London
Gavin Dixon
Charles Dutoit gets the best from the Royal Philharmonic. He conducts with broad, sweeping gestures, and the orchestra responds with dramatic immediacy and vivid colours. This concert’s programme was well chosen to play to their shared strengths, and the results were impressive: colourful Respighi, muscular Dvořák and taut, compelling Stravinsky.Respighi’s Fountains of Rome opens and closes with evocations of dawn and dusk. Dutoit has little interest in miniature, fragile textures, and never ventures into the quietest dynamics. But he and the orchestra compensate with luminous colours and Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is set in “a world midway between Elizabethan pageant and haute-couture catwalk”, a programme note for Scena Mundi's production says, and the initial signs certainly point to that. The aisle of the glorious Grade I-listed French Protestant Church in Soho Square – one of the few remnants of England's rich Huguenot history – is covered with a vivid blue plastic sheet running most of its length, as if in a fashion show runway, and the cast, some dressed to the nines, make their entrance in a sort of dumbshow with heightened dance steps and arm movements.But thankfully, that's the last we Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
An auspicious debut with the Royal Philharmonic for Vasily Petrenko. Just watching him conduct, it is clear that he is a natural communicator, always giving a clear, generous beat and never missing a cue. No surprise, then, that the orchestra was on his wavelength from the start last night in Mahler's Second ("Resurrection") Symphony, reflecting back all his dynamism and focus. That immediacy was balanced by careful planning on Petrenko’s part, with tempo choices finely calibrated for dramatic power and structural coherence.Symphonic order was Petrenko’s guiding principle in the first Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The annual Bach Choir St Matthew Passion is a satisfying mix of new and old. The tradition dates back to 1930, and, as was the fashion then, the choir employed is huge. Applause is kept to a minimum, another nod to tradition, as is the translation of the text into English.But the choir has not been deaf to more recent developments, or to the rise of period performance practice. They now sing with period instrument ensemble Florilegium, and the choir’s musical director, David Hill, led an account that draws on recent trends, not least in the fleet tempos and elegantly shaped phrases, Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Some of us have waited years for this. The opportunity to see Schumann’s largest, most ambitious work was not to be missed. For this most literary of composers, setting the Alpha and Omega of German poetry was a labour of love, which he undertook in reverse, but with progressively less reliable inspiration. From the grandiose bluster of the overture, composed last, you would be hard pressed to anticipate the sublime heights of the third part, composed by Schumann in a wake of elation shortly after completing The Paradise and the Peri.Hardly more than a year ago the London Symphony Orchestra Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Dr Robert Laing (Tom Hiddleston) feels he’s “living in a future that had already taken place”. Director Ben Wheatley, too, has made a late-arriving Seventies exploitation pic from JG Ballard’s 1975 novel. High-Rise is a highly sexy and violent look through a distorting lens at both that familiar past, and the way we live now.Like many similar Ballard tales, its dystopia is cleanly simple, with architect Royal (Jeremy Irons) living in Bourbon splendour with wife Ann (Keeley Hawes) at the top of his new, self-sufficient tower-block. In lower floors, like a concrete Titanic, malfunctions Read more ...
Katie Colombus
Adele is resting her eyelids as the audience spills in, packing the 02, a huge video projection showing off those luscious eyelashes and dark eyeliner that have become synonymous with Adele style. Her eyes open as we hear the echoes of "Hello" before she appears on a small square stage in the middle of the auditorium, resplendent in a long, black, glittery gown. It's a spine-tingling, faultless rendition of the first hit from her most recent album.This live show combines the three albums, 19, 21 and 25 - Adele's greatest songs, sung to great effect in her hometown of London. Walking to the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Errollyn Wallen is celebrated both as a singer-songwriter and for her rigorous and communicative contemporary new music. Her works include 13 operas and a plethora of orchestral, choral, chamber works, solo and ensemble piano music and concertos, as well as award-winning music for film and TV; her Principia and Spirit in Motion were featured in the London Paralympics opening ceremony in 2012.Born in Belize, she moved to the UK with her family at the age of two. She studied at Goldsmith’s College, King’s College London and King’s College, Cambridge. Her Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra Read more ...
David Nice
"Just listen". That's an imperative, of course, but it can be a very fair and reasonable one if the tone is right. It was Claudio Abbado's encouragement to his Lucerne Festival Orchestra players to make chamber music writ large. It also sounds persuasive and not at all militant coming from the mouths of ENO chorus members as their plea to the dramatic changes proposed by Chief Executive Officer Cressida Pollock, appointed a year ago. But listening to all levels of the company is something she never did in the first place, which is why, with two petitions running respectively way above 5,000 Read more ...
Fran Robertson
Situated next to the beautiful Welsh Harp reservoir in North London, the West Hendon council estate was built in the 1960s to provide 680 homes to low income families. I first went there in November 2014. I had been following various housing stories around London and had heard about an estate where residents were fighting a multi-million pound regeneration which was forcing them out of their homes and where land valued at £12 million had been sold to developers for just £3.The day I went to the estate, representatives of the private developers, the architects and the council had set up a mini Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
How can an orchestra perform the music of the future? This was the question posed by Francois-Xavier Roth, congenial maestro and charming educator, as the standard concerto for platform arrangers played out behind him on the floor of LSO St Luke’s. Roth had just offered one confident answer to the question, with the first performance of Dr Glaser’s Experiment by Darren Bloom.Californian-born in 1982 but long resident in the UK, Bloom made use of both the performing space and the virtuosity of the LSO. Radiating out from a core of bass and percussion were pairs of solo and duo winds and Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s always heartening to see a full house for a debut recital, though when expectations run so high, the stakes for the pianist can be dangerously raised. No worries at St John’s Smith Square, though, for Seong-Jin Cho. The diminutive, young South Korean musician who took the platform in front of a capacity crowd last night made waves last autumn upon winning the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and his first recording (on DG) likewise whetted appetites for his first visit to the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, which is currently being held at St John’s while the Read more ...