LPO
edward.seckerson
Thirty-five years on and this is still as much David Hockney’s Rake as it is Stravinsky’s or W H Auden’s. How rarely it is that what we see chimes so completely and utterly with what we hear. The limited palette of colours, the precisely etched cross-hatching, the directness and the cunningly conceived elements of parody – am I talking about Hockney or Stravinsky? Two great individualists in complete harmony. So why the disconnection? Is it my admittedly ambivalent relationship with Stravinsky’s dazzling score – so easy to admire, so much harder to love – an imbalance in the casting for this Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Glyndebourne’s Hänsel und Gretel comes in a large cardboard box, with plain brown wrapper, duct-tape and a barcode. There’s a public health warning, too: sugar and spice and all things nice come at a price. The evil witch Rosina Sweet-Tooth is nothing more, nothing less than rabid consumerism masquerading as a smart lady in a pink two-piece suit. Yes, Laurent Pelly’s 2008 staging was/ is the first environmentally aware Humperdinck. It had to come. For revival read recycle.So what’s in the box? Poverty and deprivation, of course. Barbara de Limburg Stirum’s ingenious variation on a cardboard Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A packed Festival Hall and a cheering, stamping, standing ovation – hardly the usual welcome for an evening of contemporary music. Sitting, wizened and waistcoat-clad, at the centre of the front row was the reason: Ravi Shankar. Framed by the mathematical minimalism of John Adams’ Shaker Loops and Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Shankar’s first-ever symphony was last night given its world premiere by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.At 90 years old – an age at which few composers are working, let alone breaking new ground – Shankar has produced Symphony, the culmination of decades of Read more ...
David Nice
Silence. Near-darkness. Oozy weeds of orchestral strings twist in the mind of Edward Fairfax Vere (John Mark Ainsley), remembering the tragic events of 1797 when he was Captain of the HMS Indomitable. From that awe-inspiring start through to one of the most upsetting of onstage murders, perhaps the greatest parade of major and minor chords in all opera and beyond to some kind of redemption, Michael Grandage's Glyndebourne production - his first in the operatic sphere - of Britten's grandest opera moves with a simplicity and grace which fit this tight little craft of an opera house very well Read more ...
David Nice
It already has the finest balance in its team of house conductors, and fortunately - though few are more sought after worldwide - Vladimir Jurowski and Yannick Nézet-Séguin have pledged to extend their contracts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.Since taking up his post as the LPO's Principal Conductor at the beginning of the 2007-8 season, Russian-born Jurowski has led the most inspiring programming on the London scene for decades, stretching his players and the orchestra's box office potential in unusual repertoire including a festival focus on the works of Alfred Schnittke last Read more ...
David Nice
For many of us, this was bound to be an emotional evening. Noëlle Mann, doyenne of all things Prokofievian on the editorial, archival, teaching and performing fronts, died peacefully at home last Friday, and it was to her that Vladimir Jurowski dedicated a typically bold programme of Prokofiev's late epic for cello and orchestra, the Symphony-Concerto, and a big but rather less focused symphony by his closest composer-friend Nikolay Myaskovsky. Perhaps it's presumptuous to speak for the departed; but I could hear Noëlle responding vitally to her master's voice, applauding Jurowski for Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Joanna Wos (left, no relation to Jonathan Ross) put in a stellar performance last night singing in Gorecki's Third Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall with the LPO, singing the part made famous on the million-selling recording by Dawn Upshaw. To get there, she drove for three days and nights from Poland arriving yesterday afternoon. What a trouper. It would be unfair to judge her against Upshaw in the circumstances. But I will. She didn't quite have Upshaw's power, but she was splendidly expressive. She even reminded me, strangely, at times of Victoria de los Angeles. And the LPO seemed Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This is the fifth time on theartsdesk that a review has been headed as above - so you must be thinking it had better be justified or bribery will be suspected. But it's not just the phosphorescent fascination that flickers around the charismatic young LPO principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski that draws the crowds, it is his inquiring programming. Last night it was another of those games that one couldn’t resist, if a game, in the end, of two halves.An all-Shostakovich evening, a young, vibrant prodigy on show, with his first symphony sandwiched by two satirical operatic confections - that Read more ...
David Nice
Asrael, angel of death, rarely glides up to the concert platform; I've only heard Josef Suk's painful and protracted symphony of the same name once before in the Festival Hall, championed by Rattle. In the past, all Suk's great Czech compatriots, including Ančerl, Kubelik and Neumann, paid their respects. Now Vladimir Jurowski joins the distinguished line for a work he clearly loves. It was no fault of his rainbow-hued interpretation if, in a week where I've sat dry-eyed through the film of A Single Man, another artistic take on bereavement left me intrigued but detached at the end of a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Whoever said it was better to journey than to arrive might have been thinking of Sibelius. The arrivals can be pretty spectacular – as here in Osmo Vänskä's tremendous account of the Second Symphony – but the getting there – or not – is what this music is all about. When Vänskä conducts Sibelius he doesn’t just traverse the musical landscape, he inhabits it, breathing it in, feeling its pull, overawed at the threshold of where sound becomes silence and vice versa. He is Sibelius’ eternal Wanderer. Barenboim may have stolen the column inches this week but Vänskä has stolen hearts and minds. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
As was hoped, Osmo Vänskä, the livewire music director of the Minnesota Orchestra, showed us exactly why he's the greatest living Sibelian last night in the first concert of the London Philharmonic's Sibelius cycle. Ducking and diving, crouching and corralling, Vänskä worked the podium like some mad ant, scurrying now over to the violas, gesturing now manically to the horns, his hands rattling fiercely like a jilted Old Testament prophet, sculpting, harrying and rousing the orchestra to peaks and troughs of ecstasy and despair. Sibelius's First Symphony has never sounded so spontaneous or Read more ...
David Nice
Laid-back Tenerife and Gran Canaria won't know what's hit them when the London Philharmonic Orchestra and its principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski land next week. The islands can expect to be sense-bombed by the jungly exuberance of Szymanowski and devastated by the scorched-earth tactics of Shostakovich at his most extreme. Even Londoners used to the highly sophisticated assaults of the city's most challenging orchestral partnership, and faced with the same programme last night, may have been taken aback by the keenly directed electricity of the occasion.Jurowski certainly Read more ...