January 2012

Debussy/Berlioz - Michael Tilson Thomas/Nelso Freire

Tue 24 Jan 2012, Barbican

The Guardian, 25 Jan 2012
[Michael Tilson Thomas] maintains an easy rapport with the players that bore fruit in the fluency of the accompaniment, in which the finely shaded string tone was matched by the delicate warmth of the wind solos.
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The Times, 26 Jan 2012
Debussy is 150 this year. But the London Symphony Orchestra, in the first of three concerts, determined that we should hear the composer with quite new ears ... Tilson Thomas conducted an outstandingly delicate and pungent performance, in which rich and strange allusions turned in the imagination.
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Classical Review, 26 Jan 2012
There were some spellbinding moments here – most memorably a few bars of pppp (or quieter) from clarinettist Chris Richards that really that had the hairs standing to attention – all seamlessly rising to anguished outbursts (and thunder-creating timpani) through Tilson Thomas’s carefully charted approach.
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Coll/Adès/Mahler - Thomas Adès/Toby Spence

Sun 15 Jan 2012, Barbican

The Times, 17 Jan 2012
The LSO, immaculately drilled and polished, guided us with equal safety — as they did earlier through Adès’s slightly later In Seven Days.
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The Guardian, 17 Jan 2012
Scored for a sizeable ensemble firing on most cylinders most of the time, including a varied posse of percussion, [Francisco Coll's Hidd'n Blue] displays a brilliant colouristic range and a sense of momentum that meant that its four-minute span passed all too quickly.
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Classical Source, 17 Jan 2012
Coll's handling of sudden shifts in direction is brilliantly assured, however, and his final twist is the abruptly cut-off conclusion, stopping the music's flow in its tracks.
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Arts Desk, 16 Jan 2012
The orchestral writing [In Seven Days] demands much, and the LSO balanced the mechanistic impersonality of the opening with some beautifully characterised solo contributions from flutes and muted brass.
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BackTrack, 16 Jan 2012
the colours created by the LSO were testament both to Adès the conductor and Adès the composer.
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Adès/Walton/Elgar - Sir Antonio Pappano/Antoine Tamestit

Tue 10 Jan 2012, Barbican

Huffington Post, 12 Jan 2012
Elgar composes a lush green playing field of melody that is light but Pappano turned the grass luminous with vivid expressions and massively fine, articulated phrasing that ensured the best results possible.
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The Times, 11 Jan 2012
I’ve seldom heard an audience so rapt, so silent in this work. There was a sense that something very special was happening.
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The Independent, 11 Jan 2012
There was inwardness in the healing hush which lays the slow movement to rest, there were thrills in the tumultuous string playing of the close, but above all here was a performance which celebrated the impassioned face of Englishness.
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Evening Standard, 11 Jan 2012
The dances retain the mildly scurrilous humour and spiky cheek of the original but Pappano also located a streak of menace, his players enjoying the slinky rhythms and boozy glissandos.
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Financial Times, 11 Jan 2012
Even under Colin Davis the LSO does not sound more rudely super-confident than this, the strings full-blooded, the brass arriving like a division of tanks, the timpani firing off cannonballs.
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The Sunday Telegraph, 15 Jan 2012
His surging, striving account caught all the nervous energy of this elegiac work, and he drew warm yet never overly lush playing from the LSO.
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Classical Source, 11 Jan 2012
Pappano and the LSO are becoming an irresistible combination...the Adagio was beautifully turned into, the core of the symphony and of this performance, here spacious with a pulse, rapt, tender responses from the LSO taking us to a special place, sending a chill through the system and moistening the eyes.
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Adès/Walton/Elgar - Sir Antonio Pappano/Antoine Tamestit

Mon 9 Jan 2012, Warwick Arts Centre

The Warwick Courier, 16 Jan 2012
The ovation at the end proved that the orchestra is as popular as ever, especially when it plays Elgar to a Midlands audience.
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The Guardian, 10 Jan 2012
... much more of the reading was vividly right, particularly the conflicts of the outer movements, which were scarcely reconciled at the end of the opening allegro after a monumentally fierce climax, and were more convincingly, though by no means conclusively, dispelled in the symphony's final pages.
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