GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – July 2018
It’s fun trawling for online definitions of PERCUSSION. Most are light years behind the curve in evaluating or even just attempting to describe music’s at once most basic and highly sophisticated family of instruments. A phrase like…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – June 2018
With the arrival of this column came the reinstatement of an important strand of repertoire in Gramophone’s pages – Musical Theatre. As I have argued for some time – in these pages and elsewhere – Music Theatre…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Bernstein Mass – Philadephia Orchestra/Nézet-Séguin
The more live performances, the more live recordings, one experiences of this marvellous piece the more challenging it seems. No question that Bernstein’s inaugural recording – with an extraordinary cast that had been in intensive rehearsal for…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – May 2018
She adorns the front cover of this issue just as she has so many magazine covers in the 100 years since her birth – but eclipsing every personal memory of Birgit Nilsson on record and in the…
GRAMOPHONE Review: War Paint – Original Broadway Cast Recording/Frankel
The title, the concept, the casting would seem to have Broadway success written all over it. A musical about the bitter rivalry between two iconic cosmetic giants – Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden – who never met…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Shostakovich Symphony No. 7 – London Philharmonic Orchestra/Masur
The opening of this tremendous piece reveals so much about a performance. Before the invasion, before the siege of Leningrad, there is buoyancy and uplift and hopefulness in the confidant and forthright theme which begins and indeed…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – April 2018
The dramatic and somewhat predictably mixed reaction to Barrie Kosky’s staging of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera House recently (a show first seen in Frankfurt in 2016) once again raised questions as to how far opera…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Falsettos – 2016 Broadway Cast Recording/Finn
The two parts of William Finn and James Lapine’s brilliant urban opera Falsettos first came together in 1992 when the horrendous human cost of the AIDS epidemic was still incalculable. But March of the Falsettos (1981) and…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Mahler Symphony No. 1 – Düsseldorfer Symphoniker / Fischer
This is a terrific account of Mahler’s fledgling symphony – full of the rashness and impetuosity of youth and the wild imaginings that go hand in hand with it. Each time that eight-octave-deep “silence” of the opening…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – March 2018
Late last year I attended the UK Premiere of Anders Hillborg’s Violin Concerto No 2 performed by its spellbinding dedicatee – the extraordinary Lisa Batiashvili- and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo. I…
