GRAMOPHONE Review: Mahler Symphony No. 6 – Minnesota Orchestra/Vanska
The distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is crucial in Mahler and it doesn’t take long to establish that Vanska’s bias is emphatically towards the former. The opening Allegro energico ma non troppo is very non troppo indeed…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Bernstein Mass – Philadephia Orchestra/Nézet-Séguin
The more live performances, the more live recordings, one experiences of this marvellous piece the more challenging it seems. No question that Bernstein’s inaugural recording – with an extraordinary cast that had been in intensive rehearsal for…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – May 2018
She adorns the front cover of this issue just as she has so many magazine covers in the 100 years since her birth – but eclipsing every personal memory of Birgit Nilsson on record and in the…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Shostakovich Symphony No. 7 – London Philharmonic Orchestra/Masur
The opening of this tremendous piece reveals so much about a performance. Before the invasion, before the siege of Leningrad, there is buoyancy and uplift and hopefulness in the confidant and forthright theme which begins and indeed…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – April 2018
The dramatic and somewhat predictably mixed reaction to Barrie Kosky’s staging of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera House recently (a show first seen in Frankfurt in 2016) once again raised questions as to how far opera…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Mahler Symphony No. 1 – Düsseldorfer Symphoniker / Fischer
This is a terrific account of Mahler’s fledgling symphony – full of the rashness and impetuosity of youth and the wild imaginings that go hand in hand with it. Each time that eight-octave-deep “silence” of the opening…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Mahler Symphony No. 7 – Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Mariss Jansons
I barely recognise the symphony I know and love as being wild and wonderful, elemental, fantastical, startling, from this beautifully executed (well it is the Royal Concertgebouw) but oddly sanitised performance. It’s as if health and safety…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – March 2018
Late last year I attended the UK Premiere of Anders Hillborg’s Violin Concerto No 2 performed by its spellbinding dedicatee – the extraordinary Lisa Batiashvili- and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under its Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo. I…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Bartok Concerto for Orchestra/Piano Concerto No 3 – Javier Perianes/Münchner Philharmoniker Pablo Heras-Casado
Late, late, Bartok – the pair of masterpieces that could and would have turned his fortunes around during his final years exiled in America. Financially embarrassed, terminally ill, it was not to be. Conductor and soloist are…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Heggie – Great Scott
There’s a cunning (and witty) interplay of ideas at work here. Sport versus Art, better yet American Football versus Opera; an opera within an opera, better yet an Italian opera within an American opera. You can absolutely…
