Southbank Centre
Boyd Tonkin
The Southbank Centre automatically stuck the trusty “Bohemian Rhapsodies” headline on this London Philharmonic Orchestra concert of Czech music streamed from the still-deserted Royal Festival Hall. Given Janáček’s presence on the bill, they should have made that “Moravian” as well. I know – get a life. Well, as we wait for that to begin properly once more, Marquee TV continue to bring high production values to their transmissions from the RFH.Sometimes, indeed, the team seems to takes undue, intrusive care. Directed by Nathan Prince, this gig featured too much moody blue and crimson lighting Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The LPO, and its soon-to-depart chief conductor Vladimir Jurowski, began its 2020 Vision season back in February. It set out to mix and match the music of three centuries and show how it echoes in contemporary works. Well, little of that turned out quite as planned: this final concert at the Royal Festival Hall was meant to premiere Sir James MacMillan’s new Christmas Oratorio, now scheduled for the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 16 January. That outsourced event feels like a saddening symbol of Britain’s interlinked catastrophes this year. Still, in spite of 2020’s never-ending series of Read more ...
David Nice
Nobody would wish it this way, but orchestras playing on a stage specially built-up for distancing to a handful of invitees have never sounded better in the Royal Festival Hall. The Philharmonia’s outgoing principal conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is a master of exquisite textures, and Ravel, arguably the greatest orchestrator ever, has come under his sympathetic microscope on many occasions. It says much for Britten that his writing for strings and human voice stood the comparison with the French master last night in an enchanted hour of music.Britten’s haunting response to Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s an old rule in the theatre that you don’t have to go on if there are more people on stage than in the audience. Last night I counted less than 15 people listening in the cavernous auditorium of the Royal Festival Hall pitted against a fairly full-sized Philharmonia (with the now familiar onstage social distancing) but the show went on anyway, for the benefit of an unknown number of people watching the livestream. It made for a somewhat dispiriting experience in the hall. I enjoyed the Philharmonia’s virtual Prom last month and I’m prepared to concede that this concert may have come Read more ...
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 ...