Philharmonia Orchestra, Goerne, Koh, Salonen, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
We began with the most beautiful moments in all of Ravel and ended with the ugliest. For the final concert, the climax, of the Philharmonia’s revelatory Lutoslawski retrospective Woven Words the fastidious Frenchman proved the perfect framing…
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Petrenko, Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool (Review)
With the news that Vasily Petrenko had extended his tenure as Chief Conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra “to eternity” (his words) the little bit of Russia that came to the soon to be refurbished Philharmonic…
Mitsuko Uchida, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
The magic usually descends quickly in a Mitsuko Uchida recital but the opening Bach of this rescheduled Festival Hall concert – a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Klavier – took a…
Philharmonia Orchestra, Gabetta, Ashkenazy, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
Death comes in many guises but in this ingeniously devised Philharmonia concert he most definitely did not have the last laugh. That was for Shostakovich and a curiously ticking time bomb of percussion which first surfaced in…
Philharmonia Orchestra, Zimerman, Salonen, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
Of all the heavyweight anniversaries being celebrated this year the name of Witold Lutoslawski will have been less at the forefront of peoples’ minds had the Philharmonia Orchestra and their Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor not chosen…
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Rattle, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
Period instruments demand absolute honesty from their players. Their sound is their personality – candid, quirky, eccentrically beautiful – but their soul is revealed in the spirit of the playing where beauty is not skin deep and…
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Elder, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
The natural logic of this heady mix of first and second Viennese utterances was turned on its head with Webern’s early tone poem Im Sommerwind opening like a breathy premonition of the autumnal second song of Mahler’s…
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Mattila, Hampson, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
A single bottom C sunk deeper than even the deepest underground trains running so audibly below the Royal Festival Hall was the auspicious start to the South Bank Centre’s much anticipated festival “The Rest is Noise”. Forget…
London Symphony Orchestra, Upshaw, Adams, Barbican Hall (Review)
You learn a lot about a composer from the pieces they revere – and for John Adams what might have seemed like an unlikely opening gambit to kick-start this short stack of three concerts with the London…
Wagner “Der fliegende Holländer”, Zurich Opera, Royal Festival Hall
Why anyone these days would want to perform Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer with an interval when even the three act version was so plainly fashioned to be performed without one is beyond me. There is that tell-tale…