When it comes to the style and essence of their music Ottorino Respighi and Luigi Dallapiccola really come from entirely different places. Church Windows and Il prigioniero, heard side by…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
Lise Davidsen and Freddie De Tommaso: voices of star quality in an exceptional recital
The last couple of times I have reviewed Lise Davidsen at the Barbican – who is beginning to feel at home in this hall as Birgit Nilsson once did at…
Kathryn Rudge sings an exquisite Sea Pictures beside Vasily Petrenko’s safe Mahler Sixth
The coupling of Elgar’s Sea Pictures and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is not an obvious one. One tangible link is that Mahler conducted Sea Pictures in the final year of his…
Chelsea Opera Group present a superb Andrea Chénier at the Southbank
The 2022 summer opera season has been getting well and truly underway this week, with first nights at Opera Holland Park (Eugene Onegin) and Garsington (Orfeo), following Glyndebourne’s production of…
Apollo of the Arts: Lost Lamentations – a concert for connoisseurs at Winchester College Chapel
It’s rare these days to find a new vocal ensemble prepared to dip its toe in the water of Marian-themed repertoire that is virtually unknown. Such is the case with…
Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida bring darkness and dreams to Wigmore Hall
Mark Padmore continued his season-residency at Wigmore Hall with a programme of lieder by Beethoven and Schubert. In the latter’s ‘Ihr Bild’, one of the Heine settings in Schwanengesang, the…
Laurence Equilbey and the Insula orchestra bring a very ‘human’ Fidelio to the Barbican Hall
Sometimes, less really is more. Such was confirmed by this powerful and affecting concert performance at the Barbican Hall of Beethoven’s lone opera, Fidelio, by Laurence Equilbey’s Paris-based Insula orchestra…
Zipangu and Lonely Child: Two Claude Vivier masterpieces in magnificent performances by the London Sinfonietta
The Quebquois-born composer Claude Vivier – still largely neglected, despite many of his works having an almost fearless intensity entirely relevant for today – was the subject of a rare…
A glimpse of eternity: the LPO performs Birtwistle and Mahler
For many, the greatest English composer since Purcell and the greatest English composer of opera tout court, Harrison Birtwistle died little more than a fortnight before this concert. Even for…
More virtuosic feats from Tenebrae at Wigmore Hall
Tenebrae is one of the UK’s national treasures and like a perfectly manicured county cricket pitch barely a blade of grass is out of place. Everything in this Wigmore Hall…