GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – March 2022
Recent times have taught us to take nothing for granted – so dare I get too excited about the rescheduling of live events with the great Dame Janet Baker with whom I shall be bound to three…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Métamorphoses Nocturnes (Strauss/Respighi/Schoenberg) – Appassionato/Herzog
Something of a revelation, this disc, this programme (the Respighi was new to me) – and for the creator of Appassionato, Mathieu Herzog (late of the Ébene Quartet), something plainly close to his heart. Appassionato is a…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Mahler Symphony No. 6 – Düsseldorfer Symphoniker/Fischer
This final chapter of Adam Fischer’s distinctive, occasionally inspired, Mahler cycle draws to a close dare I say that it is nothing if not fatalistic that the traumatic Sixth should have coincided with the start of the…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – February 2022
I don’t think anyone would dispute that programme building is a real art. The structure, the proportions, the way chosen pieces impact upon each other. You can be creative but you can also be capricious. I’m thinking…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – January 2022
It’s 1992 and Sam Mendes’ celebrated staging of Sondheim and Weidman’s Assassins is in rehearsal at the Donmar Warehouse. In the green room Stephen Sondheim sits reading a copy of Gramophone during the lunch break (yes, really),…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Bartók Concerto for Orchestra/Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta – Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Mälkki
Susanna Mälkki’s thrilling sojourn in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was roundly welcomed by me in the June edition of Gramophone – and now on much more familiar ground she and the outstanding Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra work more conspicuous…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Britten The Turn of the Screw (DVD) – Soloists, OperaGlass Works, Sinfonia of London/Wilson
How inspired of OperaGlass Works’ founders Selina Cadell and Eliza Thompson to identify Wilton’s venerable Music Hall as the perfect environment in which to reimagine Britten’s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw. But the projected run of…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – December 2021
Sitting down last week to experience the music of Florence Price for the very first time reminded me yet again that there is nothing quite like the thrill of first-encounter – a moment by moment sense of…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Price Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3 – The Philadelphia Orchestra/Nézet-Séguin
This has been a fascinating experience. I chose to come to this music – exhumed as it is from nearly a century of neglect – as new music. That’s how I wanted to hear it for the…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Sounds of America – Jon Manasse, Park Avenue Chamber Orchestra/Bernard
I am not familiar with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony or indeed their conductor David Bernard but there are many issues here that make me wonder why they might have chosen such hotly contested repertoire for a…
