Classical Reviews
Guildhall School Gold Medal 2024, Barbican review - quirky-wonderful programme ending in an awardThursday, 02 May 2024
While the Royal College of Music Symphony Orchestra were performing Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie – weirdly, despite its size and difficulty, a repertoire staple – over at the Royal Festival Hall, their Guildhall School counterparts presented a programme of stunning originality. Read more... |
Queyras, Philharmonia, Suzuki, RFH review - Romantic journeysTuesday, 30 April 2024
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Masaaki Suzuki has not just travelled into pastures new but proved himself thoroughly at home in them. The founder-director (in 1990) of Bach Collegium Japan, a distinguished harpsichordist-organist as well as one of the most rigorous and scholarly interpreters of the Baroque legacy, has just completed a tour with the Philharmonia that joyfully embraced a selection of Romantic masterworks. Read more... |
Christian Pierre La Marca, Yaman Okur, St Martin-in-The-Fields review - engagingly subversive pairing falls shortThursday, 25 April 2024
The French cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca confesses that – like so many classical musicians – he was at a loss during lockdown as to how to develop his musical career. Then, at a recording for a TV show, he met the street dancer Yaman Okur, who made his name with the hip hop collective Wanted Posse and has collaborated with performers including Madonna. Read more... |
Sabine Devieilhe, Mathieu Pordoy, Wigmore Hall review - enchantment in Mozart and StraussTuesday, 23 April 2024
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital. In her native France, and in the rest of Europe, she has gathered ecstatic reviews for her performance and recording of a range of repertoire that stretches from the Baroque and Mozart to Richard Strauss, Debussy and Poulenc. Read more... |
Špaček, BBC Philharmonic, Bihlmaier, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - three flavours of ViennaMonday, 22 April 2024
Billed as a “Viennese Whirl”, this programme showed that there are different kinds of music that may be known to the orchestral canon as coming from Vienna. Read more... |
Watts, BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Bignamini, Barbican review - blazing French masterpiecesSaturday, 20 April 2024
Anyone who’d booked to hear soprano Sally Matthews or to witness the rapid progress of conductor Daniele Rustioni – the initial draw for me – could not have been disappointed in their late-stage replacements. Elizabeth Watts is as much of a national treasure among singers as Matthews, and Jader Bignamini, music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, negotiated his first Barbican concert with absolute mastery. Read more... |
Bell, Perahia, ASMF Chamber Ensemble, Wigmore Hall review - joy in teamworkWednesday, 17 April 2024
All three works in the second of this week’s Neville Marriner centenary concerts from the ensemble he founded vindicated their intention to reign for ever and ever. Those very words as set by Handel in his “Hallelujah” Chorus were treated fugally by Mendelssohn in the coruscating finale of his Octet, and as part of her own homage in the Partita for String Octet, Sally Beamish approached them very differently. Her ethereal fugue deserves immortality, too. Read more... |
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Philharmonia Chorus, RPO, Petrenko, RFH review - poetic cello, blazing chorusFriday, 12 April 2024
Purple patches flourished in the first half of this admirable programme: it could hardly have been otherwise given Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s devotion to a new work in his repertoire, and the current strength of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko. Even so, it was the culmination, Rachmaninov’s multifaceted “Choral Symphony” The Bells, which truly dazzled. Read more... |
Daphnis et Chloé, Tenebrae, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - lighting up Ravel’s ‘choreographic symphony’Thursday, 11 April 2024
Antonio Pappano fervently believes that talking about music is a vital part of his communicative art, and nobody does it better. Given that the London Symphony Orchestra's enterprising Half Six Fix format is scheduled for an hour each time, and that Ravel’s complete Daphnis et Chloé lasts almost that long, there wasn’t going to be much room for pre-performance demonstration yesterday evenng, but what we got still hit the mark. Read more... |
Goldscheider, Spence, Britten Sinfonia, Milton Court review - heroic evening songs and a jolly horn rambleWednesday, 10 April 2024
Milton Court, like its parent Barbican Hall, disconcertingly inflates the sound of larger ensembles and voices. Had there been a conductor for all four pieces in the Britten Sinfonia’s programme - Michael Papadopoulos was there for the two most recent works – the approach might have been more nimble and nuanced. Though Mozart in masterpiece form could have been a gambit to entice warier punters, a fourth British work would have rounded out the overall picture better. Read more... |
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