LPO
Bevan, LPO, Jurowski, RFH online review – never-ending storiesFriday, 01 January 2021
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... Read more... |
L'enfant et les sortilèges, VOPERA, LPO, Reynolds online – Ravel and Colette reimaginedThursday, 26 November 2020
Colette’s sharply fantastical libretto for Ravel’s second one-act opera imagines wrongs exercised upon objects and animals by a naughty child revisited by the victims upon the perpetrator. In a giddying venture which may be the most imaginative use... Read more... |
Finley, LPO, Gardner, Royal Festival Hall (p)review - special magic ready for streamingThursday, 24 September 2020
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... Read more... |
Radio 3 In Concert, BBC Sounds - a wonderful week of musicTuesday, 28 April 2020
The absence of live concerts is not just affecting the "in the flesh" audiences, but also having a knock-on effect for the Radio 3 audience, used to hearing a live or as-live concert every night of the week. The BBC have instead gone to the archive... Read more... |
Denk, LPO, Vänskä, RFH review - 200 years of joy and sorrowSaturday, 29 February 2020
Three works two centuries apart, two of them rarities, with 100/200 years between each: that's no guarantee for programming success, and no way to fill a hall (though the London Philharmonic Orchestra admin deserves a good medal for the intricacy of... Read more... |
Blaauw, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - Beethoven seen in '2020 Vision'Monday, 10 February 2020
It’s Beethoven with everything for 2020, the composer’s 250th anniversary year. But the London Philharmonic has devised an interesting approach for their Beethoven-themed programming. “2020 Vision” is a series of concerts which couple a work by... Read more... |
Siegfried, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - an incandescent journey to the mountain topSunday, 02 February 2020
Of Wagner's four Ring operas, Siegfried poses the biggest casting problem. Most heroic tenors with the lungs to last the evening are not going to be ideal incarnations of the stroppy adolescent who learns and fights his way through an often... Read more... |
Wegener, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review – on the revolutionary road to MahlerThursday, 14 November 2019
For better or worse, because of Visconti’s classic film the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony now inevitably means Venice in its gloomiest moods. So there turned out to be a grim timeliness in a performance on an evening that coincided with the... Read more... |
Williams, LPO, Alsop, RFH review - sleek lines and pastoral tonesMonday, 11 November 2019
The London Philharmonic’s Isle of Noises, a year-long festival dedicated to music of the British Isles, drew towards its close with this programme of Butterworth, Elgar and Walton. Marin Alsop was a good choice to lead, especially for Walton’s... Read more... |
The Apostles, LPO, Brabbins, RFH review - Elgar's melancholy New Testament snapshotsMonday, 28 October 2019
The Apostles is a depressing work, mostly in a good way. Elgar's one good aspirational theme of mystic chordal progressions is easily outnumbered by a phantasmal parade of dying falls, hauntingly shaped and orchestrated. After The Dream of Gerontius... Read more... |
Gerstein, LPO, Adès, RFH review - engaging new piano concertoThursday, 24 October 2019
Every ten years or so Thomas Adès writes a piano concerto and the latest had its UK premiere last night at the Royal Festival Hall, played by Kirill Gerstein and conducted by Adès himself. Following on from the youthful, skittish Concerto Conciso of... Read more... |
Verdi Requiem, LPO, Gardner, RFH review – beyond the big noiseMonday, 14 October 2019
You seldom expect to feel the breath of apocalypse and the terror of the grave amid the modestly rationalist architecture and passion-killer acoustics of the Royal Festival Hall. In fact, before Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra... Read more... |
