Whether or not you rate Vladimir Jurowski among the top 10 hardest-working, most inspirational conductors in the business – I do – you have to award him the palm for enterprise. His passionate involvement in youth projects of various kinds, and a quest for innovative programming that would send most concert managements running, combined in the launch of his latest festival centred around the work of a single composer.
classical music reviews
edward.seckerson
It is quickly apparent when you are in the company of exceptional talent. In even the most hackneyed repertoire nothing is quite as you expect it to be: there’s a charge in the air, phrasings take on a different urgency, textures are opened up and newly revealed. And on this night, certain revelations concerning Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony were, under the exciting baton of Vasily Petrenko, no longer conjecture but irrefutable fact.
David Nice
Bryn Terfel is a good guy. I know; he never forgets a face, and I’ve seen him making the tea for the entire team at a recording session – no one-off, they assured me. Yet the nature of the bass-baritone beast is given over to more villains than noble souls. The "bad boys" of opera and musical theatre are grist to Terfel’s satanic mill in his latest CD-linked tour. Although inevitably given the demands of live performance there’s less than meets the ear on the disc, Bryn as dark god in concert gives far more than those recent short-shrifting divas Fleming and Gheorghiu.
Adam Sweeting
The famously tempestuous Romanian soprano is, we learn, living a separate life from her husband Roberto Alagna. If Opera's Most Romantic Couple is no more, will Brand Angela be terminally damaged? Surely a showcase performance in the South Bank's International Voices season would be just the thing to rally the faithful and reaffirm Ms Gheorghiu's spectacular star quality, but I must admit that by the time we reached the interval, I was beset with gnawing doubt.
Ismene Brown
Michael Tilson Thomas’s association with the London Symphony Orchestra runs deep - he was its principal conductor for eight years, and for his latest return to his old band last night the American programmed works that, while they had a Viennese theme, also seemed vividly designed to show off the jewels of this great orchestra, its wonderful wind players.
igor.toronyilalic
So many 19th-century opera plots park themselves on fertile historical ground, amid all the colour, character and juice you could ever want, and then spend three hours picking at some anaemic daisies at the edges. It was a worry last night as I watched Donizetti’s Maria di Rohan in concert at the Royal Festival Hall. By sidestepping the heavyweight power players of Louis XIII’s reign, the eminently operatic figures of Cardinal Richelieu (endlessly alluded to) and Marie de Medici, weren’t we also sidestepping the juice? Thankfully, not. But we did have to wait until the second half for it to flow.
edward.seckerson
Shostakovich’s Festive Overture marked the 30th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution with earnest fanfares and jolly tunes. 62 years on it smacks more of “Looney Tunes” and a cheesy kind of newsreel patriotism and you can’t help wondering if, behind all the laughter and frenetic flag-waving, the disillusionment had already set in. Mikhail Pletnev’s face suggested it had.
edward.seckerson
The irony won’t have been lost on many in the audience that the South Bank’s International Voices series began with Ballet. A whole first half of it, actually. Just as well the diva-in-waiting – the almost indecently glamorous Renée Fleming – knows the value of expectation and anticipation. Her very first album was entitled The Beautiful Voice and if that isn’t pressure for a burgeoning career I don’t know what is.
jonathan.wikeley
It is probably fair to say that the concert hall at the Barbican Centre isn’t one of London’s most intimate spaces. It’s not the sort of place that would put one immediately in mind of, say, a drawing room – in fact, to do so requires a particular willingness to suspend one’s disbelief. Tonight, Thomas Quasthoff and friends endeavoured to make us do just that, and got within a hair’s breadth of pulling it off.
igor.toronyilalic
We Brucknerians aren't easy to please. Few musical partnerships get the official seal of approval. Horenstein and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Wand and the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic, Knappertsbusch and the Vienna Philharmonic. These are among the handful of collaborations that have gained a place in my Brucknerian pantheon. Last night’s performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, however, saw the London Philharmonic Orchestra and their French-Canadian guest conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin catapult themselves into these exalted ranks.