tue 19/03/2024

Brewer, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall | reviews, news & interviews

Brewer, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

Brewer, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

Freshly reinterpreted core rep felt in the gut rather than the heart

Christine Brewer: Heroic model of a Strauss soprano, soars in the Four Last SongsChristian Steiner

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 of seasons back, duly recorded, this was a Fifth veering more to the Classical than the Romantic, felt in the gut rather than the heart.

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 of seasons back, duly recorded, this was a Fifth veering more to the Classical than the Romantic, felt in the gut rather than the heart.

We don't always need to be knocked emotionally for six by Tchaikovsky's most immaculately tailored trajectory of symphonic darkness to light

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