| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 20-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 50: Michael Collins steals the show |
 Osmo Vänskä strode onto the stage to great applause, paused for the slightest of moments and then lunged at the orchestra with his baton. The gesture was sudden and lacked clarity, and as a result, the first note of the Prom wasn’t together in the strings. In Beethoven's Egmont Overture, Vänskä seemed to veer between extremes of dynamics, which sometimes worked well, such as in the first pianissimo, and at others appeared ungainly and unsubtle.Read full review... | |
| 7-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 33: MacMillan's new Credo, framed by Wagner and Bruckner |
 I would say a little over three quarters of the seats in the Royal Albert Hall were full for Prom 33, featuring Juanjo Mena, the BBC Philharmonic and several northern choirs, and that whilst I’ve seen the arena busier than it was, it was still fairly tightly packed. The haunting opening solo line of Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde crept into our consciousness out of the silence with its instinctively straight quality and it stayed in that timbre until the cellos’ theme opened up into a warmer vibrato.Read full review... | |
| 31-Mar-2012 St Barnabas Church, Jericho | Cardinall's Musick's Byrd Tour: More Passion? |
 After fifteen years of trying to persuade us that Byrd’s lesser-known works are just as worth listening to as the famous ones, I felt that the Cardinall’s Musick could have come up with a more exciting programme of his celebration of Easter.Read full review... | |
| 23-Mar-2012 North Wall Arts Centre | OperaUpClose to Perfection |
.jpg) Having arrived earlier than I anticipated for this evening’s production of Puccini’s La Bohème by OperaUpClose, I took the opportunity to read through the libretto, helpfully provided in the form of a thin volume available for purchase. When I organise concerts, I often provide texts so that unclear diction is better understood, but this evening I didn’t look at the libretto once. The clarity of text in the intimate space that is the Northwall Arts Centre, Oxford, was without fault; the small cast made the compelling story easy to follow and deeply moving.
Read full review... | |
| 11-Feb-2012 Sheldonian Theatre | Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis: Wintereise |
 Last night brought Mark Padmore (tenor) and Paul Lewis (piano) to the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford for a recital of Schubert’s Winterreise, Schubert’s setting of a text by the short-lived lyric poet Wilhelm Müller. The poems focus on a ‘wanderer’ whose only friend is his shadow, having been rejected by his sweetheart in favour of a new lover. He walks past where he and his lover carved their names into a linden tree which invites him to ‘find his peace’ in suicide.Read full review... | |
| 3-Feb-2012 Sheldonian Theatre | New Chamber Opera: Orpheus in the Underworld |
 It has suddenly become bitterly cold in Oxford, so scuttling the hundred yards or so from where I live to the Sheldonian Theatre, along with having to rush my dinner, saw me in a foul mood at eight o’clock this evening when Ben Holder strode onto stage to conduct New Chamber Opera in Orpheus in the Underworld, Offenbach’s comic operetta in two acts. However, almost from Holder’s first downbeat my temper subsided and I prepared for what was only ever going to be a fantastic evening.
Read full review... | |
