fri 02/05/2025

Southbank Centre

Mahler 8, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - lights on high

Transcendence is everywhere in Mahler’s most ambitious symphony, from the flaming opening hymn to the upper reaches in the epic setting of Goethe’s Faust finale. You’d think no visuals could match the auditory phantasmagoria, just as dance, music...

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Philharmonia, Alsop, RFH / Levit, Abramović, QEH review - misalliance and magical marathon

“Let the music guide your imagination” was never going to be the slogan of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. Its 13 events offer parallel visions, intended in the case of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (a shared project between the LPO and...

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Frang, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - every beauty revealed

When Vladimir Jurowski returns to what used to be “his” London Philharmonic Orchestra, you’d better jump. I would have done on Wednesday had I been able to get to his heady mix of Russian and Ukrainian rarities; luckily I could on Saturday night,...

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Verdi Requiem, Philharmonia, Muti, RFH review - new sparks from an old flame

Forget, for a moment, the legend and the lustre. If you knew nothing about Riccardo Muti’s half-century of history with Verdi’s Messa da Requiem for the writer-patriot Alessandro Manzoni – he first gave it with the Philharmonia back in 1974 – and...

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Levit, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, RFH review - anger unleashed, fantasy finessed in Prokofiev

A showstopper for starters followed by dark depths, a quirky compilation after the interval: it’s what you might expect from Iván Fischer and his 42-year-old Budapest Festival Orchestra. All Prokofiev, too: the sort of thing we used to get from...

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A Form of Exile: Edward Said and Late Style, CLS, Wood, QEH review - baggy ferment of ideas and sounds

You could plan an entire concert season around the theme of “late style”, its paradoxes and variations. For this one-off, many of us expected a concentrated mesh of Edward Said’s only-connect observations with a well-balanced musical programme,...

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Sidorova, Philharmonia, Alsop, Royal Festival Hall review - ladies of the dance

George Gershwin called one of his early classic songs, first created by Fred and Adele Astaire, “Fascinating Rhythm”. It was that mesmeric pull that propelled last night’s Royal Festival Hall Concert from the Philharmonia and its principal guest...

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Tiffin Youth Choir, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, Jurowski, RFH review - perfect detachment suits public statements

When Vladimir Jurowski planned this typically unorthodox programme, he could not have known that a disaster even greater, long-term, than 9/11 was going to befall the USA two days after the concert. There is no bad time for a tricky commemoration of...

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Kavakos, Philharmonia, Blomstedt, RFH review - a supreme valediction forbidding mourning

From a privileged position in the Festival Hall stalls, I could see 97-year old Herbert Blomstedt’s near-immobile back as he sat on a piano stool with the score in front of him, but also his supremely expressive right arm and hand, every finger...

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Bach Brandenburg Concertos, OAE, QEH review - forever young

Victims of their own success in the postwar era of well-recorded sound, the Brandenburg Concertos first arrived in the ears of listeners from my generation via glossy, plush and polished recordings by heavyweight orchestras of a sort that would have...

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Interview: Roy Haynes, Jazz Drumming Giant (1925-2024)

Roy Haynes, who had begun to seem immortal, has died aged 99. In this extensive Arts Desk interview from 2011, one of the greatest jazz drummers ranges across his remarkable life with sharp intelligence and generous feeling.The man who played with...

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Documentary highlights from the 2024 London Film Festival

One of the many pleasures of the London Film Festival is the chance to see high-quality documentaries on the big screen. If lucky, these films might get a brief, specialist cinema release, but all too often non-fiction features are destined for TV....

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