GRAMOPHONE Review: Mahler Symphony No. 5 – Düsseldorfer Symphoniker/Fischer
Adam Fischer’s kinship with this music seems to grow exponentially with each successive instalment of what is already proving an exceptional Mahler cycle. There’s a stylistic and emotional understanding which goes beyond the precisely annotated scores. It…
GRAMOPHONE Review: The Last Concert – Claudio Abbado/Berlin Philharmonic
Claudio Abbado stepped down from his post as Chief Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in May 2002 on the stage of the Musikverein, Vienna. 4000 roses rained down on his departure. Just over a decade later…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Bernstein Orchestral Works – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic/Lindberg
A compendium of popular and streetwise Lenny for Bernstein 100 – and the virtuosic trombonist in Christian Lindberg surely gives him a jazzer’s head-start on just how this music should go. It certainly feels that way. I…
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 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…
