sat 26/07/2025

Classical Reviews

Joyce DiDonato, Il Complesso Barocco, Barbican Hall

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

It may look like a sure-fire hit to let Kansas mezzo Joyce DiDonato rip through the drama-queen repertoire of the Baroque. But last night’s exploration of the dustiest, most overgrown byways of 17th and 18th century Italian opera needed every drop of DiDonato’s star musical talents – not to mention those of her backing band Il Complesso Barocco – to convince us of the worth of these rarities. The audience bought it. I remain on the fence.

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Total Immersion: Sounds from Japan, Barbican

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

“Improvisation? That?” whispered a Japanese lady to her friend at the end of the afternoon concert. She was making a good point. Half the performers in this programmed jam were glued to their scores. It was the low point of a mixed day at the Barbican Centre that began with a very enticing premise of offering to immerse us in the “Sounds from Japan”. We barely dipped our toe. The problem wasn’t simply the variability of the music; it was also the laziness of the curatorial thinking.

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Hardenberger, BBCPO, Storgårds, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

philip Radcliffe

I’ve seen some double acts in my time, such as the Oistrakhs and the Torteliers, but none quite like that of Storgårds and Hardenberger. Best friends, they took it in turns to conduct the BBC Philharmonic and to take over the soloist's spot. First one mounted the rostrum, while the other gave us a UK premiere as soloist. Then they switched roles, producing a second UK premiere.

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Classical CDs Weekly: John Cage, Schubert, Stravinsky

graham Rickson

 

John Cage 100 Various artists (Wergo)

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Rachlin, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Runnicles, Glasgow City Halls

David Nice

Viennese night in Glasgow’s Candleriggs was hardly going to be a simple matter of waltzes and polkas. True, its curtain-raiser was a Blue Danube with red blood in its veins rather than the anodyne river water of this year’s New Year concert from Austria’s capital; one would expect no less from Donald Runnicles after the refined but anaemic Franz Welser-Möst.

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Spassov, LSO, Järvi, Barbican Hall

alexandra Coghlan

The tabloids are getting shriller every day in their warnings about the army of Bulgarians and Romanians about to descend on British shores, so it’s probably lucky that none of their journalists was present last night at the Barbican to witness an Eastern European musical coup of deadly efficiency.

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Zimerman, Philharmonia, Salonen, Royal Festival Hall

Geoff Brown

The centenary bandwagon always passes some composers by: how many organisations in Britain will be celebrating George Lloyd or Tikhon Khrennikov? Other figures almost get steamrollered flat with attention; Britten, I’d say, is this year’s likely candidate. But who could throw any stones at the birthday cake and bunting created by the Philharmonia Orchestra for that mercurial Polish wizard Witold Lutoslawski?

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Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Rattle, Royal Festival Hall

Edward Seckerson

Period instruments demand absolute honesty from their players. Their sound is their personality - candid, quirky, eccentrically beautiful - but their soul is revealed in the spirit of the playing, where beauty is not skin deep and the expressiveness of phrasing in the strings is created in the bow arm and from a truthfulness of intonation that does not hide behind vibrato.

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St Matthew Passion, Academy of Ancient Music, Choir of King's College Cambridge, Kings Place

alexandra Coghlan

Kings Place’s Bach Unwrapped season invites audiences to come at the composer from new and unexpected angles. Bach gets arranged, adapted and re-orchestrated, and his legacy is showcased in works from three centuries. Occasionally however he also gets played straight – and it doesn’t get much straighter or more authentic than the Academy of Ancient Music and the Choir of King’s College Cambridge performing the St Matthew Passion.

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LSO, St Lawrence String Quartet, Adams, Barbican

alexandra Coghlan

And so John Adams’s residency with the London Symphony Orchestra reaches its finale – a brisk allegro of a concert with a cheeky coda in the form of the composer’s latest orchestral work, Absolute Jest.

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