LPO
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 ...
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 ...