thu 31/07/2025

Classical Reviews

Gabriel Prokofiev: Nonclassical Directions, LSO St Luke's

alexandra Coghlan Gabriel Prokofiev: Creativity, risk-taking and just a few teething problems

In a week in which the nation has debated the relevance of classical music, it was left to the LSO’s Eclectica concert series to have the final word. Incorporating world and electronic music alongside traditional chamber works and contemporary programmes, Eclectica’s concerts offer dressed-down, laid-back forays down the roads less travelled of the...

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BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff

stephen Walsh David Atherton: Excellent, undemonstrative

It’s a neat-sounding idea for a concert: a sequence of works composed in the year the previous composer died. Neat, but not necessarily revealing. This one started with Elgar’s Cockaigne, composed – symbolically, I assume – in 1900, and ended with Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony, completed in 1934, the year of Elgar’s death. In between came Britten’s Nocturne, written in VW’s last year, 1958. With a little more time, they might have added Birtwistle’s Melancolia...

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Reverberations: The Influence of Steve Reich, Barbican

peter Quinn

Sometimes you can leave a concert feeling slightly shortchanged: a perceived weakness in the programming; an unprepared, lacklustre conductor; a phoned-in performance. No danger of any of the above at the marathon session three of Reverberations, a weekend of concerts at LSO St Luke's and the Barbican devoted to the music and influence of the contemporary US composer Steve Reich.

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Seeing is Believing, Aurora Orchestra via Guardian Online Live Stream

David Nice Few stars for Nico Muhly's new electric-violin concerto

Its advertised centre of gravity, a concerto specially commissioned from affable whiz-kid Nico Muhly, turned out weightless, and not in a good way. Yet the programming of the Aurora Orchestra's latest adventure showed us why the Arts Council were right to fund this young and dynamic constellation. OK, so I'd have been happiest...

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Classical CDs Weekly: De Sabata, Scarlatti, Violin/Viola Duets

graham Rickson Marital harmony: Husband and wife Thomas Zehetmair and Ruth Killius play violin-and-viola duets

This week we’ve offbeat violin and viola duets played by a renowned husband-and-wife duo, Scarlatti keyboard sonatas played on piano, and a very Italian take on Shakespeare from one of the 20th century’s fieriest conductors.

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Brewer, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

David Nice Christine Brewer: Heroic model of a Strauss soprano, soars in the Four Last Songs

In a London Philharmonic season playing safer than before, principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski has earned the right to a few meat-and-two-veg programmes. Even in a concert containing more than a handful of your hundred best tunes, Wagnerian carrots and Straussian greens were presented pleasingly al dente, with a prelude to this crack team's longest ever impending Glyndebourne journey and the most secure of all living dramatic sopranos soaring assuredly. And Jurowski always serves...

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Welsh National Opera Orchestra, Koenigs, St David's Hall, Cardiff

stephen Walsh Lothar Koenigs: A master at pacing as well as spacing

Popping up on royal wedding day from the Niebelheim where they spend most of their working life, the WNO Orchestra brought with them a birth-and-death programme: hatch and dispatch, rather than match. Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was a thank-you present to Cosima for their baby son, born out of wedlock; Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony turned into an epitaph for Wagner when he died in 1883, though most of it was written while he was still alive but ailing.

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Classical CDs Weekly: Górecki, Haydn, Shostakovich, Second Viennese School

graham Rickson Second Viennese School quartets: 'Music which can curdle milk, so make sure the fridge door is closed'

It’s string-quartet Saturday – a young German group tackle Soviet classics and a rejuvenated Russian quartet smile with Haydn. There’s music from a contemporary Polish master and exquisitely uncomfortable fin-de-siècle music from Vienna.

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London Schools Symphony Orchestra, Segerstam, Barbican Hall

David Nice

With regional youth orchestras dropping from a thousand short-sighted, wholesale cuts - flagship Leicestershire the latest under threat - it should be enough just to celebrate 60 seasons of the LSSO, safe for now under the City of London's munificent wing. But last night was more than just another fun concert.

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Alexander Melnikov, Wigmore Hall

Ismene Brown

How important is it to hear “the composer’s intentions” at a concert? Maybe only the interpreter’s intentions are possible. The young Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov challenges the golden rule of faithfulness to source with the resources of today’s piano - not the ropey old Soviet thing Shostakovich would have had, or the limited piano Schubert would have known, and last night at the Wigmore Hall delivered an ear-opener of a recital all about modern pianism at its most fascinating and...

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