| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 16-Oct-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Russian rue and revelry with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra |
 Beginning with a work sprung from the minds of not one, but two great Russian composers, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Andrew Litton opened their latest distinctly Slavic programme at the Southbank Centre with Rimsky-Korsakov’s revised version of Mussorgky’s Night on Bare Mountain.Read full review... | |
| 29-Sep-2012 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Trifonov excels in a Russian night with the New York Philharmonic |
photoTBA.jpg) Sometimes, when hearing an instrumentalist’s debut with an orchestra on a tight schedule of concerts and rehearsals, an encore tells you even more about the quality of the soloist than the concerto that precedes it. Such was the case here, as young superstar Daniil Trifonov obliged a typically generous audience at Lincoln Center with Liszt’s transcription of Schumann’s “Widmung”.Read full review... | |
| 6-Jul-2012 Davies Symphony Hall | Cirque Musica with the San Francisco Symphony |
 With the official season at a close, the San Francisco Symphony’s “Summer and the Symphony” is well underway with a collection of concerts designed to attract and welcome all audiences. Friday night’s offering was a collaboration with circus troupe Cirque Musica, partnering classical and popular repertoire with a variety of dazzling cirque acts.Read full review... | |
| 18-Oct-2011 Bridgewater Hall | Moscow Philharmonic and Yuri Simonov: Mussorgsky and Rachmaninov in Manchester |
 The Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra enjoyed an evening of youthful exuberance in the Bridgewater Hall with an all-Russian programme, conducted with grace and refinement by Yuri Simonov.
Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain explicitly paints what the composer called “Spirits of darkness...and the Black Mass” in a progressively wild orgy before the bells of dawn break the scene. Simonov opted for a generally slow but quite variable tempo through the majority of the piece, in contrast to the common tendency to push for a firmly brisk pace in many readings. This was an interesting adjustment, removing any risk of seeming formulaic with such a popular piece, but added little to the sense of untamed nature. It did make some of the themes suggest folk music, particularly in the oboe/bassoon duet passages. The orchestral playing was as passionate as could be expected: plenty of brassy bite and roars from the percussion section. The dawn passage gave the string section its first opportunity of the evening to display its wonderful sound; rich and full in tone, filling the large hall without straining.
Read full review... | |
