four strands weaving through it – early English a cappella music, contemporary works...
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