Concert Reviews

Prokofiev’s Fourth Symphonies – 1 December
Among the most directly appealing of his orchestral works, Prokofiev’s Fourth Symphony is also among his least played – its genesis a confusing and unsatisfactory one. Commissioned in 1929 to...
Philharmonia/Brüggen – 1 December
An enjoyable and thought-provoking concert, one that required last-minute arrangements to ensure it took place, Wolfgang Sawallisch having withdrawn through illness.Frans Brüggen has a different concept of Beethoven to Sawallisch,...
Chelsea Opera Lakmé
Perhaps it was partly because I find a number of dull patches in Lakmé and partly because a trapped nerve was causing sickening pain in my left arm that I...
LSO/Jansons – 28 November
There was much to admire in this (second) performance – the confident playing, Mariss Jansons’s non-histrionic view, the diligent preparation and the committed realisation. However, the four movements didn’t gel....
Philharmonia Orchestra/Bamert – 28 November
An evening of disappointments on three scores. Firstly, the absence of Wolfgang Sawallisch (born 1923), one of the major conductors of his generation, due to illness. Secondly, that the generally...
UK & EIRE COMPOSITION PLATFORM – 27 November
The UK and Eire Composition Platform is the imposing title for this annual competition featuring ’new’ music for violin and piano. 2002 saw a range of pieces rich in stylistic...
LSO/Jansons – 27 November
Expectations ran high for this concert (repeated tonight, 28 November), especially after Mariss Jansons’s pair of Barbican concerts with the LSO last November and his freshly-minted performances of Strauss and...
The Bach Choir – 26 November
All three works in this programme are memorials of different kinds and this concert was given to commemorate “special friends and relatives.”Although Arvo Pärt never knew Britten – he long...
South Bank International Piano Series – Daniel Barenboim (26 November)
In this age of pianist-turned-conductors, it is easy to see that some of them relish the flexibility of their new roles more than their old – whether from the paucity...
BBCSO/Berglund – 26 November
Spanning the BBCSO’s current season is a cycle of Prokofiev symphonies divided between concerts at the Barbican and studio performances at Maida Vale. Paavo Berglund conducted the Second Symphony (1925)...
Finnish Radio SO/Saraste – 25 November
This was a well-planned programme and the predominance of Sibelius was apt for a concert which marked Finnish Independence Day.This was also a concert in the “Classic International” series,featuring “the...
Philharmonia/Järvi – 24 November
The Georgian pianist, Elisabeth Leonskaja, who has been resident in Vienna for twenty-five years, is known for the solidity and straightforwardness of her performances.In an interview before a recent Musikverein...
Steve Mackey – 23 November
In an era obsessed with half-baked notions of fusion, Steve Mackey comes as a welcome tonic. Combining the immediacy of rock with a classical sensitivity to sound and a jazz-derived...
Angela Hewitt in Dorking – 23 November
In 1985, when Angela Hewitt came to prominence through winning a one-off commemorative Bach competition in Toronto, the piano as a Bach instrument was in need of champions against the...
Saariaho L’Amour de loin
Over the past two decades, Kaija Saariaho has fashioned a musical idiom of supreme aural finesse – with a range of expression not so much restricted in scope as rarefied...
Singers at Six – Finnish Landscapes
This forty-minute programme (recorded for Radio 3) was designed as a prelude to the Barbican Hall’s main event of the evening – Saariaho’s widely acclaimed opera, L’Amour de loin, and...
Ben Heppner and the Philharmonia – 20 November
The ’printed’ part of the programme ended with Le carnaval romain, a scintillating overture that received a scintillating performance from a British orchestra under an Italian, though not Roman, conductor.It...
John Adams and the LSO (20 November)
After the peculiar stage-antics the previous night with Les Arts Florissants’ “Les Jardin des Voix”, it was left to the London Symphony Orchestra to restore musical values to the uppermost...
Chloë at Wigmore Hall – 19 November
What do we expect from our musical prodigies today? Are they the performing seals of the industry, finding audiences drawn by a mixture of curiosity, admiration of precocity and the...
The Garden of Voices – 19 November
The Barbican is always completely sold out for the London visits of Les Arts Florissants; such is their reputation and William Christie’s. This programme of scenes from Baroque opera was...
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