Wagner “Tannhäuser”, Royal Opera House
To ravish the senses or feed the soul? That is the question. And although Wagner posed it knowing full well that its significance would resonate through the ages – and no more so than now – he…
Philharmonia Orchestra, Nelsons, Royal Festival Hall
The heroics came fast and fervently with Andris Nelsons and the Philharmonia Orchestra emerging from suffocating pianissimi to rip out the exultant fanfares of Beethoven’s Leonora No.3 Overture as if already limbering up to take on Strauss’…
Where do I begin?
It’s an in-joke that composer Howard Goodall could hardly pass by – quoting that song in his and Stephen Clark’s musical adaptation of the much-loved novel and film LOVE STORY. But it’s the moment he chooses that…
LSO, Alsop, Barbican Hall
It was extraordinary but not especially surprising how Gustav Mahler’s presence could loom so large in a concert containing not one single note of his music. His pointless “retouching” of the Beethoven symphonies and wholesale repression of…
LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall
Vladimir Jurowski must have had a sixth sense about this programme beginning as it did with Debussy’s Prelude Des Pas sur la neige (“Foosteps in the Snow”) and ending with the sound of sleigh bells ushering in…
Julia Fischer, Martin Helmchen, Queen Elizabeth Hall
With the truly great composers – and I count Schumann among them – there is that abiding sense of music being created in the playing of it. It is, in effect, like a stream of consciousness in…
Risor Festival of Chamber Music at Wigmore Hall
Each year, Risor – a small fishing town on the south-eastern coast of Norway – hosts an internationally renowned festival of chamber music. This week some of its key players decamped to Wigmore Hall and naturally they…
LPO/ Petrenko, Royal Festival Hall
What a journey we took here from the muted half-lights of Stravinsky’s Scherzo Fantastique to the tumultuous bell-laden prophecy at the close of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony. Vasily Petrenko was at the helm of the London Philharmonic taking…
Rainbow’s End
It’s a terrible old cliche that it takes a star to play a star – but in the case of Judy Garland there never has been and never will be a star big enough to fill her…
Raskatov “A Dog’s Heart”, English National Opera
The premise is simple: can Professor Filipp Filippovich take a starving mongrel from the street and with a simple transplant of a man’s testicles and pituitary gland make him human? And if he can, what then? It’s…