| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 16-May-2013 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | European première of Shostakovich's Orango at The Rest is Noise |
 Among the brilliant programming of The Rest is Noise festival in London, there was one concert this year that stood above all the others for me: the European première of Shostakovich’s opera prologue Orango. First discovered in an archive in 2004 by scholar Olga Digonskaya, Orango was never finished by Shostakovich, and indeed only a piano score remained.Read full review... | |
| 17-Jan-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Birtwistle's Minotaur at Covent Garden: Impressive but sterile |
 Revivals of 21st century operas on the stages of major houses are rarer than hens' teeth, so the Royal Opera were making a strong statement when they announced the revival of Harrison Birtwistle's 2008 The Minotaur, with the original director and much of the original cast.
Read full review... | |
| 19-Nov-2012 Segerstrom Center for the Arts: Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall | John Eliot Gardiner enlightens with Beethoven's Missa Solemnis in Orange County |
 Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is an odd piece. Despite having a rich recorded legacy, it is not a piece that one encounters often in the concert hall. The technical challenges of this music are up there with virtually any other piece of combined music for choir and orchestra. As performed by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir last night, its difficulty was dispatched with an awe-inspiring fervor.Read full review... | |
| 16-Nov-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | John Eliot Gardiner's Beethoven 9 still shocks at Carnegie Hall |
 As I walked to this concert by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir, I wondered what might have changed in Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Beethoven in the two decades since he first recorded these symphonies. In the early 1990s the period-instrument movement was at its height, and the shock of the new (in the guise of the old) drew dividing lines between those who insisted that Beethoven needed to be played with original instruments at the composer’s set speeds, and those who believed in the importance of tradition.Read full review... | |
