LPO
Bernard Hughes
I left this concert a bit depressed, but not because of anything I heard: rather, by the conservatism of London concert-goers. As London orchestras focus on programming the usual wall-to-wall Brahms, Beethoven and Mahler, the LPO was rewarded for their excursion from the well-trodden path by the punters staying away in droves from this imaginative programme.As part of their Changing Faces: Stravinsky’s Journey year-long season, we heard two works from his 1920s output, paired with older pieces in the same vein of good humour and wit. Weber’s Konzertstück was a direct model for Stravinsky’s Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The London Philharmonic, conductor Vasily Petrenko and cellist Andreas Brantelid are just back from a tour of China, so they’ve had plenty of time to get to know each other. That affinity is apparent in the ease with which Petrenko (pictured below by Chris Christodoulou) marshals the orchestral forces, directly transmitting his trademark energy to every section. But the highlight of this concert turned out to be the Elgar Cello Concerto, given a far more intimate and low-key reading than we might expect from Petrenko himself. No doubt, Brantelid was the inspiration here, but Petrenko adapted Read more ...
David Nice
"You have to start somewhere," Debussy is reported to have said at the 1910 premiere of The Firebird. Which, at least, is a very good "somewhere" for Stravinsky, shot through with flashes of the personality to come. The Symphony in E flat of two years earlier, however, is little more than a theme park of all the ingredients amassed in Russian music since Glinka forged its identity less than a century earlier. It's fun to have on CD - and to play the opening in a "guess the composer" quiz (the reasonable answer would be Glazunov). To work in concert, it needs companions with more than the Read more ...
David Nice
Vladmir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra have been to the bottom of the Rhine before, but in 2015 only did a whistlestop tour of the rest of Rheingold's terrain with an extensive array of excerpts. Having worked with the players on Tristan und Isolde and DIe Meistersinger at Glyndebourne, their ever-thorough and brilliant music director decided that the time has come to tackle the most daunting of Wagner's music-dramas, one opera a year up to 2021 when the river will finally burst its banks and the fortress of the gods goes up in flames.Water and fire already play an impressive Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Just when you can scarcely move for Messiahs, two Christmas Oratorios came along at once on Saturday night. That’s London concert schedules for you. While John Butt and his Dunedin Consort unwrapped four of the cantatas at the Wigmore Hall, Vladimir Jurowski presented all six. Was it too much of a good thing? You’d never say the same of an incomplete St Matthew Passion – at least, I hope you wouldn’t.What Jurowski uncovered was the degree to which the cantatas hang together as a hexaptych – and the extent to which they don’t. To serve for Christmas in Leipzig in 1733, Bach adapted the music Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This concert was to have been conducted by Stanisław Skrowaczewski, who died in February. Though futile, it’s hard not to speculate about what could have been, especially given his spectacular Bruckner performances with the London Philharmonic in recent years. But life goes on, and in his place we heard Lawrence Renes, whose account of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was solid and dependable, even if it was more memorable for the quality of the orchestral playing than for his interpretive insights.Renes is a Dutch/Maltese conductor, well established in both of those countries and a regular visitor Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Richard Goode is one of the world’s great pianists, but you wouldn’t guess it from his humble and unpretentious stage manner. He wears thick glasses and squints into the music, and when he plays he sings along under his breath. When he is not playing, he often turns and gestures vaguely at the orchestra, not so much aping the conductor as moving with the flow of the music. He clearly lives every note, and everything he does is to the service of the score.Not virtuoso showmanship, then, and little bravado, though his playing is always lucid and engaging. That’s an ideal combination for Mozart’ Read more ...
David Nice
It’s official: Romanian master George Enescu’s four-act Greek epic lives and breathes as a work of transcendent genius. It took last year’s Royal Opera production to lead us further along the path established by the magnificent EMI studio recording with José van Dam as protagonist. But La Fura dels Baus’s brave and sometimes disorienting vision was incomplete, shorn of some bewitching dance-music, and fine young conductor Leo Hussain couldn’t hope to reach the total understanding and mastery of a unique style – or styles – that only Vladimir Jurowski could achieve with his musical partner of Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
For the first performances of his Eighth Symphony in Munich, Mahler conducted 11 rehearsals. He arranged for the bells of the city’s trams to be silenced during the concerts. He left nothing to chance. On Saturday night, for once, one felt that all concerned had done likewise.In Munich the piece was billed as the Symphony of a Thousand. Symphony of 250, often as not, is what we get, including instrumentalists, unless you turn up to one of those get-your-uncle-in-to-sing affairs at the Royal Albert Hall. So the sight of 350 choristers filling up the choir and side stalls of the Royal Festival Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
In 1970, documentary maker Alan Power interviewed homeless people in the Elephant and Castle area of London. Rejected footage found its way to composer Gavin Bryars, including a short clip of an old man singing a snatch of a religious song. This became the basis of the minimalist classic Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, performed by members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday.The old man’s 25-second song is looped and faded in on speakers. Gradually the orchestra adds a simple chordal accompaniment that grows in volume, before ultimately fading away 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 ...
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 ...