thu 24/07/2025

Classical Reviews

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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Rites: 3D, CBSO, Volkov, Royal Festival Hall

Ismene Brown Mach 2: The virtual Julia Mach, generated in a 3D computer digital space to Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'

Were the great Diaghilev alive today, surely he’d be working in the imaginative possibilities of electronic technology - this was the opinion given me by the arts panjandrum, the late Sir John Drummond. And given the developments of 3D, who knows? Would it be this manipulation of our perceptions that fascinated him? 3D is certainly everywhere in dance now, though the challenge is to leap the judgment of it as merely a gimmick. I reckon while Wim Wenders’ film Pina 3D achieved...

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Classical CDs Weekly: Haydn, Gershwin, Ciccolini, Sheherazade

graham Rickson Riccardo Chailly's 'Gershwin': Fun music that can take a bit of stretching

Today we’ve Easter-themed music from Haydn and a rare chance to hear some delectable Grieg played by an old master. A kitsch Russian classic is given a new slant, and two Italians have serious fun with Gershwin.

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