fri 29/03/2024

Southbank Centre

Budapest Festival Orchestra, Iván Fischer, RFH review - elegy and ecstasy

Standing ovations on the less-than-passionate South Bank can have a dutiful, grudging quality. However, I’ve seldom heard more heartfelt ardour at the Royal Festival Hall than the acclaim for Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra last...

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Pavel Kolesnikov, Samson Tsoy, QEH review - piano magicians conduct themselves beautifully

Shortly before his death, Rachmaninov proposed recording the two-piano version of his swansong Symphonic Dances with Vladimir Horowitz. A curse on that RCA executive who turned the offer down. What amazes is how much pianistic magic can make up for...

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Bell, Dreisig, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - royal rifts, and uplifting Mahler

Brett Dean’s opera Hamlet will play at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in June: the next stage of an acclaimed progress that began at Glyndebourne in 2017. Now on the last stretch of his three-year stint as composer-in-residence with the London...

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National Youth Orchestra, Gourlay, RFH review - non-stop jamboree at the highest level

What a manifesto against those in power who seem determined to knock the UK off its hard-won classical music pedestal: hundreds of young choristers and instrumentalists of two fabulous orchestras in a week-long celebration of innovative programming...

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Fröst, Philharmonia, Lazarova, Kuusisto, Southbank Centre review - congenial new works complemented by live-wire classics

Anna Clyne’s engaging First Person here led me to two of her works in a Philharmonia rainbow. She curated a woodwind-based gem of a 6pm programme of works by four women composers, herself included, and her Clarinet Concerto could only gain from two...

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First Person: Anna Clyne on composing collaborations, not battles, in her latest concertos

Collaboration fuels a lot of my music – I love the interaction that takes me outside of my natural tendencies – it’s a source of inspiration and an opportunity to see my own music and creative process through a different lens.This past season I had...

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Mahler’s Third Symphony, Philharmonia, Paavo Järvi, RFH review - phosphorescent glow, depths only glimpsed

This longest, wackiest and most riskily diverse of Third Symphonies became Esa-Pekka Salonen’s personal property during his years as the Philharmonia's Principal Conductor. His successor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, has (in)famously said he’s not...

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Suzanne Vega, Royal Festival Hall review - the years melt away

It’s almost 40 years, but I still vividly remember the excitement of hearing Suzanne Vega for the first time. Singer-songwriters had always mattered to me, even though I grew up in the vacuous era of glamrock and insipid teen idols such as David and...

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LPO, Adès, RFH review - tempests and infernos

I was really looking forward to hearing music from Thomas Adès’s ballet The Dante Project again, after being so excited by it at the Royal Ballet last year. By contrast, I was seriously disappointed by his opera of The Tempest in 2003, and hoped to...

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Transatlantic Sessions, Southbank Centre - an evening of stellar music-making

It all ended in great style, the 20th edition of The Transatlantic Sessions which closed out its tour at London’s Southbank Centre on Saturday. The line-up of musicians is, of course, an embarras de richesse: a house band led by Aly Bain, master...

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The Damnation of Faust, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - the devil's in the detail

No work gives its listeners such pleasure on the way to hell (and back) as Berlioz’s rule-busting “dramatic legend”, The Damnation of Faust. It delivers not just flamboyant thrills, but low comedy, high drama, pathos, terror, nostalgia, pastoral...

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Philharmonia, Hrůša, RFH review - total brilliance in Bartók, Dvořák and Strauss

Salome was not to get her head on a silver platter: Jennifer Davis, due to sing the bloody final scene of Strauss’s opera, had been experiencing abdominal pains during her first pregnancy – mother and child are fine – and had to withdraw at a late...

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