Classical Reviews
Bartlett, LPO, Bihlmaier, RFH review - a clear path through the stormSunday, 28 January 2024
Tempest-tossed seas seem all too apt a theme for January, so it felt fitting that the LPO decided to begin Saturday evening with Wagner’s stirringly elemental overture to The Flying Dutchman. As the programme note fascinatingly reminded us, he composed the work shortly after a turbulent voyage from Riga to London with his wife and their Newfoundland dog Minna, an early and terrifying exposure to the sea that would provide rich creative fodder. Read more... |
Paraorchestra, Hazlewood, Southbank Centre review - re-thinking the orchestral experienceSaturday, 27 January 2024
The Clore Ballroom at the Southbank Centre is usually an open-plan space within the foyer, a little ambiguous in its extent and purpose. Last night, for the first time, I saw it enclosed and separated off, ambiently lit and full of smoke, for the Paraorchestra to evoke a 1970s New York loft happening, only with iPhones and the smoke coming from machines and not the audience’s wacky-baccy. Read more... |
Radulović, Hallé, de la Parra, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - fun for the youngThursday, 25 January 2024
Back on home ground, the Hallé begin 2024 in Manchester with a repeated programme. I heard the first of three performances this week. It includes one piece they played only 10 days ago on a tour in Spain with the orchestra’s new principal conductor designate, Kahchun Wong. Read more... |
Balanas Sisters, Anonimi Orchestra, The Bomb Factory, Marylebone review - talented Latvian conductor heads exciting new ensembleWednesday, 24 January 2024
In an evening filled with "firsts" one of the many striking aspects was the effect the Anonimi Orchestra debut had on people walking past on the Marylebone Road. As we sat in the warehouse space of the Bomb Factory – with its exposed brick walls and large display windows – from time-to-time passers-by could be seen transfixed, gazing in at the vivacious ensemble bringing light to the January gloom. Read more... |
Ablogin, SCO, Emelyanychev, City Halls, Glasgow review - a happy 50th birthdayTuesday, 23 January 2024
The mood was indeed celebratory at Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday evening for the second of two concerts celebrating the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th birthday. It opened with a suite from Figaro Gets a Divorce, a comic opera written by composer Eleanor Langer to a text from director and librettist David Pountney which was premiered by Welsh National Opera in 2016. Read more... |
Gerhaher, Huber, Wigmore Hall review - new colours from old favouritesMonday, 22 January 2024
After a frozen week, the sensual languor of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été promised warm respite at the Wigmore Hall – especially when delivered by house favourite Christian Gerhaher and his peerless pianist, Gerold Huber. Read more... |
Sakamoto's Kagami, Tin Drum, Roundhouse review - haunting virtual reality performance from late composerSaturday, 20 January 2024
This mixed reality concert is simultaneously a dimension juggling conundrum, a philosophical puzzle, and a fascinating insight into what the future might hold. Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto – whose influences included Bach, John Cage and David Bowie – died in March last year, but still lives on in this curiously moving virtual event in which his performance was captured by 48 cameras at 60 frames a second. Read more... |
Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall review - every note of Brahms’ late genius carefully weighedSaturday, 20 January 2024
Successful performances, conductor Robin Ticciati once suggested to me, are when “the head has a conversation with the heart”. The same goes, surely, for great music, though from personal experience one has to reach a certain age to find that true of Brahms. Last night Igor Levit seemed to favour the head, occasionally missing, for me, that very elusive something at the heart of Brahms’s late piano pieces. Read more... |
BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Martin, Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff review - a host of horns in the wild woodsMonday, 15 January 2024
There were a lot of horns on display in the BBC NOW’s latest concert in Cardiff’s Hoddinott Hall. Brahms’s Second Symphony has four of them, and so does the Elegy for Brahms that Parry wrote on hearing of Brahms’s death in 1897. Gavin Higgins’s Horn Concerto, whose world premiere formed the programme’s centrepiece, has no less than five. Read more... |
SCO, Ilias-Kadesha, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh review - Eastern promise sputters outMonday, 15 January 2024
Violinist Jonas Ilias-Kadesha was placed front and centre of the publicity for this concert. This is his first season concert with the SCO, though back in 2019 he stood in for an indisposed soloist at short notice for one of their European tours. Inviting him back is a vote of confidence, so I was looking forward to hearing him as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 and Ravel’s Tzigane. Read more... |
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