fri 27/06/2025

BBCSO

Lewis, BBCSO, Bělohlávek; Pires, Royal Albert Hall

Two pianists, one indisputably great and the other probably destined to become so, lined up last night to show us why the Proms at its best is a true festival, not just a gaggle of summer concerts. First there was the prince of pearly classicism,...

Read more...

First Night of the 2010 Proms

Numerologists may have been fretting over whether Proms forces could match the apocryphal thousand of the mightiest Eighth Symphony's 1910 world premiere, which Mahler feared would turn into a "catastrophic Barnum and Bailey show". With nothing like...

Read more...

Leonskaja, BBCSO, Bĕlohlávek, Barbican Hall

Fantasies in apparent freefall, though in fact ruthlessly organised and blindingly well executed, were the name of last night's game - an endgame, as it happened, to the BBC Symphony Orchestra's hardest-working Barbican season before the marathon of...

Read more...

Wolfgang Rihm Day, Barbican

Wolfgang Rihm: 'Sod the Hadron Collidor. You want a decent particle-smasher? Look no further than Wolfgang Rihm's brain.'

It's hard to miss German composer Wolfgang Rihm. He has an enormous head. There it is, bulging from his giant frame, a big, friendly grin slapped onto it while he wanders around the Barbican on his celebratory day, none of it going to waste. Listen...

Read more...

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Marc Minkowski, Barbican

Pergolesi: 'We know that a member of the audience struck Pergolesi's head with an orange at the premiere of the opera L’Olimpiade.'

It always repays to push a world-class orchestra beyond their comfort zone. The BBC Symphony's sound emerged from the refashioning hands of period specialist Marc Minkowski like a naked body from a cold shower: convulsively invigorated and...

Read more...

BBCSO, Bĕlohlávek, Barbican Hall

Martinů in New York: master symphonist in exile

Nothing stays the same for long in the hypersensitive symphonies of Bohuslav Martinů. A pastoral idyll accelerates to fairground mania before dropping off the merry-go-round, rapture fades in a single bar and victory may be snatched out of the jaws...

Read more...
Subscribe to BBCSO