| Date and venue | Title | Submitted by |
|---|---|---|
| 15-May-2013 Queen's Hall, Edinburgh | Edinburgh Quartet play Haydn, Britten and Tchaikovsky at the Queen's Hall | Alan Coady |
 Inclement weather stalks the Edinburgh Quartet; at least, those concerts which I’ve attended in the past few months. On cue the early evening heavens opened unstintingly. By the time the concert approached it had “faired”, as the Scots sometimes say, but perhaps disinclination to venture out had been irreversibly embraced by some. That’s not to say that the attendance was poor. The central stalls were pretty full; less so the posture-punishing pews which frame the Queen’s Hall’s wooden horseshoe.Read full review... | ||
| 13-May-2013 St Andrew's Hall | Britten and Bridge with the Philharmonia in Norwich | Nathan Waring |
 The fourteen-year-old Benjamin Britten was already a prolific young composer, albeit without any formal training, when he heard Frank Bridge’s The Sea at the 1927 Norfolk and Norwich Triennial Festival. Hearing this performance and also meeting Bridge (who later became his composition teacher) were seminal events in the youngster’s life. In a letter written in 1963, Britten described himself as being “knocked sideways” by the effect of Bridge’s expressive tone-poem and was thrilled when Bridge agreed to look through his juvenile scribblings.
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| 8-May-2013 BBC Hoddinott Hall | Britten and Poulenc with Adrian Partington and the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales | Philip May |
.jpg) On Wednesday evening the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, conducted by Adrian Partington, presented a programme of choral music by the two musical friends Poulenc and Britten. Interestingly, most of the works also originated from a narrow three-year period in the late 1930s (Poulenc was, at this stage, in his late 30s, Britten in his mid 20s), making the juxtaposition of the composers’ works all the more pertinent.
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| 27-Apr-2013 Queen's Hall, Edinburgh | Scottish Chamber Orchestra and George Benjamin celebrate Britten | Alan Coady |
 This second of two SCO Britten centenary concerts saw its subject juxtaposed with two living British composers and Mozart. Cynics might consider the closing Symphony no. 40 in G minor (1788) a reward for surviving the rest of the programme’s modernity. However, the audience of sophisticated, paying volunteers, such as I felt to be present, would be more likely to detect in it a parallel with our own, home-grown, prolific child prodigy, Benjamin Britten.Read full review... | ||
| 26-Apr-2013 St John's Church, Hagley | The silver chain of sound with Orchestra of the Swan and Tamsin Waley-Cohen | Katherine Dixson, katherinedixson.co.uk |
 David Curtis displayed his usual deceptively effortless ease on the podium. Perhaps this felt like a handy warm-up for the marathon that he would run, hard on the heels of this concert, in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Orchestra of the Swan’s home territory. He’d be racing to raise funds for musical outreach work in schools, one of OOTS’s laudable trademarks, along with their championing of new and contemporary works.Read full review... | ||
| 21-Apr-2013 University of Southampton: Turner Sims | Birmingham Contemporary Music Group play Britten at Turner Sims | Edward Whitney |
 Birmingham Contemporary Music Group is celebrating its 25th anniversary this season, and as it does so it is marking the anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s birth. BCMG is touring a programme of Britten’s early compositions, the second stop of which was at Turner Sims in Southampton.
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| 21-Apr-2013 The Royal Conservatory of Music, TELUS Centre, Koerner Hall | Alisa Weilerstein and Inon Barnatan rule the realm of sonatas for cello and piano | Stanley Fefferman |
 Beethoven started it, the piano’s duologue with the cello, in 1801, with his Seven Variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen” from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Beethoven himself, and many composers from Brahms (1862) through Lera Auerbach (2002) continued to ornament this form. In 1968, Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim, with their recording of Brahms’ Cello Sonata no. 1, reigned as the power-couple of the genre.Read full review... | ||
| 18-Apr-2013 Queen's Hall, Edinburgh | Scottish Chamber Orchestra celebrate Britten with Purcell | Alan Coady |
 Endeavouring to travel lightly through the world, I tend not to collect programme notes. However, such was the quality of Jo Kirkbride’s notes for this SCO Britten centenary celebration that scanning them for e-posterity is tempting. They prompted a consideration of the whole idea of programming. A structured evening’s listening is an entirely different thing from an evening’s will-o’-the-wisp home listening, and it can be greatly enhanced by coherent notes from a single source.
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| 16-Apr-2013 Barbican Centre: Hall | A fitting tribute to Sir Colin Davis: LSO and a superb cast perform Britten's The Turn of the Screw | Julia Savage |
 Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, part of the London Symphony Orchestra’s contribution to the Britten 100 celebrations, was supposed to have been conducted by Sir Colin Davis; it was instead dedicated to his memory following his death last Sunday. Before the concert began, LSO Chairman and Sub-Leader Lennox Mackenzie and LSO Managing Director Kathryn McDowell delivered an eloquent and fitting tribute to the man they described as the “head of our family”.Read full review... | ||
| 10-Apr-2013 Sheldonian Theatre | Exceptional Britten and Dvořák from Maxim Vengerov and the Oxford Philomusica | Katy Wright |
 Just a few weeks after the announcement that Oxford would be hosting the UK’s first major Stradivari exhibition this June, Maxim Vengerov gave a phenomenal performance on one of the Italian craftsman’s instruments. Performing on the ex-Kreutzer instrument made in 1727, Vengerov’s performance with the Oxford Philomusica was unforgettable.
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| 6-Apr-2013 St George's Bristol | Sea pictures and Enigmas (but no Elgar): Enigma Orchestra at St George's Bristol | David Fay |
 I doubt many of us have been to the seaside recently. Even if Bristolians had braved the cold and wet and wind, I’m sure that the mudflats of Brean or the arcades of Weston-super-Mare were a far cry from the visions of that mysterious body of saltwater conjured up by the Enigma Orchestra in their second ever concert at St George’s.Read full review... | ||
| 3-Apr-2013 Wigmore Hall | Britten, Bridge and a co-commission: Britten Sinfonia at Wigmore Hall | Julia Savage |
 The centenary of Britten’s birth has seen a surge in performances of his music both in the concert hall and on the stages of many a noted opera house. Sensationalised biographies, radio and television programmes, and a number of Britten-centred festivals have helped to pique further interest in a composer whose music tends to attract a love-hate relationship with its listeners. Unsurprisingly, Britten Sinfonia is in the midst of a busy year of imaginative concerts and hotly anticipated collaborations.
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| 30-Mar-2013 Staatsoper | New Britten production in Hamburg: Gloriana as a village pageant | Nahoko Gotoh |
 British director Richard Jones is well known for his bold, modern and often controversial takes on operatic repertoire. So I was very curious to see what surprising ideas he would come up with in directing Britten’s rarely performed opera Gloriana, originally composed in honour of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. 60 years on, this new production opened on 24 March at the Hamburg State Opera, and will travel to the Royal Opera House in June.
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| 28-Mar-2013 Bridgewater Hall | Hunting music in Manchester with the Hallé | Rohan Shotton |
 Sir Mark Elder conducted the Hallé in an unusual programme of music themed around hunting. There were many excellent performances, most memorably in Britten's Our Hunting Fathers, which added substantial depth to the evening.
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| 28-Mar-2013 BBC Hoddinott Hall | 20th-century concerti with Tadaaki Otaka and BBC National Orchestra of Wales | Philip May |
 “Three concertos and an epitaph” is how the Wales Millennium Centre summed up tonight’s concert. Not only did the selected programme focus almost exclusively on three composers’ essays in the concerto genre, but it also spanned a narrow period of time within the mid 20th-century: 22 years in total, or 38 if one includes Andrzej Panufnik’s Katyn Epitaph.
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| 13-Mar-2013 Bridgewater Hall | MacMillan, Britten and Stravinsky with the BBC Philharmonic and H.K. Gruber | Andrew H. King |
 Conductor H.K. Gruber’s visits to the BBC Philharmonic are guaranteed to be unmissable concerts of the season; with unquenchable enthusiasm and pride in the music he programmes, Gruber, (known affectionately to all as “Nali”), always assures a stirring performance.
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| 1-Mar-2013 Epstein Theatre | Britten's The Beggar's Opera with the RLPO | Andrew H. King |
 On 29 January 1728, at John Rich’s theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, playwright John Gay and composer Johann Christoph Pepusch presented to the London public a new ballad opera that would shake the foundations of musical entertainment. Hitherto dominated by Italian opera, the London stage was principally the stomping ground of composers like Handel, Porpora, and Bononcini, as well as the imported French, German and Italian opera stars of the day, all of whom achieved dizzying levels of success.Read full review... | ||
| 24-Feb-2013 Brooklyn Academy of Music: Howard Gilman Opera House | New York City Opera's Turn of the Screw says too much | Zerbinetta |
 Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera The Turn of the Screw is a sensible choice for the New York City Opera: its chamber orchestration and emotional intimacy make it unsuitable for production by the Met Opera (against which every other company in town must define itself), and its claustrophobia would seem to offer a great opportunity for one of the company’s more innovative directors to create something creepy and unexpected. It also enjoys the name recognition to fill seats – which has, unfortunately, been an issue for the company’s more adventurous recent efforts.Read full review... | ||
| 23-Feb-2013 HKAPA: Concert Hall | City Chamber Orchestra and Die Konzertisten perform Britten at the Hong Kong Arts Festival | Alan Yu, alanayu.wordpress.com |
 In celebration of the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth, the Hong Kong Arts Festival this year is presenting three programmes of works by the composer in collaboration with local choral group Die Konzertisten. The first of these, collectively called “The Britten 100 Project”, consisted of his early works based on religious themes completed mostly in the decade between 1934 and 1943.
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| 21-Feb-2013 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | The Philharmonia celebrate music: Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony | Renée Reitsma, ypgtcm.blogspot.com |
 Britten’s Death in Venice suite, arranged by Steuart Bedford, is a continuous piece of music taken from the opera. As such, it is an extremely scenic work and even though it has its moments, I could not help but long for the actual opera rather than these excerpts (thankfully it will be performed by ENO later this year). The suite starts off rather calmly, but soon we found out that the stars of the piece were the percussion instruments.Read full review... | ||
| 21-Feb-2013 St George's Bristol | The Badke Quartet play Haydn and Britten | Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres |
 Freezing lunchtime weather made the golden uplighting on the stage a particularly welcome sight. The Badke Quartet played two pieces in this hour-long programme: Haydn’s Quartet in D major Op. 20 no. 4,, and Britten’s Quartet no. 3. To celebrate the Britten centenary, the Badke Quartet explained that they plan to play their way through all three of Britten’s string quartets during the course of the year.
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| 19-Feb-2013 Perth Concert Hall (Horsecross) | Music to drive you wild: La Follia with Scottish Ensemble | David Smythe |
-1.jpg) A very striking wild-eyed hirsute man has been staring out at us across Scotland on posters for this concert tour, showing that the Scottish Ensemble has adapted well to the modern world of promotion, using titles, straplines and imagination. On the face of things, the choice of eight seemingly very disconnected pieces in the programme, from 1700 to the present day, was disconcerting. Jonathan Morton explained to the audience that the link was “lots of repeated things over a long time” – notes, chord sequences or tunes.Read full review... | ||
| 8-Feb-2013 Gresham's School: Auden Theatre | Little-known Britten juvenilia brought to the fore at Gresham's School | Nathan Waring |
 The centenary of Benjamin Britten continues to gather pace as we move through February and it was a warm welcome given to the Aronowitz Ensemble for an all-English programme of chamber music on Friday evening. Gresham’s Auden Theatre is at the heart of many of the schools’ activities to celebrate their most famous old-boy and the Aronowitz Ensemble made the most of the occasion by programming works not only by Britten, but by his teacher Frank Bridge also.
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| 8-Feb-2013 Royal College of Music: Britten Theatre | Iain Burnside's Journeying Boys at the Royal College of Music | Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade |
 “Bring it on”. This was the response of Nicholas Sears, Head of Vocal Studies at the Royal College of Music, when Iain Burnside sketched out his plan for a music theatre event that would almost certainly cross boundaries of taste. Using Benjamin Britten’s song cycle Les Illuminations as a point of departure, Journeying Boys traces the life of the 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose prose-poem suite Les Illuminations forms the basis of Britten’s composition.Read full review... | ||
| 7-Feb-2013 Howard Assembly Room | Delius, Britten and Elgar from Tasmin Little and Martin Roscoe | Sam Wigglesworth |
 Delius is a composer who is often misunderstood, the English pastoralism of works like On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring hardly representative of either his cosmopolitan life or the breadth of his output. Tasmin Little has long been one of the composer’s most passionate advocates, and opened this recital with her regular duo partner Martin Roscoe with the earliest of Delius’ four violin sonatas.Read full review... | ||
| 6-Feb-2013 Birmingham Symphony Hall | Exceptional Sibelius and barnstorming Britten from Osborne, Volkov and the CBSO | Peter Marks |
 Ilan Volkov, a regular guest conductor with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, is a passionate advocate form contemporary and modern music. His programmes with his current orchestra, the Iceland Symphony, and his previous one, the BBC Scottish Symphony, often consist entirely of such works. This concert, featuring works from the 20th and 21st centuries, was ideally suited to Volkov’s lucid and intelligent conducting.
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| 31-Jan-2013 St Lawrence Centre For The Arts: Jane Mallett Theatre | St Lawrence String Quartet at Music Toronto make Haydn, Britten and Zwilich sing | Stanley Fefferman |
 People want to be in love and to live forever. That is not how things work out. Haydn explores this contradiction in his string quartets. What makes each quartet different is how Haydn resolves musically the way things do work out. The St Lawrence String Quartet bolded the elements of this contradiction in their contrasty treatment of two Haydn quartets, one early and one late, and extended this bold style of interpretation to works by Britten and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. They made the music sing in a way that was vital and refreshing.
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| 31-Jan-2013 Bridgewater Hall | Britten, Ravel and Janáček with Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé | Andrew H. King |
| The 2013 Britten centenary celebrations are now well under way with every major and minor musical institution, British and foreign, scheduling a broad range of works in honour of Britten’s birth. The Hallé’s first contribution, under the direction of Sir Mark Elder, consists of a suite, compiled by Mervyn Cooke and Donald Mitchell, from Britten’s only full-length ballet score The Prince of the Pagodas. Read full review... | ||
| 26-Jan-2013 Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama: Dora Stoutzker Hall | The Welsh Sinfonia play Britten and Michael Csány-Wills | Philip May |
 In light of this year’s Britten centenary, The Welsh Sinfonia has slipped its foot in the door with what will be one of many commemorative concerts to be given over the next eleven months.
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| 26-Jan-2013 Theatre Royal | A Midsummer Night's Dream in neon | David Smythe |
 Audiences have come to look forward to the annual co-production between Scottish Opera and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where student opera singers, orchestra players and backstage crew get a chance to partner up with their professionals across the other side of Glasgow’s Hope Street. In this big Year of Britten, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its many individual singing parts, was a good choice, made even more special by reviving the distinctive 2005 Covent Garden production from Olivia Fuchs.
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| 17-Jan-2013 Birmingham Symphony Hall | Springtime and the sea with Edward Gardner and the CBSO | Andrew H. King |
 The sea has been the inspiration for many concert works; Debussy’s La mer springs to mind immediately as perhaps the most popular, but in England during the first half of the 20th century nautical themes sustained an important presence. Amongst Delius’ Sea Drift, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony and Britten’s Four Sea Interludes sits Frank Bridge’s short and splendid suite The Sea.
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| 14-Jan-2013 The Norwegian Opera and Ballet | This is all: Britten's The Rape of Lucretia at the Norwegian National Opera | Aksel Tollåli |
 Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia is, as the title implies, not an easy opera subject-wise. It is based on André Obey’s play Le viol de Lucrèce, which in turn is partially based on Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece. This was Britten’s third opera, and the first of his so-called chamber operas, operas with small orchestras and small casts.
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| 11-Jan-2013 Barbican Centre: Hall | A tour of British music: Clyne, Britten and Elgar with the BBC Symphony Orchestra | Madelaine Jones |
.jpg) Britain is a country not often historically associated with great composers, repertoire or music: apart from the occasional early music programme peppered with Purcell or production of Peter Grimes, there is a great tendency to overlook British classical music, both past and present, in favour of its Germanic and Slavic cousins.Read full review... | ||
| 5-Jan-2013 Leeds Town Hall | The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain are the sun to Holst's Planets | Andrew H. King |
 Assembling tonight in Leeds Town Hall for a programme of English and American scores by Adams, Britten and Holst, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, directed by John Wilson, presented three fiendishly difficult works. With all three pieces incorporating a variety of prominently nerve-shattering musical agonies, this programme might be the frustration or terror of any professional orchestra.
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| 4-Jan-2013 St Martin-in-the-Fields | Vivamus impress with Britten and Whitacre at Brandenburg Choral Festival | Billie Hylton |
 After the overload of concerts and carol singing around Christmas, most choirs have a well-deserved break before starting for another year, but not Vivamus. This young London-based choir entered 2013 in style with a candlelit concert for Epiphany. The concert’s main advertised work was Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, with other composers on the programme including Leighton, Howells and Whitacre.
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| 6-Dec-2012 St John's Kirk | Scottish Ensemble showcase Bach and Britten in variations by candlelight | David Smythe |
 Every December, the Scottish Ensemble takes a candlelit concert around Scotland. The music is not usually Christmassy, yet often suits the more contemplative season of Advent and comes as a complementary alternative to the many festive musical performances on offer and a relief from carols on loop in the shops.
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| 1-Dec-2012 Sheldonian Theatre | Superlative Britten in Oxford: World première of Two Psalms | Katy Wright |
 With his centenary year fast approaching, Saturday night’s concert was a celebration of all things Britten. The festivities have certainly begun in style in Oxford, with Nicholas Cleobury leading the Oxford Bach Choir, the English Chamber Orchestra and soprano Elizabeth Atherton in some truly outstanding music-making. Mixing works by Britten himself with those by composers who influenced him, the performances of the majority of the pieces were dynamic and committed, and certainly made for a memorable evening.
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| 30-Nov-2012 Wigmore Hall | Britten's Five Canticles at the Wigmore Hall | Emily Owen |
 Celebrating Britten’s centenary, tonight’s performance of his five canticles seemed particularly fitting. Written throughout his composing career, they are a testament to the composer’s affinity for poetry and skill at writing with particular performers in mind, and they provide an intimate commentary on Britten’s large-scale works.
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| 27-Nov-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Strange meetings: Britten's War Requiem at the Southbank Centre | Ninfea Cruttwell-Reade |
 November continues to be a month of poppy art, despite Philip Larkin’s derisory account of “Wreath-rubbish in Whitehall”. As the only flower to survive the ravished soils of the trenches following the First World War, the poppy is replicated in the form of a paper badge to be worn yearly in commemoration of 11 November, the Armistice Day of 1918. It was deemed to be a symbol of hope and regeneration in the aftermath of devastating combat.Read full review... | ||
| 22-Nov-2012 Sage: Hall One | Blessed Cecilia celebrated in style by Gabrieli Consort & Players | Jane Shuttleworth |
 22 November, St Cecilia’s day, lends itself perfectly to music by two of Britain’s greatest composers. Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten both wrote pieces to celebrate Cecilia as patron saint of music, and Britten was inspired and enriched by Purcell’s music. Fortuitously for concert programmers, Britten’s birthday also falls on St Cecilia’s day, and so today also marks the beginning of the Britten centenary celebrations.
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| 22-Nov-2012 Wigmore Hall | Britten Sinfonia and Alice Coote celebrate Britten's birthday in style at Wigmore Hall | Evan Dickerson |
 22 November 2012 would have been Benjamin Britten’s 99th birthday. Wigmore Hall marked the occasion with the first concert in a series of nine events in November and December. However, rather than focusing exclusively on Britten’s music, it built towards the climax that saw Britten’s angst-ridden late masterpiece Phaedra searingly performed.
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| 18-Nov-2012 Trinity Church, Wimbledon | Benedict Cumberbatch joins the Britten Oboe Quartet in Wimbledon | Paul Kilbey |
 How do you get more people interested in classical music? It’s a difficult question, but I’d never have guessed it was difficult enough to give to Sherlock Holmes. But sure enough, last Sunday night saw the crowds flock to an oboe quartet recital in a small Wimbledon church, and while they may mostly have been there to see Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch read some poetry, they also gradually became one of the most genuinely engaged and enthusiastic audiences I’ve ever been a part of at a classical concert.
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| 17-Nov-2012 Canongate Kirk | Calton Consort: Translated Daughters | Alan Coady |
 From the altar of their customary home in Edinburgh’s 1691 Canongate Kirk, Calton Consort presented an a cappella concert enigmatically entitled “Translated Daughters”. The enigma dissolved upon hearing W.H. Auden’s text for Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia. It features the arresting couplet: “Translated Daughter, come down and startle / Composing mortals with immortal fire.” As though the transmission of musical inspiration from Heaven to Earth were not difficult enough, Britten experienced his own earthbound obstacles.Read full review... | ||
| 10-Nov-2012 The Royal Conservatory of Music, TELUS Centre, Koerner Hall | Excellent rapport: The Takács Quartet and Marc-André Hamelin at Koerner Hall | Stanley Fefferman |
 Each time I hear the Takács Quartet in concert a new excellence comes through: this time it is their gentleness. Schubert’s String Quartet in A minor, “Rosamunde” is allowed to unfold gently, as the petals of a rose open themselves. Edward Dusinberre’s first violin sings the wistful theme – a reference to the composer’s heavy-hearted song “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”, whose lyric sets the mood: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I’ll find it never, never again”.Read full review... | ||
| 27-Oct-2012 Barbican Centre: Hall | Looking Forward with Britten Sinfonia at the Barbican | Paul Kilbey |
 Rhydian Peters.jpg) Pleasantly enough, Britten Sinfonia went down a thoroughly unconventional route in celebrating their 20th birthday at the Barbican on Saturday, with a brilliantly varied range of new pieces mixing with chamber orchestra classics. With a stellar range of guests, they carried us along all the way from Purcell to Moondog, encapsulating the spirit of versatility and openness which makes the group what it is.
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| 22-Oct-2012 Caird Hall | Illuminations: New innovations from the Scottish Ensemble in Dundee | David Smythe |
 The Scottish Ensemble has been resident in Dundee for four days, really getting under the skin of the city. Amongst a whole raft of activities, including pop-up concerts, performing a film score live at a screening at Dundee Contemporary Arts, the Ensemble has been working with string players from Dundee Schools Orchestra and Dundee Symphony Orchestra.
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| 12-Oct-2012 Usher Hall | RSNO with Oundjian: Britten, Rachmaninov and Brahms | Alan Coady |
 Although the Usher Hall was slightly less packed than for the inaugural concert of the season, there was a healthy crowd. If two concerts is sufficient to gauge an emerging format then Music Director Peter Oundjian’s preferred style seems to be to save welcoming remarks until after the opening piece, at which point he talks us through the evening as a whole.
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| 8-Oct-2012 New National Theatre: Opera House | An outstanding Peter Grimes in Tokyo | Nahoko Gotoh |
 Willy Decker’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, which originated at La Monnaie in Brussels in 1994 and was revived at London’s Royal Opera House in 2004 and 2011, has now reached Tokyo. The work opened the new season of the New National Theatre Tokyo, the capital’s main opera house, currently celebrating its 15th anniversary. It’s the first time the New National Theatre has staged Peter Grimes, and Decker himself directed this revival with great care and attention to detail.
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| 6-Oct-2012 Royal Opera House: Linbury Studio Theatre | English Touring Opera perform Britten's Albert Herring in London | Emily Owen |
 “Community, exclusion, rejection and desire”, writes director Christopher Rolls about English Touring Opera’s production of Albert Herring. “Doesn’t sound like a recipe for an uproarious comedy does it?Read full review... | ||
| 27-Sep-2012 La Maison Symphonique de Montréal | James Conlon and Gil Shaham with the Montréal Symphony | Andrew Crust |
 In recent seasons the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal has had a tradition of crafting remarkably excellent programs which not only entertain, but suggest a dramatic or historical link between the featured works. Tonight was no exception: it was a program united by dances, by Spain and by Impressionism. Most strikingly, it was an evening featuring brilliant orchestrators.
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