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Photo: Clive Barda

Garsington Opera at Wormsley – Strauss’s Ariadne with Natalya Romaniw, Young Woo Kim, Jennifer France & Polly Leech; directed by Bruno Ravella; conducted by Mark Wigglesworth

Few musical dramatists were quite so alert to the complexities and subtleties of Mozart’s great Italian operas with Lorenzo da Ponte as Richard Strauss at the turn of the twentieth-century when that repertoire tended to be regarded as frivolous and trivial. Strauss and his distinguished librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, like their eighteenth-century forbears, sought to …

Garsington Opera at Wormsley – Strauss’s Ariadne with Natalya Romaniw, Young Woo Kim, Jennifer France & Polly Leech; directed by Bruno Ravella; conducted by Mark Wigglesworth Read More »

Philharmonia Orchestra/John Eliot Gardiner at The Anvil, with Alice Coote

One might ordinarily associate John Eliot Gardiner with the performance of Baroque music, but he has made several acclaimed recordings of Mendelssohn with the LSO and a disc of Elgar with the Vienna Philharmonic. Judging from this superb account of Dvořák’s rarely performed Fifth Symphony, one might be allowed to speculate if Gardiner will be …

Philharmonia Orchestra/John Eliot Gardiner at The Anvil, with Alice Coote Read More »

The Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by John Wilson (James Ehnes: violin) perform Walton: Violin Concerto and Elgar: Symphony No.1in the Southbank's Royal Festival Hall on Thursday 10 Feb. 2022 Photo by Mark Allan

Philharmonia Orchestra/John Wilson, with James Ehnes, at Royal Festival Hall

In recent years John Wilson has emerged as a significant force in British music life even if audiences like him best as the man who extended the concept of authentic performance to the great twentieth-century songwriters and their arrangers. A relatively puny crowd had assembled to sample the present, not conspicuously generous tranche of mainstream …

Philharmonia Orchestra/John Wilson, with James Ehnes, at Royal Festival Hall Read More »

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