LSO
First Person: Donatella Flick on why the conducting competition in her name is needed more than ever
Donatella Flick
What are the qualities that make a great conductor? It’s something that has been debated for years, brought into focus recently not least because of Cate Blanchett’s award-winning performance as fictional maestra Lydia Tár. Despite what you may think of the film, it has reignited debate about what it means to be a conductor today, and what qualities they should possess. For me, of course technique, gesture, and communication with the orchestra are obviously all vital – but what is needed in the end is magic, that something extra that makes you sit up in your seat and hang on to every Read more ...
David Nice
So it turns out there isn’t a problem with Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), a stroppy mock-epic I thought couldn’t ever love again, when constantly singing phrases from Antonio Pappano and the LSO turn it into an hallucinogenic opera for orchestra.It seems too good to be true that 10 days after a Philharmonia Don Juan to die for from Jakub Hrůša, who will take over from Pappano at the Royal Opera, along came another performance which felt legendary even as we listened. We have to hear way more Strauss from both great conductors.Perhaps not so much from Samuel Coleridge- Read more ...
David Nice
There’s life in the old overture-concerto-symphony format yet – especially if the conductor not only shapes every phrase but takes care over the number of string players needed for each work, the soloist lives every bar of a concerto you thought you knew inside out, and the symphony is a relatively rare neighbour to another regularly on concert programmes.It would be foolhardy to claim that Prokofiev’s Sixth, his symphony of suffering, is better than the ever-fascinating Fifth, no straightforward warhorse, but it’s certainly more consistently dark and deep. The London Symphony Orchestra has Read more ...
David Nice
Amanda Majeski pushed the boundaries as Janáček's tormented heroine for director Richard Jones at the Royal Opera. Here there were confines – no “concert staging” this, but a laissez-faire affair with scores and music stands, occasionally obscuring the stage directions – but she still conveyed the essence in front of Simon Rattle’s throbbing, luminous London Symphony Orchestra and flanked by other cast members of uniform excellence.Not for Majeski the composer’s definition of Russian playwright Ostrovsky’s Katya – the opera is performed in Czech, of course, but the LSO gives the Russian Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In a Renaissance artist’s studio, a wannabe master proved his skill by drawing a perfect circle. Perhaps playing Beethoven’s A minor Bagatelle (aka “Für Elise”) as an encore should count as the pianist’s equivalent. At the Barbican last night, Alice Sara Ott did just that with the ubiquitous ring-tone earworm.It came after an assured performance of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann. And Ott traced its shape perfectly: feathery, supple, light, but not insipid. If the LSO’s rubric for this concert invoked “wild and stormy Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Long goodbyes don’t get grander, warmer or more passionate than this. Sir Simon Rattle began his farewell season with the London Symphony Orchestra with a Proms performance of Mahler’s Second, “Resurrection” Symphony – the mighty work that has waymarked the major moves of his career. Finely pointed and detailed as ever, yet lacking nothing in the overwhelming uplift of its close, this Resurrection almost felt designed to remind London of the giant gifts it will soon lose. However, if the motives for Rattle’s departure for Munich included disappointment over the city’s failure to fund and Read more ...
David Nice
If you sought a spectacular shrugging-off of jubileemania last night, you could have done no better than this programme to coincide with Italian Republic Day from our own national treasures Antonio Pappano – Knight of the British Empire, if you’ll pardon the expression – and the London Symphony Orchestra.Vivaldi, Puccini and possibly Gabrieli would be known to all; probably not Goffredo Petrassi other than as a name, nor Victor de Sabata other than as a conductor. The revelation of a uniquely original sequence, Petrassi’s Concerto for Orchestra No. 5, stems from the 1950s when he was turning Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Conductor and pianist came at Liszt from opposite directions last night. Michael Tilson Thomas is a venerable presence at the podium and has been Laureate Conductor of the London Symphony for decades. Their relationship speaks of deep empathy and close communication. In the Liszt First Piano Concerto, MTT dug deep into the rich string tone of the LSO for round, warm sonorities, and always with plenty of bass. Lukáš Vondráček (pictured below) is a generation or two younger than MTT, and is the leading Czech pianist of his generation. He’s not a complete stranger to the LSO; they played Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As Walter Huston croaked in 1938, it’s a long, long while from May to December. And Kurt Weill – who wrote his evergreen “September Song” for Huston in that year – spanned several musical epochs within not so many years as he travelled from the Weimar avant-garde to Hollywood and Broadway.At the Barbican, Simon Rattle’s all-Weill evening with the London Symphony Orchestra followed the composer’s obstacle-strewn but often triumphant journey in a programme that culminated in Weill’s “ballet chanté” The Seven Deadly Sins, with Magdalena Kožená (Lady Rattle) as the soloist. For Rattle, Weill’s Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Xian Zhang is clearly a versatile conductor. In this concert, with the London Symphony Orchestra, she presented a fascinating strings work by Chinese composer Qigang Chen and a new trombone concerto by Dani Howard, all framed with favourites from Ravel and Stravinsky. Zhang is from China herself, and mostly works in the US, but she will be known to UK audiences from her time as principal guest conductor of the BBC NOW, and for occasional appearances with English and Welsh National Operas.A keen ear for detail was apparent from everything that Zhang conducted in this diverse programme. She has Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Had he never written a note of his own, George Walker would still have left a record of trailblazing achievements. Born in Washington DC in 1922, he studied piano at Oberlin College and the Curtis Institute (the conservatoire that notoriously rejected Nina Simone). He was taught by Rudolf Serkin and, in 1945, debuted as a soloist first at the New York Town Hall and then, playing Rachmaninov’s third concerto, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy.Needless to say, neither Town Hall nor Philadelphians had ever seen an African American soloist before. By 1946, however, Walker had Read more ...
David Nice
“This symphony comprises 11 songs about death and lasts about one hour,” the conductor Mark Wigglesworth declared before a second New York performance of Shostakovich’s Fourteenth – people had left in droves during the first – only to see a swathe of his audience look anxiously at their watches.I doubt if anyone in an obviously more receptive and surprisingly youthful Barbican audience did that at any point during Gianandrea Noseda’s interpretation at the Barbican last night, which drew focus from start to finish. So did his Beethoven Seventh after the interval in a daring but triumphant Read more ...