| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 7-Sep-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 75: Haydn and Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic |
 It was in the 1790s, when Haydn came to England at the invitation of London-based impresario Johann Peter Salomon, that the twelve 'London' symphonies were composed. They were to be Haydn's last essays in the genre, examples in which, he said, he had to 'change many things for the English public'. Yet, whatever Haydn's vernacular adaptations to the symphony were, this was an account that had an indelible Viennese stamp, in both sound and approach.
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| 14-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 43: Delius, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky with the RPO |
 If this year's Delius anniversary glut – he was born in 1862 – has taught us anything, it is how difficult his music is to capture: beautifully idiosyncratic at best, but plain boring if wrong. Not only is his structural approach unique, unbounded by schema or formal moulds, but so too is his harmonic language, and his method of evocation, no more so than in his nocturne Paris: The Song of a Great City.Read full review... | |
| 1-Mar-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Uchida and Salonen play Brahms, Schoenberg and Beethoven |
 How do you solve a problem like Schoenberg? Sweetening the musical pill is a good start, and whilst neither the billed Brahms nor Beethoven received saccharine readings, the contrast between the angularity of the programmed modernism and the sheer beauty of these canonical works was all the more acute through their juxtaposition.
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| 13-Dec-2011 Barbican Centre: Hall | A triumphant conclusion to Uchida's Beethoven cycle |
 If he could, would Beethoven have chosen Mitsuko Uchida to première his final piano concerto? They certainly seem to inhabit the same creative plane, at once revelling in the innovative – nay, revolutionary – features, whilst enjoying the grand connections with their historical precedents too. This was the first concerto that Beethoven himself could not perform, his deafness having become all too severe by 1811; and to this end, there is perhaps more 'Beethoven' in this concerto than in any of his previous – a strong compositional stamp in place of his own playing.
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| 11-Dec-2011 Wigmore Hall | Pahud and Bronfmann play flute transcriptions at the Wigmore Hall |
 This was a programme torn strongly in opposite directions: on the one hand lay the superlative artistry of both flautist Emmanuel Pahud and pianist Yefim Bronfman; on the other was the sheer unsuitability of the transcribed works – those by Schumann, Brahms, and Mozart. Indeed, not enough can be said to endorse the artistry of either Pahud or Bronfman, both of whom are effortless virtuosi and thoughtful players. Furthermore, their partnership is ideal: both share a glorious sound, which is by turns expansive, warm, full, and perfectly controlled.Read full review... | |
| 11-Dec-2011 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | French fantasy from the Philharmonia |
 Paul Mitchell.jpg) Paul Dukas' success rests almost exclusively upon his symphonic scherzo L'apprenti sorcier ("The Sorcerer's Apprentice"). Premièred in 1897, the year of Brahms' death, this orchestral tour-de-force illustrates Goethe's ballad in which a lazy apprentice tries to fulfil his wizard master's requests through his own inadequate magic, which results in rapidly-escalating chaos, only calmed at the end by his master's return.Read full review... | |
| 21-Nov-2011 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | An enterprising evening with the OAE |
 Those happy to brand the British Isles as the "land without music" for the time between Purcell and Britten might have cause to rethink if they audited the vintage of London of the late 1760s. Johann Christian Bach, the youngest of Johann Sebastian's sons, moved to England in 1765, helped along by the expatriated Carl Friedrich Abel, with whom he shared a house on Meard Street in Soho. After Bach's arrival, the pair embarked upon 'The Bach-Abel Concert Series', which lasted over twenty-five years, and established them both as major figures on the London scene.Read full review... | |
| 13-Oct-2011 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | A Conductor's Craft |
| If the craft of the conductor has ever been a mystery to you – for it can certainly be a mystery to the orchestra – there couldn’t have been a finer explanation than this showcase concert. A rostrum rota was in play, as a carousel of conductors from the International Conductors’ Academy of the Allianz Cultural Foundation each wheeled their distinctive gestures, and effected radically different musical results.
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| 4-Oct-2011 Barbican Centre: Hall | A colourful Q & A and an effortless sale |
| Mitsuko Uchida's dress presented a challenge for the colour-blind eye, but she left no unanswered chromatic questions for the ear. From a dramatically exposed initial entry, through the poignant lyricism of the second movement, to the brilliance of the finale, Uchida's playing was marked by an intensity of thought, mastery of colour, and musical commitment. It is, in particular, her quiet playing that enraptures, daring the listener ever closer, as she edges nearer to silence. Read full review... | |
| 3-Sep-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 65: "A riot of orchestral colour?" |
 A "riot of orchestral colour" was promised, but little of it was allowed to flourish.
Elgar's Cockaigne Overture, written during the winter of 1900-01, is a portrait of a busy London, conjuring the hustle and bustle of everyday, metropolitan life. The orchestration, as is typical of Elgar, is often very detailed, the principal threads of the texture being added to momentarily here and there, as a flute highlights this and a tuba underscores that. Jac van Steen, the principal guest conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, exerted tight control over the score, but often at the expense of integration. As a result, the sound was unequal rather than homogeneous, which was further upset by moments of poor orchestral balance, the brass at times overwhelming their colleagues. Yet this was spirited playing that did much to realise the charm of Elgar's score.
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| 1-Sep-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 62: Magical music |
 The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra knew the difficulties they would face. Accordingly, they kept the proportions of this programme modest out of pragmatism rather than an expectation for encores, as richly deserved as they would have been. Despite security measures on entrance, the disruption started towards the end of Webern's 'Passacaglia' when a coordinated group of anti-Israel protesters stood and started singing.Read full review... | |
| 27-Aug-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 57: Perfect Pires, baffling Beethoven |
 Nothing quite made sense in this programme, but the confusion was impressive nonetheless. The opening, the UK première of Anders Hillborg's 'Cold Heat', was a prime example of post-minimalism: an eclectic assortment of styles, juxtaposed with consideration, but without much sense of unity for the work itself. The commission had come from David Zinman for a piece 'with NO slow music whatsoever', and Hillborg complied – on the whole.Read full review... | |
| 19-Aug-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 47: COE, Ax and Haitink |
 Criticism of Brahms' orchestration, so often concerned with supposedly clumsy couplings and other textural decisions, would have little to go on after a performance like this. The orchestral sound was lean, but never malnourished, exposing the frame without making it skeletal. Haitink's approach to the symphony did much to lighten the sonorities too, insisting on highly articulated phrases, so that the lines never lagged or became ambiguous in their direction.Read full review... | |
| 16-Aug-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 43: Two wrongs don't make a right |
 The programme read a little like a musical version of Kim's Game: not one but two full-scale symphonies, the same number of prefatory pieces, and then a piano concerto to boot: a test for the audience as well as the orchestra. The principal connexion between the works – apart from their contemporaneity – was the celebrated conductor, Serge Koussevitsky. Not only had he premièred Bax's Second Symphony and Prokofiev's Fourth (which he also commissioned), he was a keen champion of Copland's music too.Read full review... | |
| 1-Aug-2011 Cadogan Hall | PCM 3: Les Talens Lyriques |
 Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques, founded in 1991, is inextricably linked with the music of the French Baroque. Rousset cut his teeth in William Christie's similar outfit, Les Arts Florissants, before branching out to explore works off the beaten track of Charpentier, Couperin, et al. That's not to say that this ensemble still doesn't have something to offer through the works of these more established composers however, as their programme revealed.
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| 30-Jul-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 21: CBSO Triumphant! |
 An 'immense glow and sumptuousness' were the words that Richard Strauss, aged just twenty-four, chose to describe the sound at the première of his tone poem, Don Juan, in 1889. 122 years later another young conductor found similar qualities with his orchestra. Andris Nelsons, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's artistic director since 2008, has obviously fostered a relationship that works tremendously well.Read full review... | |
| 25-Jul-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 14: Revelatory insights |
 Mahler's Ninth Symphony – his last complete work in the genre – was written in 1908-9, against a backdrop of considerable personal tragedy and uncertainty. In 1907 he lost his eldest daughter, Maria, to scarlet fever, only to be followed by an anti-Semitic coup forcing him out of his job as artistic director at the Vienna Court Opera, and to receive the diagnosis of the heart condition that would kill him in 1911.Read full review... | |
| 18-Jun-2011 Boughton Aluph Church | Terrific Telemann, luscious Leclair, and brilliant Bachs |
 The London Handel Players should be applauded for many things, from their characteristically warm and full sound through to their consistently thoughtful approach to how they play. Never are there any clichés of the early-music movement, adopted without question – the predictable treatment of syncopations; the uniform swelling of long notes – but rather a highly considered detailing of each and every corner of the musical palaces they inhabit.Read full review... | |
| 15-Jun-2011 Salle Pleyel | Lacklustre Tchaikovsky, but brilliant Thibaudet |
| The programme notes suggested that Glinka was the father of Russian nationalism. Perhaps this is the case, but his overture to his second opera, Ruslan and Ludmilla, is undeniably an Italianate work, surely influenced by his meetings with Donizetti and Bellini in 1830. Although written twelve years later, it still typifies that idiomatically light and breezy style, which is exactly what the Orchestre de Paris found. Read full review... | |
| 12-May-2011 Barbican Centre: Hall | Unfussed Beauty from Bronfman |
 Shostakovich's first and second piano concertos were coupled with Tchaikovsky's third symphony in the exciting continuation of the LSO's complete Tchaikovsky cycle, under their principal conductor, Valery Gergiev.
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