Southbank Centre
Jessica Duchen
Bidding farewell to the Royal Festival Hall, Tasmin Little was at the very peak of her powers. It’s almost unthinkable that we will never see her play here again. Many have hoped that she’d be one of those musicians who announce their retirement only to be back for one last time…and another… but Little is a genuine soul who has always said what she means and meant what she says. And she says that that really is that. This unique evening featured one violinist, two gowns, four pianists, four piano stools and plenty of disinfectant. Since its first planned date was cancelled during Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
During the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in London earlier this year, a black man named Patrick Hutchinson hoisted over his shoulder an injured white man from the counter-protest of the English Defence League and carried him to safety. The photographs made headlines. The incident took place just outside the artists’ entrance of the Royal Festival Hall. As part of the Black Legacies series for Black History Month, the Chineke! Orchestra - inside the hall, if without an audience beyond a select few - paid tribute to Hutchinson’s selflessness with the world premiere of a new work, Read more ...
David Nice
There was a rainbow over the Royal Festival Hall as I crossed one of the Hungerford foot bridges for the first time in six months. The lights and noises inside did not betray the augury. Was it the sheer hallucinatory pleasure of being within the auditorium with a handful of other spectators watching and hearing a full orchestra after what felt like a lifetime? Partly, perhaps, but I’ll swear that the building-out of the stage to accommodate players at a proper distance has made a difference to the sound. Never again will I diss the Southbank Centre’s main auditorium – I didn’t realise how Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like it or not, we live – as Beethoven did – in interesting times. In place of the revolutions, wars and occupations that convulsed the cities he knew, we now confront a silent, invisible foe that breeds an equal terror. Hence the empty seats in the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday: a small proportion of the whole, but still noticeable. They greeted this unique concert, compèred by a top-flight celebrity, which gathered several of the best-loved works in the repertoire into one bumper package over a long Sunday afternoon.Directed by Gerard McBurney, narrated by Stephen Fry, and anchored by the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss are not the composers you'd hear at a typical chamber music concert. Their early efforts at piano quartets made up the first half of an evening at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with Benjamin Grosvenor and friends that was, in any case, far from typical. Topped off with the mature Brahms’s Third Piano Quartet, wasn’t it going to be too much rugged Alpine rocky road? In the hands of these youthful musicians, it wasn’t. The audience couldn’t get enough of them.The four performers, who have recently been touring together, are soaring individually towards the top of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert represented the British leg of the NHK Symphony Orchestra’s European tour. Tokyo’s radio orchestra is Japan’s flagship ensemble, and they are fine advocates for the country’s thriving musical culture, the playing precise and the tone focused. Paavo Järvi is the orchestra’s Chief Conductor and a good fit for the orchestra’s sound. Järvi takes a similarly focused approach, expressive but never extrovert. He has a real feeling for drama as well, often driving climaxes furiously, while always relying on the orchestra’s unshakable unity. Despite his minimal gestures, he has a tendency Read more ...
David Nice
In Beethoven anniversary year, there are three ways to enhance our ongoing concert dialogues with the composer beyond the bog-standard overture-concerto-symphony format: complete cycles of the quartets, symphonies and sonatas, preferably without old vulgarians presenting; focusing on Beethoven and his contemporaries, including programmes recreated from the early 1800s; and linking the genius with what our own contemporaries have to say about him.By making its own unique tribute to the whopping "academies" the composer presented, not least in the 1808 blockbuster which included the premieres Read more ...
David Nice
So many performances of Mahler's most theatrical symphony every season, so few conductors who have something radically fresh to say about it. Two who do are London Philharmonic Orchestra chief Vladimir Jurowski, perfecting his vision over the years, and now the Philharmonia's Principal Guest Conductor, Jakub Hrůša. With total command, he captures the scope of a monumental canvas, every nuance in the phrasing – quite often it's simply that Mahler's meticulous instructions need following, but how rarely that happens – and pointillist jabs of colour.The breadth of Hrůša's interpretation – the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
It’s Beethoven with everything for 2020, the composer’s 250th anniversary year. But the London Philharmonic has devised an interesting approach for their Beethoven-themed programming. “2020 Vision” is a series of concerts which couple a work by Beethoven, or occasionally one of his contemporaries, with a piece written 100 years later and another written 200 years later. The result is a series of gloriously eclectic programmes, not least for the obscurity of the later works chosen. In this opening concert, Beethoven’s First Symphony (1801) was followed by Snatches of a Conversation (2001) by Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Visiting conductor Mark Wigglesworth is a good match for the Royal Philharmonic. The orchestra’s repertoire is usually at the popular end of the spectrum, so they know how to make the most of a good tune. Wigglesworth gives the players the space to phrase and shape the music, but his approach is more about drama and discipline. That’s a great musical virtue, but it’s hardly glamorous. Fortunately, pianist Khatia Buniatishvili was on hand to provide charisma and pizzazz in an electric performance of the Liszt Second Piano Concerto.To begin, Walton’s Portsmouth Point Overture. It’s a great Read more ...
David Nice
Of Wagner's four Ring operas, Siegfried poses the biggest casting problem. Most heroic tenors with the lungs to last the evening are not going to be ideal incarnations of the stroppy adolescent who learns and fights his way through an often nightmarish fairy-tale landscape. Torsten Kerl, not an agile mover to say the least, certainly wasn't. But complemented by similarly strong vocal performances of varying degrees of dramatic expressivity, and above all perfectly supported by the iridescent safety net of the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, who show clarity of Read more ...
David Nice
In Beethoven anniversary year, there will probably be many more "Moonlight"s, meaning the Sonata, than the real thing (though we've been lucky to see the crescent in close conjunction with Venus these past two nights). Not many pianists would dare to place it at the beginning of a programme. Denis Kozhukhin's paradoxically no-nonsense poetry meant that a constant sense of motion culminated in the whirlwind of the finale, a steady move towards implosion mirrored in the piano transcription of Ravel's La Valse at the end of the programme. In between came perfection in the form of pure song from Read more ...