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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
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