| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 5-Apr-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Waves of Wagner: Gatti and DeYoung with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall |
 The Wagner bicentennial marches on, bringing grand sounds from practically every corner of the musical earth. What appear most frequently on concert programs are various extracts from the operas, such as the collection of preludes, overture, and vocal and orchestral excerpts offered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Daniele Gatti at Carnegie Hall. This kind of programming runs the risk of coming across as a tasty but haphazard smorgasbord; composer and musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey denounced these “bleeding chunks of butcher’s meat chopped from Wagner’s operas”.Read full review... | |
| 29-Sep-2012 Bridgewater Hall | BBC Philharmonic and Juanjo Mena: Wagner Evening |
 Juanjo Mena launched the BBC Philharmonic’s season with an all-Wagner programme which, despite some small faults, featured some excellent playing.
Read full review... | |
| 10-Sep-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Balloons, Lang Lang and Jerusalem: it must be The Last Night of the Proms |
 BBC Chris Christodoulou-1.jpg) The Last Night of the Proms isn't really a concert: it's more like going to the cast party for the Proms season. The choir, orchestra and a fair bit of the audience are in tail coats and brightly coloured evening dresses, there's an abundance of balloons, party poppers and things making rude noises, and the hall is transformed by the waving of literally thousands of flags (between numbers, of course, there's proper hush during the music). Not much point in doing a sober, serious, musicological review, then, so here are a dozen memories, in no particular order.
Read full review... | |
