Past reviews

2007/08 Season >
2006/07 Season >
2005/06 Season >

Current reviews are in the Newsletter section >

2007/08 Season

30 April 2008 – Royal Festival Hall
Osmo Vänskä conducts Wagner, Beethoven and Sibelius
It was followed by Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, which traces a course from Stygian gloom via frozen grief towards an ambiguous ending; Vänskä drew playing of utmost subtlety from the LPO.
John Allison, The Sunday Telegraph, 11 May 2008

26 April 2008 – Royal Festival Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Verdi’s Requiem
In fact, unremittingly intense as Verdi’s Requiem is, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a performance as emotionally gripping. It had that essential Jurowski ‘stripped-down’ flavour, allied to an unfailing dramatic awareness … The sound was rich, warm and balanced, no doubt helped by the addition of valved trombones and the fearsome cimbasso (a double bass trombone) in the pursuit of that authentic Verdi sound.
Neil Fisher, The Times, 29 April 2008

13 April 2008 – Royal Festival Hall
Christoph Eschenbach conducts Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde
Instantly establishing her authority in the poignant second song of autumn loneliness, she [Petra Lang], Eschenbach and the exquisitely responsive lead woodwinds of the LPO proceeded to run the full gamut of longing, sorrow and loss, redeemed by Nature’s renewal in the culminating ‘Farewell’ with its ineffable, far-horizon fade-out. It was almost a minute before the audience dared to break the final silence.
Bayan Northcott, The Independent, 16 April 2008

5 March 2008 – Royal Festival Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Ravel and Shostakovich
And the highest accolade one can pay to Jurowski’s detailed and deeply felt reading of the symphony was that, where others may leave only an impression of tub-thumping rhetoric with this piece, Jurowski left one in no doubt of its greatness.
Edward Seckerson, The Independent, 10 March 2008

… the LPO’s brass and strings showing superhuman ease with Jurowski’s relentless accelerando … Throughout, the playing (five stars for the brass) was icily majestic; the final destination never out of sight. And plenty of years yet, we hope, to hear more Shostakovich from Vlad and the LPO’s ripe partnership.
Neil Fisher, The Times, 7 March 2008

13 February 2008 – Royal Festival Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Turnage
With Collins in top form, as adept at sudden entries as wonderfully sustained passages, the different sections of this fine orchestra savoured the chance to showcase their skills, the strings as silky as the woodwind were ethereal and the brass, well, brassy.
Anthony Holden, The Observer, 17 February 2008

2 February 2008 – Royal Festival Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Tchaikovsky’s Symphony 6
Audacious, self-centred, soulful, masochistic – the Pathétique in Jurowski’s hands gave us the tears without the glycerine, made the waltz wink and the march glitter, and balanced the instrumental strands most carefully. The LPO strings scaled a new temperature in warmth, brass and winds never turned vulgar; all was splendid.
Geoff Brown, The Times, 5 February 2008

30 January 2008 – Royal Festival Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Prokofiev’s Symphony 5
Jurowski and the orchestra were at their most vital and detailed after the interval, in Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony. Every one of its wide-ranging gestures – the oddly half-hearted heroism of the first movement, the manic brilliance of the scherzo and finale, the frustrated lyricism of the slow movements – was executed with conviction.
George Hall, The Guardian, 2 February 2008

23 January 2008 – Royal Festival Hall
Emmanuel Krivine conducts Brahms, Sibelius and Zemlinsky
Brooding nobility characterised their first offering, Brahms's Tragic Overture; a fine, dark-blooded reading. Finessed ensemble playing and subtle instrumental colours continued throughout...

On then to the watery excesses of Zemlinsky's 40-minute Seejungfrau of 1902, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's sad story of unrequited love, The Little Mermaid. In length and opulence the work compares favourably with the contemporary symphonic whoppers of Strauss, though as a composer Zemlinsky has a smaller talent, certainly a smaller ego. No matter how manicured Krivine's beat, the work's padding and repetitions remained; this is a work that needs scissors. But it's also a work of splendid pages, and Krivine and the LPO made the highlights gleam, from the opening crawl along the ocean floor, and the storm spray and succulent string themes, to the whirl of the second movement's ball. And it was refreshing to hear even underpar Zemlinsky in concert: rather that than yet another battering of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben.
Geoff Brown, The Independent, January 2008

15 December 2007 – Royal Festival Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Vaughan Williams, Higdon and Stravinsky
The LPO strings, honed and polished, hovered in gentle rapture over the Fantasia’s modal musings. From that point on, every part of the orchestra let loose with jiggling bedlam … This was a Rite that took time to show its teeth. But when they were bared, in the awesome crescendo concluding Part 1, in the woodwind shrieks, the scything brass or the blood stomp of the Sacrificial Dance, those teeth were sharp and wicked.
Geoff Brown, The Times, 19 December 2007

28 November 2007 – Royal Festival Hall
Christoph Eschenbach conducts Mahler’s Symphony 4
Yet there was absolutely nothing casual about the account of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in G, through which Eschenbach led an LPO that was joyously with him all the way. Rarely has the opening movement, that sweet-sour apogee of Mahlerian neoclassicism, with its pert nursery tunes and Johann Strauss-style sentiments, sounded so resonantly clear in its scoring – one heard every note. Rarely can the massed string textures of the major-key variations of the slow movement have sounded so radiantly serene, or the alternate minor-key plunges to the depths sounded more sonorous.
Bayan Northcott, The Independent, 30 November 2007

14 November 2007 – Royal Festival Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Zemlinsky, Korngold and Shostakovich
Vladimir Jurowski’s determination to wean the London Philharmonic off a meat-and-two-veg diet of familiar symphonies is admirable … What’s so refreshing about Jurowski’s programming, however, is that there’s usually a thread connecting all the music in a concert … Jurowski’s reading of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony, with the revitalised LPO playing out of their collective socks, swept all before it.
Richard Morrison, The Times, 19 November 2007

3 November 2007 – Royal Festival Hall
David Parry conducts Bellini’s La straniera
David Parry conducted with a fine blend of poise and passion … As London’s first Straniera since – could it be the King’s Theatre performance of 1832 with Grisi, Rubini and Tamburini? Correct me, those with ampler annals! – this performance with its beautiful heroine was something to cherish.
Andrew Porter, Opera, January 2008

7 October 2007 - Royal Festival Hall
On October 7, 1932, Sir Thomas Beecham presented his new London Philharmonic Orchestra to the Queen's Hall. Something of his spirit was to be felt in Sunday's performance of Mozart's Prague Symphony - the only work from that original debut programme. Not since Beecham has the LPO had a conductor with such a mercurial sense for the wit and inner energies of the 18th-century repertoire as their new principal conductor, Vladimir Jurowski. Messages sped from the nerves of the music to its muscle: in this performance of Mozart's Symphony No 38 it was the speed of reaction and response rather than merely of tempo that counted.

The entire evening's celebrations had been introduced by a buoyant brass fanfare written for the occasion by the LPO's principal horn, Richard Bissill. A golden arc of brass was arrayed on stage, in two octet groups. And, as though in stereo, they played with their patternings of alarums and swooping melodies, all based on a jazz-waltz rhythm arising from the sound of the words "seventy-five".

At the opposite end of the evening, Jurowski had sent the orchestra his own birthday present in the form of an exquisitely wrapped performance of Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances. The LPO eagerly tore it open, stomping through the primitive dance rhythms of the opening, and creating a strange, almost sinister valse triste of a waltz, with ever-shifting levels of recession within the strings and muted trumpets.
The Times, Tuesday 9 October - Hilary Finch


On Oct 7, 1932, the London Philharmonic Orchestra gave its first ever concert in the old Queen's Hall under its founder, Sir Thomas Beecham, in a programme that included Mozart's Prague Symphony. If we needed any evidence of how things have changed in the musical world in the intervening years, then the performance of the same work in the orchestra's birthday concert exactly 75 years on, under its latest music director Vladimir Jurowski, couldn't have been more instructive.

One wonders what Sir Thomas would have made of the use of valveless horns and trumpets, hard timpani sticks and virtually vibrato-free strings, never mind the dapper speed of the andante and the adherence to every last repeat. Period practice in modern symphony orchestras is now de rigueur in music of the 18th and early 19th centuries - except, perhaps, in the hands of a few of the old guard among conductors - so Jurowski's Mozart was by no means remarkable in this respect. But it was noteworthy for other reasons: the way he teased out the contrapuntal interplay of the allegro, helped by his antiphonal placing of the two sections of violins; the exquisite shaping of phrases in the central andante; and the stylish wit and sense of operatic denouement that characterised his finale.

The whole concert was as much a celebration of today's conductor-orchestra partnership as it was a tribute to the LPO's history. It ended with a work they have already played and recorded to much acclaim, Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances - it's emblematic of the versatility of today's orchestral musicians that the players could move with such ease from the first half's "authentic" Classicism to this supreme example of late-flowering Romanticism. Jurowski brought out the music's macabre aspects with particular insight: percussion rattled and rolled, brass roared, woodwind pleaded and strings soared.
The Jurowski era looks set to be a golden one and though the changes in 75 years might leave Sir Thomas a bit bewildered, he would be proud of what his offspring had made of itself.
The Telegraph, Tuesday 9 October - Matthew Rye

26 September 2007 - Royal Festival Hall
... Litton, who received the Elgar Society's Medal at the end of the evening, drew deep, instinctive breathing and mercurial responses from the players, with the elegiac heart of the work most beautifully paced.
The Times Online Fri 28 Sep - Hilary Finch


'... Elgar’s Symphony No 2, received a comparably tradition-minded, blazingly vivid performance by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrew Litton in its second Festival Hall concert this season.'
The Sunday Times Sun 7 Oct 07 - Paul Driver

19 September 2007 - Royal Festival Hall
In his debut as the LPO's principal conductor, Jurowski opened the Festival Hall's new season with a programme ambitious enough to amount to a mission statement, with Wagner's Parsifal prelude and Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra as mere hors d'oeuvres to the complete, original version of Mahler's Das klagende Lied.

This was more than just another concert; it was a long, intense journey through century-old musical minutiae, deconstructing the influence of late Wagner on early Mahler, each to some degree guilty of luxuriant self-indulgence at opposite ends of their careers. The portentousness of Wagner's Holy Grail epic and the theatricality of Mahler's choral fairy tale made the austere, atonal Berg sound almost flippant, if not lightweight, for all the terrible beauty of his contrapuntal imaginings.

... this was a menu to test the mettle of the greatest of orchestras, led by Jurowski with a conviction beyond his years. Don't let that neo-Rattle mane of hair and those Slavic good looks deceive you: here is one of those rare maestros whose consummate musicianship is forged by intense self-discipline, demanding introspection and an extensive hinterland in other art forms...
The Observer, Sunday 23 September - Anthony Holden


They called it The Plaintive Song in the programme, but that's rather underselling Mahler's Das Klagende Lied, the glamorous centrepiece of Vladimir Jurowski's first and eagerly awaited concert as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

This eerie cantata, which Mahler finished at the astonishingly youthful age of 20, is both an epic fairytale and a fierce presentiment of the bigger things to come from its distinctly antiheroic composer. As for the song in question - the morbid witness of a murdered prince, piping out of a flute made from his bones - it isn't so much plaintive as grimly accusatory. We know that this is a story that is never going to end well.

Jurowski knew it too. Without skimping on the Technicolor effects of Mahler's glittering orchestration, he moulded a sinuous and sinister path from the sprawling first movement, Waldmärchen, to the crashing, horrifying denouement… there was a real spark and crackle to the playing that made the most of the greater immediacy of the acoustics, although whether those further back in the stalls were getting the same benefit was harder to say.

Berg's hugely testing Three Pieces for Orchestra… an intoxicating, virtuoso performance that chilled and charmed in equal measure.
Times online Friday 21 Sept 07 - Neil Fisher


It was almost like an act of defiance that Vladimir Jurowski began his first concert as chief conductor of the London Philharmonic with the Prelude to Wagner's Parsifal. There could be nothing more challenging with which to launch the orchestra's 75th London season and nothing more pertinent to the Berg and Mahler that followed, Wagner's last opera pointing the way to what could so easily have been Mahler's first - Das Klagende Lied - with Berg the portent of a momentous, if turbulent, future. And with programming like this, that wasn't just a possibility but a promise.

... the winds of change were set to blast through Alban Berg's astounding Three Pieces for Orchestra. It was the boldest and bravest of juxtapositions and I have never heard a more thrilling performance.

As spectral percussion opened up a portal to some godforsaken netherworld, it was as if Berg were carrying the musical trappings of an entire century into oblivion. Figments of the past, tarnished waltzes and the like, decomposed before our ears, Jurowski and the LPO quite dazzlingly chronicling the neurotic switches of mood from lyric to blackly dramatic.

But then, like déjà vu, we were spirited back to Mahler's first magnum opus, Das Klagende Lied... Jurowski strove to startle with each and every special effect... auspicious - and how.
The Independent Fri 21 Sept 07 - Edward Seckerson


It would have been easy for Vladimir Jurowski, in his inaugural concert as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, to have played a Russian crowd-pleaser; or, given that Mahler is to be his focus in coming seasons, a blockbuster symphony.

But no: what we heard - the prelude and finale to Parsifal, followed by Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces and the little-known original version of Mahler's Das klagende Lied - was a typical example of Jurowski's thought-processes. You programme with your head, in this case illustrating a direct lineage from late Romanticism to early Modernism. Then you conduct with your heart. Pulling off such a programme demands absolute conviction in the moment of performance, and this concert had it in spades. If this is a sign of things to come, the Jurowski/LPO partnership will set a standard by which all other London orchestras are judged.

...the LPO "voiced" Wagner's choral parts beautifully, and turned Berg's dense triptych into a ravishing concerto for orchestra.
Financial Times Fri 21 Sept - Andrew Clark


Vladimir Jurowski chose his inaugural concert as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic to tackle Mahler with the orchestra for the first time. He began at the very beginning, with the cantata Das Klagende Lied, which Mahler completed at the age of 20, and later described as his Opus 1. Jurowski elected to conduct the original version, with its lavish scoring, including six harps and an off-stage military band, and the restored first part of the work, Waldmarchen, which Mahler discarded when he revised the work in the 1890s.

With its supernatural narrative and vividly descriptive orchestral writing, Klagende Lied is the nearest to a dramatic work that Mahler ever completed, and Jurowski's own dramatic instincts responded keenly to its blazes of theatricality... Jurowski galvanised both orchestra and singers: there was wonderfully secure brass playing, and full-blooded contributions from the LPO Choir and the team of soloists...

Before the Mahler came the prelude to the first act of Wagner's Parsifal, a rapt, contained performance, which made one long to hear Jurowski unfold the whole music drama, and Berg's Three Orchestral Pieces... which by the final march had become a convincing, tragic statement.
The Guardian Fri 21 Sep 07 - Andrew Clements

2006/07 Season

3 October 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
LPO/Jurowski
The programme for Vladimir Jurowski's latest concert with the London Philharmonic was a curious affair that framed Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with two 20th-century ballet scores, both effectively adaptations. Stravinsky's Pulcinella re-examines the 18th century through modernist eyes by ringing changes on music by Pergolesi. Rodion Shchedrin's Carmen turns extracts from Bizet's eponymous opera into a clattering extravaganza for strings and vast batteries of percussion. The two works are poles apart in quality, however. Pulcinella, with its subtle flashes of irony and tenderness, is almost a masterpiece. Placed by its side, Shchedrin's effort seems a crude exercise in camp.

Both are a nightmare for conductor and orchestra. One false move in Pulcinella and the whole fragile edifice can crumble. However, Jurowski and the LPO achieved near perfection with it: the solo strings weaved filigree patterns over the rest of the players, the woodwind slithered through unctuous gavottes and the brass spun out graceful if portly minuets. Jurowski allowed himself to go completely over the top in Carmen. The LPO strings outdid Mantovani in lubricious slushiness, while the percussionists whirled between their instruments like participants in some dexterous musical Olympiad - a reminder that this is a work that can be more interesting to watch in performance than to hear.

The soloist in the Tchaikovsky, meanwhile, was Leonidas Kavakos, one of the most self-effacing of performers, as well as one of the greatest. Technically, he was staggering, surmounting every challenge with a weighty brilliance. As always with Kavakos, however, showmanship is subordinate to expression. All the double and triple stopping in the finale had shape and meaning as well as virtuosic fire, while the long cantilenas of the opening movement and the central andante were operatic in their intensity. Jurowski and the LPO were at their electrifying best here, too. It was hard to imagine the work being better performed.
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, Tuesday October 3, 2006

23 August 2006 - Royal Albert Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Turnage's A Relic of Memory and Prokofiev's Piano Concerto 2
Not that Vladimir Jurowski ever seemed to project anything other than total command, and in the Prokofiev that followed he was intensity personified. Every sharp accent of this piece seemed to fir into his grand plan, and the London Philharmonic responded with razor-sharp focus.
Neil Fisher, The Times, 25 August 2006

23 August 2006 - Royal Albert Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Turnage's A Relic of Memory and Prokofiev's Piano Concerto 2
Soloist Nikolai Lugansky employed subtle colourings to shade fearsome piano writing…He and Jurowski defined precisely the concerto's extravagant variety in their wide-ranging tour of early modernism, also taking in remnants of the Russian late-Romantic school.
George Hall, The guardian, 25 August 2006

23 August 2006 - Royal Albert Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Turnage's A Relic of Memory and Prokofiev's Piano Concerto 2
What really impressed was the sure grip exerted by Jurowski, both in these two opening pieces and Rakhmaninov's choral spectactular The Bells. Performances of this just-less-than-top-drawer Rakhmaninov do not come better than this.
Richard Falman, Financial Times, 25 August 2006

Back to top >

2005/06 Season

3 May 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Louis Langrée conducts Ravel and Beethoven
French pianist Claire-Marie le Guay's performance with Louis Langrée and the London Philharmonic was a darkly nostalgic affair that uncovered great emotional depths beneath the piece's glittering surface... Langrée conducted with edgy brilliance, and the LPO responded with playing of sleazy virtuosity. This was a great achievement, as was the performance of Ravel's Mother Goose Suite that preceded it. An immaculate judge of mood and colour when it comes to French music, Langrée opened up a beautiful if occasionally uneasy soundscape in which innocence teetered on the brink of experience and shafts of loneliness and sensuality could be heard in the silky strings and acerbic woodwind.
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 8 May 2006

19 April 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Brahms and Schumann
She drew warm and pungent playing in a rigorous account of Brahms's Symphony No. 4, and together with the soloist Melvyn Tan unlocked a great variety of texture in Schumann's Piano Concerto.
John Allison, The Sunday Telegraph, 30 April 2006

19 April 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Brahms and Schumann
Alsop was wonderfully alert to his every emotional shift, and the LPO's playing was exceptionally fluid in its beauty… She offered us a hugely impressive account of the Fourth Symphony, however, carefully highlighting its internal drama. The slow movement, in which grief and consolation are juxtaposed, was particularly fine, while the finale had a severe nobility and a genuine sense of tragic sublimity.
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 25 April 2006

28 April 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Kurt Masur conducts Schumann
The Second Symphony, very obviously written in Beethoven's shadow, found the orchestra galvanised … the violins made a good job of the virtuoso second movement, and the third, with Masur tracing big arcs of melody in his conducting, formed a sumptuous, emotional centre.
Erica Jeal, The Guardian, 2 May 2006

28 April 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Kurt Masur conducts Schumann
He is the picture of benevolent authority: his platform persona is gracious, his gestures are few but decisive … As is Masur's way, he made the lyrical passages intense, the dramatic opening and subsequent irruptions grandly telling.
David Murray Financial Times, 3 May 2006

28 April 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Kurt Masur conducts Schumann
In anniversary terms, Schumann has been the loser this year. Mozart and Shostakovich have won hands down. So, great praise for the London Philharmonic Orchestra for programming an entire concert of Schumann's work … Kurt Masur coaxed out the warmest of string sound in the brooding, slow, improvisatory opening of the overture to Schumann's only opera Genoveva, while the horns produced a strikingly open, almost raw sound ... In Schumann's 2nd Symphony, Masur captured Schumann's aping of Beethoven and Mendelssohn. Never allowing the piece to sag, he observed the many sforzati, bows and fingers flying in the second and final movements, sheer balm delivered in the third.
Annette Morreau, The Independent, 15 May 2006

18 February 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Mozart and Shostakovich
I will consider myself lucky if I hear another Mozart performance in this anniversary year as satisfying as the one Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra gave of the 'Jupiter' on Saturday. It wasn't just a question of rhythm, articulation or period inflexion, all of which were exemplary. It was the way the line of musical argument was so wonderfully sprung and sustained, without being chained to a beat.

Rather than being limited by the move to the Queen Elizabeth Hall while the Festival Hall is renovated, the LPO gives every appearance of feeling liberated. Jurowski's concerts are turning into a festival in all but name, so inventive is the programme-building and so fresh the music-making.
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 21 February 2006

16 February 2006 - Wigmore Hall
and 18 February 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Robin O'Neill conducts a chamber group from the Orchestra in Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss and Vladimir Jurowski conducts Mozart and Shostakovich
Those orchestras normally resident at the Royal Festival Hall are enduring their own Flying Dutchman-style peregrinations during the South Bank's renovations, but they are destined to wander only until next year, not eternity. Still, these are difficult circumstances, and it is good to see and hear the London Philharmonic - and its capacity audiences - adapting with such aplomb ... The concert opened and closed with the conductor Robin O'Neill drawing warm and fluid performances of Strauss's early Serenade in E flat and Suite in B flat ...

Back in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the LPO's principal guest conductor, Vladimir Jurowski, created a buzz with his imaginative programming of Mozart and Shostakovich, two composers whose anniversaries are inspiring little imagination elsewhere.
John Allison, The Sunday Telegraph, 26 February 2006

16 February 2006 - Wigmore Hall
Robin O'Neill conducts a chamber group from the Orchestra in Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss
The players drew on their experience of playing as a section to good effect, and Robin O'Neill conducted them in sleek, suave performances where phrases were ideally shaped and balance was nigh perfect.
Matthew Rye, The Daily Telegraph, 18 February 2006

15 February 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Shostakovich
McBurney takes a few chronological liberties with the 20 resusciated numbers [of his reconstruction of Shostakovich's Hypothetically Murdered] but his aim was to make an effective concert suite. And as presented by a galvanised London Philharmonic under Vladimir Jurowski, effective was certainly the right word - along with blistering, exuberant and manic.
Richard Morrison, The Times, 17 February 2006

15 February 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Shostakovich
This whole piece, like its original subject matter, is pure satire, and was performed here - as was the Jazz Suite - with panache.
Matthew Rye, The Daily Telegraph, 18 February 2006

15 February 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Shostakovich and Mozart
What a wacky programme! I suspect we have the brilliant, young principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Jurowski, to thank for the most original programme so far in the anniversary games of Mozart and Shostakovich, where wit was the main theme ... the sheer brilliance of the playing - often at terrifying speeds - aping cabaret, circus and agitprop made the work an absolute delight.
Annette Morreau, The Independent, 20 February 2006

12 February 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Paul Watkins conducts Stravinsky, Mozart and Dvorak
The programme offered the players an opportunity to spread their wings and they responded with fresh, spry accounts of Stravinsky's Danses Concertantes and Pulcinella, a lyrical, easy-going delivery of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 12 in A, K.414, with Steven Osborne the fluent soloist, and a relative rarity, Dvorak's Serenade in D minor.
Barry Millington, The Standard, 13 February 2006

12 February 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Paul Watkins conducts Stravinsky, Mozart and Dvorak
Both the Dvorak and the Mozart were glorious, however. The Serenade was ebullient, intense and perfectly played …
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 15 February 2006-02-23

30 January 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Satie, Adès, Turnage, MacMillan and Stravinsky
This was a brilliant, impassioned reading [of MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie], the LPO finding itself in fine form.
Stephen Pettitt, Standard, 31 January 2006

30 January 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Satie, Adès, Turnage, MacMillan and Stravinsky
Alsop always conducts with heart and soul, but Adès's darting rhythms and MacMillan's rage and lament found her especially aflame: by the end of the MacMillan she had tears in her eyes. Throughout the LPO responded with their best brightest playing; the house was full, young, and alive.
Geoff Brown, The Times, 1 February 2006

30 January 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Satie, Adès, Turnage, MacMillan and Stravinsky
The LPO played brilliantly for her and the choice of music - a new Mark-Anthony Turnage saxophone concerto, modern classics by Thomas Adès and James MacMillan, plus deceptively 'light' ballet scores by Satie and Stravinsky - played to her strengths.
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 1 February 2006

30 January 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Satie, Adès, Turnage, MacMillan and Stravinsky
Then, as if to prove the amazing variety of British new music, came Thomas Adès's Chamber Symphony, written when the composer was a mere 18. Alsop and the 15 players from the LPO - all cruelly exposed by this devilishly tricky score - made it sound as indecently brilliant as ever.
Ivan Hewett, Daily Telegraph, 2 February 2006

30 January 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Satie, Adès, Turnage, MacMillan and Stravinsky
MacMillan's The Confession of Isobel Gowdie remains a virtuoso piece for orchestra, and the LPO rose to the occasion.
Annette Morreau, The Independent, 3 February 2006

30 January 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Marin Alsop conducts Satie, Adès, Turnage, MacMillan and Stravinsky
A packed house of LPO loyalists was thus treated to handsome value for money in rarefied repertoire giving every department of this fine orchestra the chance to parade its skills under a modern master.
Anthony Holden, The Observer, 5 February 2006

18 January 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Mark Elder conducts Richard Strauss
It was a performance of wonderful ebb and flow, with skeins of string sound constantly changing their colour and texture. It wasn't a Karajan-style exercise in plush tone and romantic rhetoric, but something much more personal and introspective, which made Strauss seem an altogether more interesting, and ambiguous, 20th century composer.
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 20 January 2006

18 January 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Mark Elder conducts Stravinsky
Then came the tightest of performances of Dumbarton Oaks, Stravinsky's 'wrong-note' Bach chamber concerto. What elegance, spice and freshness (particularly from the clarinet), showing that the spirit of Pulcinella was not forgotten.
Annette Morreau, The Independent, 20 January 2006

18 January 2006 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Mark Elder conducts Stravinsky and Strauss
The conductor, Mark Elder, drew alert performances in both, but it was the return to the heady German late romanticism of Strauss's Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings that brought out unexpected passion from him and the best playing of the evening. Placed in the spotlight, the musicians of the London Philharmonic Orchestra have nothing to be afraid of during their stint away from the certainty of the usual run of Bruckner and Mahler symphonies.
Richard Fairman, Financial Times, 20 January 2006

10 December 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Pärt
The audience's intense concentration was also testament to the refined intricacy of the solo parts as propounded by Boris Garlitsky and Pieter Schoeman, and to the overall sense of control exerted by Jurowski, who combined certainty of direction with local flexibility.
George Hall, The Guardian, 15 December 2005

10 December 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Mozart, Stravinsky and Pärt
Mozart's formal Masonic Funeral Music, Stravinsky's cerebral Symphonies of Wind Instruments (which was conceived as an elegy for Debussy) and Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, all spotlighting clean playing in the LPO wind section.
Richard Fairman, Financial Times, 13 December 2005

2 December 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Haydn, Shostakovich and Bartók
If he keeps the LPO playing like this, he'll do the OAE out of its Glyndebourne job.
Robert Maycock, Independent, 6 December 2005

2 December 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Simon Trpceski and Paul Beniston play the Shostakovich Concerto for Piano and Trumpet
Paul Beniston endured his trumpet's deconstruction with deadpan good grace, let it sing with uncanny finesse, and more than met Trpceski's challenge to an extra turn of speed at the end.
Robert Maycock, Independent, 6 December 2005

2 December 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Haydn, Shostakovich and Bartók
The conductor Vladimir Jurowski, who also led grippingly lucid performances of Haydn's Symphony No. 60 and Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, found Shostakovich's darker orchestral colours as well as the vibrant ones in music that seemed to suggest a composer both virile and vulnerable.
Geoffrey Norris, Daily Telegraph, 6 December 2005

2 December 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vladimir Jurowski conducts Haydn, Shostakovich and Bartók
It is increasingly obvious that the most creative force in London's orchestral life is Vladimir Jurowski ... every concert generates a sense of discovery, courtesy of Jurowski's deep musical sensibility and dry charisma. These qualities were precisely profiled in the LPO's latest concert ... The strings' subtly controlled diminuendos in the opening allegro [of Haydn's Symphony 60] made you feel the orchestra was enjoying itself as much as the audience; and the finale's musical joke seemed spontaneous, whether or not you expected it.
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 8 December 2005

9 November 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Thomas Zehetmair conducts and plays Mozart
Zehetmair was faultlessly stylish and sprightly with it. So were the London Philharmonic players, who looked and sounded as if they were enjoying the performance as much as he was ...
David Murray, Financial Times, 16 November 2005

26 October 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Vassily Sinaisky conducts, Glinka, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky
With smart, direct playing from the trumpets, a suave sound from the trombones and horns, and some exceptionally tight and cultured work from the LPO's excellent strings, this was a very impressive performance; beautifully shaped and galvanised by Sinaisky.
AP, Independent on Sunday, 30 October 2005

21 September 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Ion Marin conducts Mozart
Marin's Mozart is certainly not frivolous. Throughout there was lovely interplay among the wind instruments, and Marin controlled the build-up to the sudden ending with impeccable timing.
Nick Kimberley, Standard, 22 September 2005

21 September 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Ion Marin conducts Mozart and Richard Strauss
Encouraged by Ion Marin, the late replacement as conductor for Ingo Metzmacher, the LPO developed a chamber-like intimacy that has almost disappeared from mainstream concerts ... The suite from Strauss's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme ... was nearly as enjoyable for the musicians' relish of its colourful, ever-changing combinations of solo instruments. Marin, with impeccable timing and infectious rhythm, encouraged finesse and just the right amount of swagger.
Robert Maycock, The Independent, 23 September 2005

21 September 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Ion Marin conducts Stravinsky and Richard Strauss
With the Festival Hall out of use for its overhaul, the South Bank's resident orchestras, the Philharmonia and the London Philharmonic, have had to decamp to the adjacent Queen Elizabeth Hall for the season. While this markedly smaller venue - which has had a bit of a facelift of its own over the summer - does impose restrictions on what can be done there, the LPO has seen it less as a challenge than as an opportunity, a chance to explore a range of music for smaller orchestra it feels it cannot comfortably tackle in the 3,000-seater RFH. And, if this opening concert of its season is anything to go by, we're in for one treat of a year.

The evening had begun with Stravinsky's Concerto in D for strings in a performance that bounded along with energy, the outer movements vivacious in their sprung rhythms and neatly turned Baroquisms. The central 'Arioso' was suavely contoured, its strange octave-breaching melody on violins and cellos luminescent in the LPO players' hands.

Best of all, though, was the performance of Strauss's Le bourgeois gentilhomme Suite. This is a score in which everyone is a soloist and it proved a magnificent showcase for the LPO's virtuosity and character. It's rare to see orchestral musicians so evidently enjoying what they're playing, and here they were relishing every turn, every joke, every explosion of Straussian opulence.
Matthew Rye, The Daily Telegraph, 23 September 2005

21 September 2005 - Queen Elizabeth Hall
Ion Marin conducts Mozart
The LPO woodwinds decorated cleanly, efficiently, and with character: I'd hire them any day.
Geoff Brown, The Times, 26 September 2005

22 September 2005 - Brighton Dome
Ion Marin conducts Stravinsky and Richard Strauss
In Stravinsky's Concerto in D for Strings and Strauss's Suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme - relished by the LPO's wonderful woodwind soloists - we got a taster of things to come. Their forthcoming programmes are mouthwatering menus for musical gourmets.
Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times, 2 October 2005

Back to top >