LPO
David Nice
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 up prime cuts of Tchaikovsky freshly, without rich sauce. After a discombobulating Pathétique Symphony a couple Read more ...
David Nice
Bear with me while, like supergroomed rising star Miloš Karadaglić retuning his guitar to a mellower vein, I adjust my concert-hall vocab and describe this as a no-gimmicks sell-out gig underground with young musicians from the London Philharmonic’s Foyle Future Firsts scheme presenting two varied sets and Karadaglić headlining. And now I’ll just revert to old habits and declare the meat to be a slice of Classicism chromatically spiced (Mozart) and a 20th-century maverick pushing Neo-Baroque into near-atonality (Stravinsky), our top guitarist serenading by way of late-night coda. All this to Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Send in the clowns. Or at least that was Vladimir Jurowski’s musical thinking in bringing together the mighty foursome of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Haydn and Shostakovich and seeing just how far their capricious natures might take us. The allusions and parodies came thick and fast and just when you thought there was no more irony to tap, in came the most outrageous instance of misdirection in the history of 20th-century music: Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony. And that is no joke.Jurowski has fashioned some brilliant programmes in his time but I really cannot think of another where the ingenuity Read more ...
David Nice
It's hard to believe that Yannick Nézet-Séguin could ever turn in a less-than-electrifying concert. According to theartsdesk, he did just that a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't there so I can't comment (though I can credit a rough edge or two). What I do know is that last night was showbusiness as usual: the phenomenal urge to communicate, with a committed diva in tow; the rounding-off and energising of every phrase; and a danger to the music-making, meriting a pop-star reception from the audience at the end, which that live-wire maverick among composers, Hector Berlioz, would have adored.So Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It was with Mahler’s Opus 1 – folkloric cantata Das klagende lied – that Vladimir Jurowski so memorably launched his role as the LPO’s principal conductor, and it was to this work that he returned last night. Four years on and he asked his audience to consider it within a rather different narrative; in lieu of an arc of Germanic development, moving from Wagner’s Parsifal Prelude to Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, Jurowski instead framed it with Hungarian works from Bartók and Ligeti. While the dialogue between these three exploratory pieces may have been more oblique, Jurowski’s highly Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A programme of French music under the baton of the LPO’s talented young principal guest conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin should be a treat. Nézet-Séguin’s affinity for French textures and gestures has already been amply proved, as has the orchestra’s own aptitude for them, yet whatever was happening to the Fauré Requiem last night at the Royal Festival Hall was neither polished nor delightful. To attribute it simply to a bad day might be the kindest thing, but when you take into account the sold-out hall, the Saturday-night profile of the concert and all the people who had come to London’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
Earlier this month, George Osborne, Vince Cable and Jeremy Hunt were spotted in a Royal Opera House box surveying the country's most expensive artistic patrimony. What they thought - and how they and the Arts Council might wield their axe - will change the musical landscape of Britain forever. So here to point them in the right direction, theartsdesk's merry band of regulars - Edward Seckerson, David Nice, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Alexandra Coghlan, Graham Rickson, Stephen Walsh and Ismene Brown - separate the wheat from the chaff in this round-up of the best and worst concerts, opera, musical Read more ...
David Nice
If you've just come back from a taxing, tiring orchestral tour, as has the London Philharmonic, the last thing you want to face is a programme of four tough works which demand, at the very least, bright-eyed vigilance but more often a tense, finger-wrecking articulation. So the players must have been relieved to find firm hands on the wheel in the shape of the electrifyingly assured Finnish master Jukka-Pekka Saraste and that most intelligent, repertoire-curious of solo violinists, Frank Peter Zimmermann.Between them, orchestra and conductor just about pulled off the athletic, if not always Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The flurry of fanfares at the start of Magnus Lindberg’s Al largo (UK premiere) sounded almost Waltonian. Or maybe that was because the prospect of Osmo Vänskä in Walton’s First Symphony was such an enticing one that premonitions of its highly distinctive sound-world were already being suggested in the somewhat predictable pyrotechnics of the Lindberg. Lindberg is a great showman and an accomplished technician, but against Walton’s startling originality (circa 1935) he sounded, well, old hat - like a man rapidly losing his edge.Al largo (meaning offshore) is, not surprisingly, oceanic in Read more ...
David Nice
For those of us who can't hear Vladimir Jurowski's intriguing LPO programme on Saturday night live - Gergiev calls over at the Barbican, in a typically frustrating London clash - all is not lost. We'll be able to hear it from 4 October streamed via the London Philharmonic website or the LPO iPhone application. Six more concerts can be heard this way throughout the season.As they say, there's no substitute for live concerts. But if you can't get to the event, this is a remarkable second best. And since we've been spoilt by being able to listen to every Prom as and when we wanted for a week on Read more ...
David Nice
From primeval baying to a very human song in excelsis, Mahler's Third Symphony cries out for Olympian interpretation. That I've found in recent years with Abbado in Lucerne and the Albert Hall, Bělohlávek at the Barbican and Salonen on the South Bank. Since Vladimir Jurowski always demonstrates fresh thinking, and sometimes a burning intensity to match, the first performance of his London Philharmonic's new season was bound to be at least as challenging.That it certainly was from the opening bars. After two months of hearing conductors and orchestras handling mass and void in the Proms' Read more ...
David Nice
Everyone concerned has, of course, total confidence and bags of experience at the end of a riotous run, warmly applauded by Edward Seckerson at Glyndebourne. Yet there were dangers to be negotiated. Only Irmgard Vilsmaier's Sieglinde-cum-Fricka of a mother and the ringing top of Alice Coote's Hansel as tough boy incarnate were really made to fill the crazy South Ken colosseum. The secret for the rest, and I'm sure Ticciati in his Proms debut must have worked on this, was not to force but rather to draw and coax us into Humperdinck's often startling late-Romantic clash of innocence, experience Read more ...