| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 4-May-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | "I'm in love with Vienna": Renée Fleming and friends at Carnegie Hall |
 For the last concert of her Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall, Renée Fleming assembled one of the least coherent concept programmes imaginable. Billed as “Vienna: Window to Modernity”, it was never clear what was specifically Viennese about the music on show, nor what was particularly modern, nor what windows had to do with anything. If this was about the fin de siècle and the turbulent culture that accompanied the collapse of the Austrian empire, then historians are going to have to redefine what a siècle might be, let alone a fin.Read full review... | |
| 1-May-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Living, laughing Beethoven: Richard Goode and the last three sonatas |
 A concert of the Op. 109, Op. 110, and Op. 111 piano sonatas could very easily be delivered with the kind of self-seriousness that turns Beethoven into the Beethoven of legend, a daunting, impenetrable titan, the kind of Beethoven consecrated high on the proscenium arches of so many American concert halls. The brilliance of this Richard Goode recital lay not simply in the ferocity and radiance of his playing, in his refusal to reconcile the extremes of Beethoven’s late style, but in his capacity to render Beethoven immediate, humorous, and human.
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| 20-Apr-2013 92nd Street Y, Lexington Avenue at 92nd | Modernist Mozart at the end of time: Tetzlaff at 92Y |
 It’s easiest to describe Christian Tetzlaff’s approach to playing the violin by what he isn’t trying to do. He is not trying to play as beautifully as possible, in the conventional sense. He is not trying to sound like a nightingale, soaring long, honeyed lines above an accompaniment. He is not, in other words, trying to make his violin sound as the mind’s ear instinctively thinks it should. That is too easy, after all, and it inhibits a truer sense of expression.Read full review... | |
| 19-Apr-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | An unconvincing Bruckner 8 from Christian Thielemann and the Staatskapelle Dresden |
 Christian Thielemann’s repertoire is broader than is often made out, but not that much broader. At its heart are the four composers most associated with late Austro-Germanic Romanticism: Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Anton Bruckner. It’s a satisfying if rather glutinous diet, one steeped in canonical tradition, and one that on any extended basis can nowadays only really work with certain Central European orchestras.
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| 17-Apr-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Der Thielemann brings the Staatskapelle Dresden and Brahms to New York |
 “Der Sir”, they used to call him. The death of Sir Colin Davis has been a strikingly international event, and New York has been no exception. Over at Lincoln Center, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic opened their latest subscription run with “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a joint tribute to the British conductor and the people of Boston (another of Sir Colin’s haunts).Read full review... | |
| 4-Apr-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | The British in Egypt: McVicar's Giulio Cesare triumphs at the Met |
 When David McVicar’s Giulio Cesare opened at Glyndebourne in 2005, international attention was focused on the breakdown of Iraq into a civil war that its American and British occupiers couldn’t control. A production offered by a formidably aristocratic opera house in East Sussex – with its champagne-and-strawberries picnics, enforced black tie, and cows at pasture – could only ever be quaint in its political indictments.Read full review... | |
| 28-Mar-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | The many faces of Christ: Hanno Müller-Brachmann stars in OSL's St Matthew Passion |
 In his biography of Richard Wagner, Michael Tanner writes that Tristan und Isolde is one of two great masterpieces that have the musical brilliance, the intellectual strength and the emotional power to convert you to its philosophical cause. The other, naturally, is the St Matthew Passion.
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| 3-Mar-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Berg and Bruckner from the Vienna Philharmonic on tour in New York |
.jpg) Franz Welser-Möst misses few opportunities to declare his affinity with Anton Bruckner. The conductor, after all, is from Linz in Upper Austria, and Bruckner was born twelve decades earlier in a village just outside the same town. From London to Vienna, Welser-Möst has believed it necessary consciously to advocate for Bruckner’s music. He has even gone as far as dubbing him the “grandfather of minimalism”, to explain pairing his symphonies with the works of John Adams in a recent Cleveland Orchestra residency at Carnegie Hall.
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| 15-Feb-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | The music redeems unanswered questions in the Met's beautiful new Parsifal |
 Before the music in the Metropolitan Opera’s new Parsifal starts, a black but reflective curtain drapes the front of the stage. It is dim enough not quite to show the audience, but it picks out the chandeliers. As Daniele Gatti coaxes the orchestra through the opening lines of the score the tableau becomes translucent, first seeming to mirror the front rows of the stalls, but slowly revealing the chorus, sitting in rows. Parsifal stands, in the centre, chosen. The men slowly remove their workaday suits, socks, and shoes, while the women turn.Read full review... | |
| 14-Feb-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | The Concertgebouw caress Strauss and Bruckner at Carnegie |
 Amsterdam audiences must be spoiled by hearing the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra so often. In this second concert of two at Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw again used their immaculate sound and tonal palette to lyrical effect, this time not in Bartók and Mahler, but Strauss and Bruckner.
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| 13-Feb-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Blistering Bartók from Kavakos and the Concertgebouw in New York |
 Two programmes, four works, and nothing written before 1880: the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and their chief conductor Mariss Jansons certainly know how to play to their strengths on tour. What strengths they are, too. This orchestra generates a uniquely warm sound, maintains scrupulously clean textures, and possesses technical skills that surpass even the finest of other orchestras.Read full review... | |
| 3-Feb-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Embodying Beethoven's Ninth: Barenboim and WEDO conclude at Carnegie |
.jpg) Unity over division, peace over war, a higher cause for humanity: no symphony better expresses the mission of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra than Beethoven’s Ninth, and no orchestra plays this symphony with greater emotional power. With Daniel Barenboim on the rostrum, this symphony’s composed, collective redemption becomes at once entirely natural and entirely miraculous.Read full review... | |
| 2-Feb-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Beethoven's Sixth and Seventh from Barenboim and WEDO at Carnegie |
.jpg) Two down, two to go. Whereas at the 2012 BBC Proms Daniel Barenboim and the West-Easter Divan Orchestra paired the Pastoral symphony with the Fifth, just as Beethoven programmed them in the infamously long concert that premièred them both, here the Pastoral prefaced the Seventh.
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| 31-Jan-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | What a difference a day makes: Barenboim and WEDO continue at Carnegie |
 “Daniel Barenboim can be a frustrating... conductor”, I wrote after the first concert in this series of four, in which he and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra are presenting all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies. As if to prove the point, to follow that stunning concert of First, Eighth and Fifth, these forces delivered a maddeningly inconsistent Fourth and a far loftier but hardly flawless Eroica.Read full review... | |
| 30-Jan-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | WEDO and Barenboim start a Beethoven cycle at Carnegie |
 Daniel Barenboim can be a frustrating – and frustrated – conductor. When his grand plans don’t quite come off, he can become irritable, his gestures more didactic and his brow ever more distractedly mopped. Not so in this concert, however. By the closing cadences of Beethoven's Fifth he was singing along, preempting the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s deliciously delayed and eternally held final chord with an explosive “Baaah!” from the podium.
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| 24-Jan-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Frozen haze from Radu Lupu in a wintry New York |
 Any solo recital from Radu Lupu comes with the baggage of a cult, and this Carnegie Hall concert was no exception. Lavish praise from the weeklies aside, there really is something to the aura that surrounds this exquisite pianist. He has a unique sound, seeming to breathe with the concert hall's very air. He no longer records, and what he plays live is rarely a repeat of what he has recorded in the past.Read full review... | |
| 17-Jan-2013 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Thrilling Shostakovich and Ravel from Yannick and the Philadelphia Orchestra |
 In an interview with Charlie Rose a couple of years ago, Sir Simon Rattle made the startling comment that conductors only become “competent” after they turn 60. If that’s the case, it’s really quite difficult to imagine just how “competent” young Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin might be after more than another two decades on the podium, particularly with a band in front of him as supple and giving as the revitalized – and no longer bankrupt – Philadelphia Orchestra.
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| 15-Dec-2012 Lincoln Center: Alice Tully Hall | Not another Messiah: Herreweghe's Christmas Oratorio in NYC |
 The Christmas Oratorio is an odd work to perform in concert, but it makes a welcome change from the obligatory annual Messiah. Bach’s piece contains six separate cantatas that tell the traditional Nativity narrative, all subsumed under the broader theme. But this is not the St Matthew Passion with added shepherds and Magi, even though many of the chorale settings from the Passions find their way into the Oratorio. These six cantatas were designed to be heard spread over the period between Christmas and Epiphany.Read full review... | |
| 28-Nov-2012 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | Erwin Schrott stars in the Metropolitan Opera's Don Giovanni |
 Don Giovanni is perhaps the most difficult of the Mozart–Da Ponte opera trilogy to stage. Not only is there the problem of how exactly the Don is to be consumed in flames at the end of its three-hour span, or the issue of how to make the statue of the Commendatore come to life. There is also the question of how to square the deep sexual and class conflicts that are on display throughout the work with its constant humour. After all, Mozart designated this, his bleakest work, an opera buffa, or comic opera.
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| 18-Nov-2012 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | A modernist Mahler 9 from Salonen and the Philharmonia |
 There are, speaking in broad generalisations, two main ways that Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is performed. One sees it as the composer’s farewell to life, an elegy that celebrates, fears, stands tall, and refuses to go quietly into the good night. It’s farewell “from all whom he loved – and from the world!” wrote conductor and contemporary Willem Mengelberg in his copy of the score, farewell “from his art, his life, his music.” This school is by far the more common, and encompasses a wealth of different styles within it.
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| 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... | |
| 13-Nov-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Beethoven, Pintscher and Scriabin from Welser-Möst and the Clevelanders at Carnegie Hall |
 Franz Welser-Möst’s programme was rather eclectic for this Carnegie Hall visit from the Cleveland Orchestra. Matthias Pintscher’s static, ethereal new work, Chute d’Étoiles (“Falling Stars”), found itself sandwiched between two of Beethoven’s busiest works, the Fourth Symphony and the Grosse Fuge, both of which are in the key of B flat major. Scriabin’s heady Le poème de l’extase then played coda to an already long concert. Trying to work out the connection between the four? So am I.
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| 2-Nov-2012 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Restraint pays off for Murray Perahia in New York |
 A broken crane dangles precariously over 57th Street near Carnegie Hall at the moment. Thankfully for the hall it seems the danger has passed, but rather than cancel this concert along with so many others in New York over the past week, Carnegie delayed the recital from Friday to Sunday and moved it to Avery Fisher Hall. It’s a less satisfactory space for solo work, but it’s a space nonetheless, and I’m sure this Bronx native was pleased to perform as the city gets back on its feet.
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| 1-Nov-2012 92nd Street Y, Lexington Avenue at 92nd | Part 2 of András Schiff's Bach Project at 92Y |
 At times, this recital felt just plain wrong, almost voyeuristic. It had a purgative, deeply personal flavour to it that had been absent from András Schiff’s performance of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, five days and Hurricane Sandy prior. Particularly in the second half Schiff’s playing was more overtly emotional, slightly more idiosyncratic, and, remarkably given the standards of concentration on display in the previous concert, even more intense.Read full review... | |
| 27-Oct-2012 92nd Street Y, Lexington Avenue at 92nd | András Schiff's immaculately-tempered clavier at 92Y |
 András Schiff was one of the first pianists of the digital era to record the complete works of Bach, back in the 1980s. Now, older and wiser, Schiff is embarking upon a tour demonstrating how far his interpretations have progressed over nearly three decades. This 92Y concert was the start of a two-year series which takes in New York’s major concert halls: the English and French Suites at Alice Tully Hall, concertos with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher, and the Partitas and Goldberg Variations at Carnegie Hall.
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| 22-Oct-2012 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Brahms, Brahms, and Brahms from Gergiev and the LSO in New York |
 You can’t say Valery Gergiev doesn’t get around. Four concerts in New York over the last week and a half of October, two with the London Symphony Orchestra, one with the World Orchestra for Peace, and another with the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra might seem a little like overkill, especially for a conductor as notable for hot and cold performances as for his workload. The LSO, too, have had it difficult for the last few months, with extensive tours through Europe, London concerts with replacement conductors, and now a mini-residency at Lincoln Center.Read full review... | |
| 20-Oct-2012 Lincoln Center: Alice Tully Hall | Turbulence to triumph in Schubert's final sonatas from Paul Lewis |
 Paul Lewis’ current tour constitutes the final instalment of his Schubert cycle. As is the fashion, largely following Artur Schnabel and more recently Alfred Brendel, Lewis plays the last three sonatas as a trilogy, with the D.958 and D.959 played before the interval and the D.960 afterwards. In lesser hands such programming could be a bit of a slog, but Lewis’ subtle pianism invited comparison and connection, he eschewed the pity some pianists ladle over these works, preferring psychodrama writ large, and he mercifully omitted repeats in the D.960.
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| 14-Oct-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Out of the pit and into the Alps with the MET Orchestra |
 The orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera House rarely gets out of its pit, but when it does, it plays at Carnegie Hall. Carnegie has a rather different acoustic to the Met – much more closely-held, much more intense – and its unforgiving glare occasionally presented one challenge too many for the MET Orchestra. Still, they acquitted themselves well in this matinée.
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| 4-Oct-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | Alternative energies from the Chicago Symphony at Carnegie Hall |
 Riccardo Muti made a bold claim in a televised interview on Tuesday, ahead of his three-night stint opening the Carnegie Hall’s season. Asked by Charlie Rose about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Muti suggested that this band, of which he has been Music Director since 2010, was the best in the world – before hurriedly correcting himself and ranking it alongside the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics in the very highest echelon.
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| 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... | |
| 20-Sep-2012 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | The New York Phil opens its season with Beethoven and the Rite |
 It is hard to imagine that many of the world’s major orchestras will begin their seasons this year with only three people on stage. Yet in this fascinating programme which promised much and never quite delivered, New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert was joined under the proscenium arch only by timpanist Markus Rhoten and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. The rest of a reduced Phil was arrayed around the hall, mostly at the back, in a continuation of the spatial theme that had closed its last season at the Park Avenue Armory.
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| 11-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 39: Thierry Fischer ends his BBC NOW tenure with the Berlioz Requiem |
 It’s been a busy couple of months for Berlioz’s Requiem in London. First there was Sir Colin Davis’s June performance at St. Paul’s, with the reinforced London Symphony Orchestra’s brass bands arrayed around the dome. Now, on an unofficial Big Choral Weekend at the Proms there was this valedictory effort from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and their outgoing music director, Thierry Fischer.
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| 3-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 27: Revealing Bruckner from Runnicles and the BBC SSO |
 Few conductors preface Bruckner’s vast Eighth Symphony with an amuse-bouche before the interval. If they do, they tend to pick one of three options, all of which make sense in different ways. Rarely there might be a new composition. More often you hear Haydn or Mozart, especially from the older guard of Brucknerians like Bernard Haitink, Daniel Barenboim, and so on. Or there’s Bruckner’s most obvious partner, his beloved Wagner. Wagner presents his own problems, of course, in relation to Bruckner.Read full review... | |
| 24-Jul-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 13: Barenboim's Beethoven and Barenboim's Boulez |
 Onwards Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra went, then, jumping forwards from a rousing Fifth to the Eighth, once again playing the later, even-numbered half of a ‘pair’ before the odd.
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| 23-Jul-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 12: Barenboim hits his stride in Beethoven 5 and 6 |
 So Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra continue on their odyssey demonstrating for us what Beethoven might mean in the 21st century. Barenboim’s back-to-the-future approach clearly to some seems anachronistic after years in which Beethoven has been the preserve of ‘period’ bands, and in which even the grandest and oldest of orchestras have altered their traditions. Few conductors now speak of learning their Beethoven at the feet of Wilhelm Furtwängler and Otto Klemperer, and still fewer dare to emulate and combine the two.Read full review... | |
| 21-Jun-2012 Wigmore Hall | Andreas Staier reinvents the Diabelli Variations |
 The story of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations is well known. The composer and publisher Anton Diabelli wanted to promote his new firm, and chose to do so by inviting fifty composers of varying fame to write a variation on his own waltz theme. Beethoven was, of course, the dominant figure in Vienna at the end of the 1810s, and his variation was to be the highlight.Read full review... | |
| 10-Jun-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Simon Rattle and the OAE make the case for period Impressionism |
 Mat Henneck EMI.jpg) Sir Simon Rattle is an uncommonly gifted conductor of early 20th-century French music – Debussy, Ravel, and the like. The intrigue of this concert, then, radiated not from the rostrum but mostly from the orchestra itself. Playing with ‘period’ practice – though what that entailed was explained neither during the concert nor in the programme note – the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Rattle continued to press new ground, following on from their Prom of Berlioz and Wagner a few years ago with even more modern fare.Read full review... | |
| 17-May-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | A Magnificent Mahler 5 from Daniele Gatti and the Philharmonia |
 You can, more often than not, tell how good a performance of Mahler's Fifth will be from its opening trumpet call. Here, the Philharmonia's principal, Alistair Mackie, struck just the right balance between stridency and tragedy. Daniele Gatti's direction of this symphony was not, however, one of balance, still less one of compromise. London audiences have heard a lot of Mahler over the last two or three years, but this performance was surely one of the greatest.Read full review... | |
| 9-May-2012 Wigmore Hall | Sublime Schumann from the Jerusalem Quartet and Alexander Melnikov |
 Given reports that an earlier instalment of this Jerusalem Quartet tour had been disrupted by protesters, it's pleasing to be able to write that there were no such disturbances here. It's a good thing too, because nothing should overshadow the exquisite music-making of this Israeli quartet, joined here by Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov. Melnikov and the quartet blended very well.Read full review... | |
| 25-Mar-2012 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | Murray Perahia: Bach and late Brahms at the Lincoln Center |
 Murray Perahia’s programmes are always tidily thought through, exploring interrelationships between pieces and building progressively, often from Bach to Chopin via Beethoven. This was no different, with Bach and Chopin the bread to a sandwich of late Brahms and lesser-known Beethoven and Schubert. Though the Chopin was a little abrupt, this was a thorougly satisfying concert.
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| 23-Mar-2012 Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, Verizon Hall | Memories of Prague from the Philadelphia Orchestra |
 How gratifying that James Conlon briefly introduced the rationale for this Philadelphia Orchestra concert, which turned out to be entirely divorced from the nostalgic ‘Memories of Prague’ that its title suggested. Instead, what I had presumed to be coincidental key signatures were in fact the link: an exploration of D minor (with a side of D major).Read full review... | |
| 18-Mar-2012 Carnegie Hall, Zankel Hall | Quatuor Ebène at Carnegie Hall: From Beethoven to Disney |
 It would be difficult indeed to imagine an evening of string quartet playing at once more diverse and more brilliant than this. Already one of the world’s finer quartets after only a few years in the public eye, the Quatuor Ebène are notable for their catholic tastes. Music, after all, is music, and there is no need to divide genres as we have done for so long, nor sneer at those who try to bring them together.Read full review... | |
| 15-Mar-2012 Lincoln Center: Avery Fisher Hall | David Zinman's Beethoven Festival in New York Ends with a Solid Eroica |
 There is, nowadays, no one way to play a Beethoven symphony – if indeed there ever was. Just as we today are exposed to the myriad methods of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Christian Thielemann, Bernard Haitink, and Osmo Vänskä, the supposedly bad old days of the 1950s found space for the very different talents of Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer, Erich Kleiber, and Hermann Scherchen to rub shoulders.Read full review... | |
| 4-Mar-2012 Carnegie Hall: Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage | The Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall: Johann and Richard Strauss |
| The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra's latest tour has included three dates at New York's Carnegie Hall: a concert of Sibelius symphonies, another of late Mozart and truncated Wagner, and this one of waltzes, polkas, and Richard Strauss.
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| 25-Jan-2012 West Road Concert Hall | Benjamin Grosvenor dazzles in Cambridge |
 Sussie Ahlburg.jpg) The word 'prodigy' is unavoidable when writing about Benjamin Grosvenor, or so it appears for the headline writers. Having eschewed many big concert dates and growing as an artist in smaller halls, he is clearly setting himself up for the long haul. This ambitious, sold-out Cambridge concert showed both how brilliant a pianist he already is, and hinted at how far he could go in the future.
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| 23-Jan-2012 Wigmore Hall | Dark Dvořák, light Haydn with the Takács Quartet |
 Ellen Appel.jpg) This was a short BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert, but a very good one. Of course, nothing less would be expected from the Takács Quartet, who surely have a very good claim to be the world's foremost string quartet. Even if only for a sold-out hour, all the characteristics which make them great were amply on show here.
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| 15-Jan-2012 Barbican Centre: Hall | Thomas Adès sparkles conducting the LSO in his Tevot and In Seven Days |
 Thomas Adès' music has a rawness that only comes across heard live. This seems particularly true when he conducts it himself. Gone are the smooth contours of recordings and other conductors, replaced by a focus on infectious rhythm and sometimes brutal colours. His lyrical tendencies therefore become all the more powerful.
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