Southbank Centre
David Nice
Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics; Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam; NHKSO Tokyo. Would you have thought of putting the Japanese orchestra in the same league as the top Europeans? I certainly wouldn't, at least not until last night. While there isn't the same blended warmth, the sound is never clinical or cold; and the revelation is an incisiveness unlike any other, no doubt encouraged by Chief Conductor Paavo Järvi's digging deep in the amazing march-mania at the heart of the finale in Mahler's Sixth Symphony.The ocular proof of that hard work could be seen in the physical movement and Read more ...
David Nice
Now at the very top of his game and master of sundry great orchestras around the world, Paavo Järvi is the conductor students of the art like to follow for his perfect technique. Time was when he seemed like the cooler version of his peerless father Neeme; now, if he can still at times come across as more cerebral than his impetuous but also excellent younger brother Kristjan, he often seems touched by the kind of inspiration Neeme maintains in his 80th year.They work together under Utopian circumstances every summer with the superband Estonian Festival Orchestra and the promising trainees of Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
A new work by Igor Stravinsky is always going to be a major event, so Sunday evening’s UK premiere of his rediscovered Funeral Song was hotly anticipated. The score disappeared after its first performance and was thought lost in the Russian Revolution, but the orchestral parts were rediscovered at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 2015, and, after a modern premiere at the Mariinsky in December last year, the work is now being performed around the world.Funeral Song is an early work, dating from 1908, but it’s not juvenilia. Written as a memorial to Stravinsky’s teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, the Read more ...
Katie Colombus
The idea of a heavy metal rock band for children might be somewhat lacking in appeal for some. Images of leather and chains, frightening make-up, Anthrax-style roaring into a microphone and satanic lyrics for dear little Jonti, all a bit overwhelming. But in Finland, where hard rock is a way of life, of course there’s a heavy metal group for kids.Obsessed as we are by the culture of Nordic cool, Imagination Festival on the Southbank has pushed the boundaries of British sensibility, and here we are. Any fears melt away as five dinosaurs bound onto the stage, like friendly-faced cartoon Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Mitsuko Uchida specialises in elegant, if uncontroversial, interpretations of core Austro-German repertoire, yet she’s never predictable, and every performance is full of unexpected insights and welcome surprises. Mozart and Schumann stand at the far ends of her repertoire, and between them demonstrate what makes her playing great: In Schumann we hear subtlety of tone, gradually shifting moods and psychological depth, and in Mozart an unbridled joie de vivre, elevated, through her consummate artistry, to the highest of artistic ideals.Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C, K 545, was really just Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Yuri Temirkanov chose a shamelessly populist programme for the London leg of the St Petersburg Philharmonic tour. But Khachaturian, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are core repertoire for this orchestra, and ideal for showing off its many strengths. In an impressive coup, they also managed to engage the services of legendary pianist Martha Argerich for the Prokofiev concerto, and the result was a compelling afternoon of Soviet-era classics.On the basis of this showing, the St Petersburg Philharmonic is a world-class orchestra. Their tone is bold and strident, with the focus firmly on the upper Read more ...
David Nice
Readers might be wondering how often the spectre of Trump is destined to loom in reviews. Well, Vladimir Jurowski's daring (and undersold) second concert with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the loose aegis of the Belief and Beyond Belief series teemed with timely, if disconcerting, heavy grotesquerie, above all in the 85-year-old Vaughan Williams's Ninth and last Symphony. In a week beyond belief in a sense that the Southbank didn't intend, the monster in the Oval Office was bound to be conjured in the mind's eye.There were only glimmers of transcendence in a programme which put Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Juxtaposition is a powerful thing. Just one day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the USA and mere hours after women across the world marched in unprecedented numbers to safeguard freedom and champion democracy, the Southbank Centre launched its year-long Belief and Beyond Belief festival with a performance of Fidelio – Beethoven’s blazing operatic hymn to freedom, hope and humanity. The score says it all, wrenches you each time with its dogged optimism in the face of despair and cruelty, its persistent faith. So why director Daniel Slater felt the need to gloss it with Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Leonard Bernstein once said that his favourite piece of Stravinsky was whatever one he happened to be listening to. I have a similar feeling about Mozart piano concertos: I love them all in their turn, and last night I heard Mitsuko Uchida bring two of the greatest of them to life, as pianist and director, alongside the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.The template is clearly the successful “Beethoven Journey” in which Leif Ove Andsnes spent four years touring the Beethoven piano concertos with the MCO, culminating in three scintillating Proms in the 2015 season. Combining two concertos with a Read more ...
David Nice
Osmo Vänskä isn't by any means the only Finn who conducts magnificent Sibelius. Sakari Oramo is the BBC Symphony Orchestra's property, but the London Philharmonic could have gone for a change and invited Vänskä's equally impressive and even more experienced successor at the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Okko Kamu. Still, they played safe by repeating their success with this combination in 2010, adding British string concertos, and why not? "Vänskä's Sibelius" is a brand that guarantees full houses like last night's, and nobody conducts the Fourth Symphony like he does.That was the high point of Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
This is how new and modern music should be done. In the London Philharmonic, we had an orchestra well-prepared to meet technical challenges and resolved to making sense from them. Vladimir Jurowski is a conductor who places faith in composers and audiences, who can welcome listeners and guide them through the evening as a congenial master of ceremonies rather than dessicated college lecturer.In both words and performance, Jurowski made a case for the Symphonies of Wind Instruments as Stravinsky’s first radical orchestral work (setting aside the trio of ballets for Diaghilev). The verse- Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Philharmonia’s Sunday concert wasn’t quite the event they’d planned. Christoph von Dohnányi scored a hit last season with Schubert's Ninth Symphony, so his reading of the Eighth seemed an ideal way to begin. But Dohnányi withdrew early on, leaving the work in the less inspiring hands of Josep Pons.The second half was devoted to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with the star pairing of Robert Dean Smith and Matthias Goerne. But Goerne too pulled out, and at very short notice. Fortunately, Catherine Wyn-Rogers proved a worthy stand-in, and Pons found his stride, making the second half more Read more ...