Classical Source Reviews

The first half of this intriguing and memorable concert was taken up by Luca Francesconi’s Duende: The Dark Notes. Leila Josefowicz collaborated with the composer during the writing of the piece, which she premiered in […]

Jonathan Miller’s production of Rigoletto for English National Opera is now over 40 years old – and this is its 14th revival – but it’s still a classic. Miller’s note in the programme from the […]

Such is the dramatic vitality of Verdi’s Rigoletto that there is already a sense that it presents a metatheatre of a corrupt, cruel world, embodied in microcosm in the Duke of Mantua’s court. In her […]

Five months since including Sofia Gubaidulina’s 1996 Concerto for Viola and Orchestra, the Philharmonic gave its first-ever performance of her Fairytale Poem. Composed for a 1971 children’s radio program, the alluring piece is based on […]

Returning to the UK for the first time in 27 years, the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra began its three-venue tour with blistering performances of two Western classics and music by the largely self-taught Akira Ifukube […]

Music and Artistic Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the Philadelphia Orchestra in this exciting performance of Mahler’s Third Symphony, the work that epitomizes the composer’s music perhaps more than any other. He brought out in distinctive […]

The evening opened with Matthias Pintscher leading the US premiere of his tone poem neharot, which he describes as ‘a tombeau, a requiem, a kaddish – for all the people we have lost’ in the […]

I once tried to introduce a friend to Bruckner via the Fifth Symphony. The concert did not go down well – ‘the work of a madman’ was just one of the reservations I recall. And […]

For the second of three concerts at Carnegie Hall, the LA Philharmonic included the New York premiere of Gabriela Ortiz’s Dznot, the Mayan word for abyss or sinkhole and was inspired by the ‘cenotes’, a […]

Rimsky Korsakov’s third opera The Snow Maiden (premiered 1882) draws upon pagan Russian folklore (albeit mediated through a fairly recent play by Alexander Ostrovsky) about the appeasing of the sun god Yarilo, who is jealous […]