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 Review: War Paint – Original Broadway Cast Recording/Frankel
The title, the concept, the casting would seem to have Broadway success written all over it. A musical about the bitter rivalry between two iconic cosmetic giants – Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden – who never met…
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 Review: Falsettos – 2016 Broadway Cast Recording/Finn
The two parts of William Finn and James Lapine’s brilliant urban opera Falsettos first came together in 1992 when the horrendous human cost of the AIDS epidemic was still incalculable. But March of the Falsettos (1981) and…
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: 42nd Street – 2017 London Cast Recording
The sound of tapping feet invokes a whole era of classic Broadway and Hollywood musicals and when the curtain rises on this tap-infused extravaganza it pauses eighteen inches or so off the stage to afford us our…
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 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…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – February 2018
Last month’s focus on the Jarvi conducting dynasty has prompted me to reflect on the number of times Jarvi senior (father Neeme) has come out on top in my own comparative reviewing – not least on BBC…
