London Philharmonic/ Russian National Orchestras, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall **** (Review)
The heady symbolism of the London Philharmonic and Russian National orchestras sitting cheek by jowl for the climax of Vladimir Jurowski’s War and Peace series was a powerful one and if, on occasions, the melding of these…
London Philharmonic Orchestra & Choruses, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall **** (Review)
Working backwards from Rachmaninov’s Choral Symphony “The Bells” Vladimir Jurowski’s latest confection in the new London Philharmonic season was an extraordinary resourceful and cleverly juxtaposed sequence of tintinnabulations, real and imagined, actual and suggested, celebratory and mournful…
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall *** (Review)
Opera with and without words, with and without voices – the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s new season began with a typically provocative piece of Vladimir Jurowski programming: an intriguing juxtaposition of the ripest Strauss and Zemlinsky affording dissatisfaction…
The International Conductors’ Academy of the Allianz Cultural Foundation, Royal Festival Hall
A showcase for three young conductors, a malfunction at the printers, and for the first time in my experience no programmes for the audience and the prospect of blind-tasting their talents. Now there’s a thought – no…
London Philharmonic Orchestra & Choir, Nézet-Séguin, Royal Festival Hall
Bruckner’s unfinished final symphony – the 9th – poses many questions, none more perplexing than what might have been in terms of its absent finale. There are those who insist that the great Catholic symphonist had completely…
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall
As curator of the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s ongoing Prokofiev series Vladimir Jurowski has striven to highlight the paradoxes which serve to make him the most contradictory of composers. He’s fielding oddities, he’s bowling googlies – none more…
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Vedernikov, Royal Festival Hall
The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s intriguing new Prokofiev series is entitled “Man of the People?” and the enigma is all in the question mark. Beginning at the end with the last of his symphonies, the 7th, was far…
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Fleming, Eschenbach, Royal Festival Hall
With Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture raising the curtain, so to speak, Renée Fleming arrived like Venus in a soufflé of black and bronze layered chiffon. Or to be more in keeping with the Strauss Four Last Songs she…
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Nézet-Séguin, Royal Festival Hall
Two perfect works in perfect equilibrium; Mozart and Mahler well met indeed. But even as the violin and viola soloists separated from the opening tutti of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat in perfectly symmetrical octaves it was…
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall
The Austro-Hungarian connection loomed large but it was the Hungarian bloodline which bound this typically shrewd Vladimir Jurowski programme – and out of the Trannsylvanian twilight came Peter Eötvös like a latterday Bartok. Shadows owes much to…