BBCSO
Prom 8, Kozhukhin, BBCSO, Stasevska review - Russian classics meet contemporary IcelandThursday, 21 July 2022
Russia meets Iceland: not the most obvious of juxtapositions. But the connection between the four composers featured in Prom 8 is to be found in their filmic approaches: the two contemporary Icelanders are both better known as media composers than... Read more... |
Prom 1, Verdi's Requiem, BBCSO, Oramo review - introspective sorrow and consolation between the blazesSaturday, 16 July 2022
Any sensitive festival planner knows to begin the return to a new normal with something soft and elegiac – reflecting on all we’ve lost and mourned these past two years, as well as what we’re facing in the world now. Just over a fortnight ago, at... Read more... |
Album: Paul Weller - An Orchestrated SongbookThursday, 02 December 2021
It’s a far cry from his beginnings in a tight, no-frills power-pop-post-punk three piece, that’s for sure. Last May, Paul Weller took to the stage with guitarist Steve Craddock, a smattering of guest vocalists and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to... Read more... |
First Night of the Proms, Hyde, BBCSO, Stasevska review - levitational ecstasiesSaturday, 31 July 2021
Did absence from Albert’s colosseum from early September 2019 until now and a roof-raising finale hoodwink many of us into thinking Dalia Stasevska’s interpretation of Sibelius’s Second Symphony among the greats? Having listened to it again on the... Read more... |
BBC Proms live online: BBC Singers, BBCSO, Oramo review – threnodies to an empty hallSaturday, 29 August 2020
So the bubble of reactionary brouhaha over the Last Night of the Proms quickly burst: there can be no argument about singing “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Rule, Britannia!” when they’re to be presented in their original Proms forms (Elgar’s Pomp and... Read more... |
Skelton, Rice, BBCSO, Gardner, Barbican review – romanticism’s last standSaturday, 14 March 2020
Only a modest audience turned up for this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert, though it was unclear if this was caused by the threat of airborne disease or the inclusion of Schoenberg on the programme. The result was a paradoxical intimacy, with the... Read more... |
Missa solemnis, BBCSO, Runnicles, Barbican review - affirmation in the face of adversityThursday, 05 March 2020
The tough, knotty writing of the Missa solemnis – its “unrelenting integrity”, Donald Runnicles said in a pre-concert interview – was addressed unflinchingly last night by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. They have a distinguished history with... Read more... |
Cargill, BBCSO, Saraste, Barbican review - less is more in ShostakovichSaturday, 25 January 2020
Jukka-Pekka Saraste doesn’t visit London much these days. He was Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and there were rumours that he was in line for the top job. That didn’t happen, and his career soon took him elsewhere – which... Read more... |
prisoner of the state, Barbican review - beauty, but where is the drama?Sunday, 12 January 2020
You can see the temptation. With three different versions and four different overtures to choose from, as well as all that spoken dialogue to cut, substitute or omit, Beethoven’s Fidelio has always been a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of opera – a... Read more... |
Requiem for Hieronymus Bosch, BBCSO, Bychkov, Barbican review – fire and brimstone on a flat canvasMonday, 09 December 2019
“Hieronymus!” bellowed David Wilson Johnson from the Barbican Hall’s circle on Saturday evening. “Hieronymus Bosch!” Commissioned by Dutch radio for a big piece to mark 500 years since the passing of the Dutch painter in 1516, the German composer... Read more... |
Family Total Immersion: Lift Off!, BBC SO, Glassberg, Barbican review – 50th anniversary tribute to Apollo 11Monday, 02 December 2019
This family concert – “Total Immersion: Lift Off!” – was basically a small-scale rerun of this year’s CBeebies Prom, that one entitled “Off to the Moon”. The Prom had a space theme, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and... Read more... |
The Man Who Saw Too Much, BBC One review – death camp in the cloudsThursday, 28 November 2019
Boris Pahor is the oldest known survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. In this program, the 106-year-old recounts his experiences as a political refugee and prisoner to the Nazis during their rule in his native Slovenia. As a study of one... Read more... |
