An interview with George Walker

July 2021 reviews for The Times

Awakening Shadow
5 July 2021

Generally in an opera there are a few elements I would expect: characters, a story and at the very least some dramatic spark. So I’m still struggling to work out in what sense Luke Styles and Benjamin Britten’s Awakening Shadow is, as it was billed, a chamber opera. Just to clarify, this isn’t a recently rediscovered work by the long-dead Britten resurrected by Styles. Awakening Shadow is a stitching together of Britten’s Canticles, five intense, individual works on religious themes written over four decades.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/awakening-shadow-review-a-disappointing-new-chamber-opera-inspired-by-britten-jjnxbkcp3

Cendrillon/Acis and Galatea

13 July 2021

Rossini turns Cinderella into a moral fable, Massenet conjures sumptuous fairytale magic. Pauline Viardot gives us a salon entertainment that charms and delights, its three swift acts taking Cinders from rags to riches, daydreams to true love in little over an hour. Viardot may only recently be coming back into vogue, but she was revered in her lifetime, as Berlioz put it, as “one of the greatest artists in the history of music”. She sang, she played the piano, she hosted artistic soirees and, after retiring from the stage, she focused on composing. Two hundred songs and several operettas later, Viardot reached Cendrillon, which had its premiere in 1904 when she was 83.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cendrillon-acis-and-galatea-review-musical-delights-in-a-pair-of-buxton-operas-l9s9tqshc

The Return of Ulysses

14 July 2021

For some of its season this year, Longborough Festival Opera has decamped from its lovely opera house to a bright red big top located on an adjacent field. Once inside there’s a sense of the outdoors: a breeze ruffles part of the set’s shimmering silver foil fringe curtain; light aircraft buzz overhead. The stage is in the round. We are close enough to see the looks in the performers’ eyes; we are totally enveloped by the thrilling power of their voices.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-return-of-ulysses-review-longborough-fields-a-superb-cast-for-monteverdi-lsq9x77vh

June 2021 reviews for The Times

Handel's Amadigi at Garsington Opera
21 June 2021

Anyone staging Handel’s “magic” opera Amadigi needs a few tricks at the ready. In her new production for Garsington Opera, the director-designer Netia Jones puts on a winning show. The work’s supposed weaknesses — the plot is tissue-thin; there are only four main roles whose string of da capo arias leave long stretches with little interaction — become strengths. Not least, the small cast makes this baroque rarity ideal for Covid times; it’s also being staged by English Touring Opera this autumn. They’ll have to work hard to match Jones’s inventiveness; she gives us visual spectacle yet focuses on the central human drama.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/amadigi-review-handels-magic-opera-casts-its-spell-tpjjm3jst

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla

24 June 2021

The words were poignant, the singing was superlative and the connection between performer and audience was almost tangible. Reader, I’ll confess: as Mahler faced death and God in his song Um Mitternacht, the music shifting from profound sombreness to glorious surrender, tears came to my eyes.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cbso-grazinyte-tyla-review-the-mirga-magic-is-back-f2wcb528r

BEAM/Britten Sinfonia

28 June 2021

If you’re watching BEAM, there’s a good chance that you know Nadine Benjamin as one of Britain’s fast-rising star sopranos. But who is she really? That’s a question Benjamin’s impactful autobiographical music-theatre piece, subtitled Everybody Can Stand In Their Own Light, explores over 70 minutes with still photos, video projections, lighting design and the collaboration of a number of individuals, including the excellent Decus Ensemble and music director Jan Rautio.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/beam-review-soprano-nadine-benjamins-searingly-honest-look-at-her-life-vhrkr7qgl

May 2021 reviews for The Times

Alice Coote, Philharmonia/John Eliot Gardiner
10 May 2021

Alice Coote singing Britten’s Phaedra is a remarkable thing to behold. It’s hard to imagine a more fearless performance of this one-woman cantata based on Racine, telling the tragic, transgressive tale of a woman who lusts after her stepson, then seeks absolution through suicide by poison. There’s nowhere to hide: the composer’s final vocal work is an intense, compact drama. And every note and word the British mezzo-soprano sang was utterly clear.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/philharmonia-gardiner-review-alice-coote-is-a-remarkable-phaedra-sf6tw0w2q

London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle

10 May 2021

More than a year has passed since the London Symphony Orchestra last performed in its Barbican home, when Antonio Pappano conducted Britten and Vaughan Williams that spoke of sorrow and war. So much has happened since then. The LSO’s chief conductor, Simon Rattle, is off to Munich and Pappano is to take over his LSO post. The ambitious London concert hall project has been shelved. And the pandemic has sharpened our focus when it comes to music exploring the meaning of life and death, works such as Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lso-rattle-review-song-of-the-earth-finds-real-power-at-the-end-g7zfmscnq

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Nicholas Collon

27 May 2021

Until its summer series began last week, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra hadn’t played to a live audience in Symphony Hall since the start of the pandemic, save one concert in November. For the orchestra’s second programme back home the conductor Nicholas Collon kept those patient concertgoers in mind. The “deep connection” struck by Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony with the Soviet audience at its 1937 premiere inspired him, he explained in an affable introduction.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cbso-collon-review-emotions-run-high-for-shostakovich-gc6hhrfmh

Ensemble Marsyas

31 May 2021

In reality, a trip to Italy may be tricky for a while yet, but there’s nothing stopping musical flights of fancy abroad. Ensemble Marsyas gave us a flavour of Rome with its Handel programme at the Wigmore Hall, culminating in the delicious cantata Amarilli Vezzosa (Il Duello Amoroso), written during the composer’s formative Italian sojourn. Just imagine the Roman palace in which it had its premiere in 1708 (or google Palazzo Bonelli); no quarantine necessary.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ensemble-marsyas-review-delightful-musical-flights-of-fancy-from-handel-sg2w0x3lh

Notebook: 1 January 2021

1 January 2021. I don't buy into the whole new year, new you spiel but, boy, am I glad to turn the page on 2020.  I even have a new diary, though I haven't dared open it yet. I haven't quite forgotten how life diverged so wildly from the one planned on paper last spring. Maybe this year I'll only write things in using pencil.

Sometimes it's the tiny, silly things that count. Slightly rushing so that I could be the first in the pool, the first to slip into the water today. It was warmer than I expected, the steam rising off the surface and blurring the faces of swimmers gliding and splashing along, identifiable by their various bright swimming caps.

I didn't actually feel like swimming today.  Then I remembered that it could be taken away suddenly and soon. Bristol is still in Tier 3: we can meet outside in sixes, we can swim in outdoor pools. But that will change if we move up into Tier 4. Our minds are strange, aren't they? Nothing else had altered, but knowing that swims could be in short supply did make me more grateful to be able to go today. And as always, as soon as I'm in the water, I can't remember what I was worrying about.

Old year, new year

And so farewell 2020. The year in which we stepped through the looking glass into a strange new world. I'm not sure we can ever go back. Only forwards, wishing that 2021 brings us peace, hope and joy.

Long Covid: Week 18

Belated update. Week 18, but written about mid-week 19. Words and sentences feel hard to grab out of my brain at the moment. When tired, I seem to have developed mild dyslexia. Letters sometimes add themselves up in the wrong order. I don't know the name for thinking of one word and saying another, but there's that too. I'm measuring the recovery of my mind in crosswords. Those quick crossword books. Finding answers to clues. Dragging dusty words from the clogged-up corners of my memory. Now I'm measuring it in reading too. One novel a week ago, now more. This week Nell Stevens's Bleaker Island; Maggie O'Farrell's The Vanishing of Esme Lennox; Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman. The words must be coming back. Steps are coming back too: up to 5,000 now in day. Of course, there are the lingering symptoms: nerve pain, tinnitus, inflamed (I think) ribs and abdomen, burning sensations, thudding, pulsing head, acid reflux. Fatigue, too, is a constant now. A phone call, trying to concentrate for an hour is exhausting. Coordination. I've just spilt a cup of roiboos tea. Although, anyone who knows me will tell you that this occurrence is nothing to do with Covid. That's my old clumsy self.

Long Covid: Week 17

It's the middle of week 17. Relapses seem to be an integral part of Long Covid, and sometimes it can  feel hard to trust small victories. Or as if celebrating them might jinx them. But, hey, I'm happy that this week I've been able to walk 2,500 steps each day, divided into a groups of several hundred steps. I've not needed a daytime nap. I've read a whole book from cover to cover (Rosamund Lupton's Three Hours. Totally gripping). I drove round the block. There's no way I'd have been able to do any of these things even a week ago.

(Ongoing symptoms, if helpful for any fellow Covid Long-Haulers: nerve pain, dry throat, a new mouth ulcer for a day, memory loss, sore joints and feet, stinging and tired eyes, sudden spasms of pain, a freezing right foot, can't lie on my left side (told you this virus was strange), problems regulating body temperature, insomnia, fatigue, tinnitus, and thudding in my head.)

Signs and symptoms of long-haul Covid (Week one)

I don't think I would usually fancy reeling off my medical history in a public space, nor would anyone be interested in reading it, but this feels different. Long-Haul Covid, as I think it's being called, is new to the world. I hope sharing my experience might be helpful for others going through it, even simply if it's to know that you're not alone. That became my mantra as I lay in bed ill. Isolated. But not alone. The sheer scale of this illness must mean that there will be scientific research. The medics will begin to understand how to treat it. We will get better. I can recommend joining one of the online support groups – on Facebook or Slack – too. I certainly felt relief after doing so.

Week One (Days 1-7)

Coronavirus was everywhere in the news. Wash your hands, then wash your hands some more. There were two official symptoms, high temperature and a new dry, continuous cough. So when I had uncontrollable shaking one Sunday afternoon, a cold sore, a small nose bleed, and mouth ulcers, it didn't really cross my mind that it was Covid-19. Even when I had diarrhoea the next day, I thought, well, that's horrible and odd, and carried on with life. It was the following evening, Tuesday 17 March, that the high temperature and fever hit. Oh. I woke early the next morning, breath rasping and short, with a dry cough. Heart racing. A bat fluttering in my chest. 

The symptoms came in waves. It was disconcerting. How ill am I? Am I imagining this? I felt better, sat up  at a desk for an hour, and was then totally exhausted. As if my muscles couldn't hold me up. Was that possible? 

That evening I sat on the sofa to eat soup and bread, and realised I couldn't taste it. Wholemeal crumbs in my mouth, like eating sawdust and cardboard. More energy the next day, but also a cough that felt as if would rip open the tissues in your chest because they were so dry. Heart racing when I walked up the stairs. I spent Friday lying in bed. At some points awake but so tired that I could barely reply to an email. At others, feeling well enough to talk on the phone. At yet others, asleep. 

Covid-19 messes with your mind.

On the Saturday, my birthday, I woke up determined to enjoy the day despite being ill and in isolation alone. I got in the shower, and felt as if I couldn't stand. Chest pain. Turns out I had low blood pressure on standing. Anxiety. I actually hadn't been feeling anxious before then. I knew I wasn't in a high-risk category, nor did I have any pre-existing health conditions. Friends organised a Zoom online – ah, remember when Zoom was new and exciting – for my birthday. I joined for a while, but could barely hold my head up. It felt so heavy.

By the Monday I thought I was feeling better, and joined a gentle Yin Yoga class online. I couldn't lift  my arms over my head, or lean forward. My entire back felt as if it had been dried out into a crisp, and that moving would scrunch and tear it. Still not well, then? 

But remember… it's a fever and a cough. 

A temperature again on day six. It went. I'd been given medical advice to go outside as soon as my seven-day isolation ended, to help cope with the anxiety. I did, just along the road a little, by myself and without seeing anyone. Back home. I hoped that would be the end  of it.

Kindness

Before I write about illness, I want to say something about kindness. I wouldn't have got through the last few months of Covid in lockdown without it, and it's still remarkable to me how kind people have been. I feel lucky. Neighbours who I didn't know before who have done my shopping, picked up prescriptions, taken me to the doctor, checked how I was doing. The friend who brought me soup and left it on my doorstep every day, who for weeks brought me meals to reheat because I couldn't stand up for long enough to cook. Friends who came and stood outside the window to talk through the glass when I was twice in isolation. Who have come to visit with gifts from their gardens. Who have sent cards, flowers and food. Who have simply showed up and smiled. My family, who have been there whenever I needed, with support of all sorts. The paramedics and GP who put themselves at risk of infection and came into my home to assess me. The doctor who literally went out of his way to get the right antibiotic, the neighbour who lent  me a new thermometer, the physios running free post-covid recovery online classes. Thank you. I'll have forgotten too many specifics – ah, short term memory loss is one fun feature of this virus – but not the incredible power of human kindness. That'll stick.

Mild

Mild. Even the word sounds gentle, with its soft consonants. Unthreatening. Covid would be mild for most. I hung on to the word. Reassuring, a comfort blanket. Mild is a sniffly cold, a sore tummy, a light haze of headache. That sort of thing.

Don't be fooled. What started out as mild Covid-19 back in March soon escalated for me. Thankfully – and I am so thankful for this – not to hospital admission level. More of that in another post. But Covid mild is not in the same league as even a seasonal flu.

Does mild cover an illness that lasts 102 days – and counting? Having to crawl along the floor to get water because I was too weak to stand? A heart pounding as if I'd been running a 10K, but all I'd done was lie down and breathe? Hallucinations, rashes, blinding headaches, pain all over my body, memory loss, days of sleeping for 12 hours? 

It seems that coronavirus is not simply either mild or severe in the sense that the initial public messaging suggested. There's a version somewhere in-between that causes debilitating symptoms that drag on and on. I have no idea why, nor is there any official medical guidance yet. The government has been slow to address this issue.

Mild, this illness is not. Mysterious, that's the only certainty I have.

100 days of Covid-19

At the start of the year, I was planning a rare trip to Singapore to visit friends this June. 'But I'll wait to book the flights,' I naively said in January, as the country started to impose restrictions. 'I'll just see what happens with this coronavirus thing'. We both thought it would blow over. Of course, we all know what actually happened. And here I am, 100 days after falling ill with suspected Covid-19, still not feeling better but inching forward along the path to recovery. The closest I've got to Singapore is watching Michael Portillo in his pastel outfit touring on TV. Sadly, I've got to know Covid-19 rather better. Another friend suggested blogging about it might be therapeutic. Maybe it'll also be helpful for others who have the virus. Because it turns out this is not simply a seven-day illness for lots of people. Here goes.

February 2020 reviews for The Times

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla
3 February 2020

Unsuk Chin’s Spira is subtitled Concerto for Orchestra, and this teeming 25-minute soundscape certainly put the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra through its virtuosic paces. What the title fails to point out is that this is an Olympic-level workout for the listener too. It was just as well that Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla began by summoning our concentration. Raising her arms as if to start conducting, she then paused until the audience’s momentary silence transformed into an expectant stillness.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/city-of-birmingham-symphony-orchestra-mirga-grazinyte-tyla-review-the-more-closely-you-listened-the-more-there-was-to-discover-lvqqtb7xx

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Iván Fischer
10 February 2020

What if Mozart’s three final symphonies were not individual pieces but one huge extended work? That was the “firm belief” of the late Nikolaus Harnoncourt, explained the evening’s conductor, Ivan Fischer. The evidence: all three were written in one creative burst in 1788, and, unusually, were without commission. So how about listening to them, Fischer suggested, as 12 individual movements.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/orchestra-of-the-age-of-enlightenment-fischer-review-a-disjointed-take-on-mozart-kdh07g5bc

January 2020 reviews for The Times

National Youth Orchestra/Jaime Martin
7 January 2020

This was a concert of powerful voices. Quite literally, to start with. Before the 164 instrumentalists of the National Youth Orchestra (NYO) played a note, they stood and sang a workers’ protest, Auf den Strassen zu Singen, by Hanns Eisler. An unexpected opening, but, sung in English, its message of truth and justice rang out.

Full Review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/national-youth-orchestra-jaime-martin-review-few-performances-of-shostakovich-will-top-this-tctq30rpk

London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle
20 January 2020

We’re going to be hearing a lot of Beethoven this year, that’s for sure. As orchestras embark on extensive celebrations for his 250th anniversary, there are bound to be the naysayers who moan that his music has enough airtime already, thank you very much. The London Symphony Orchestra’s opening Beethoven 250 programme was a reminder, however, of what it means to look afresh at music we think we know, and the power of truly paying attention.

Full Review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lso-rattle-review-energetic-beethoven-but-berg-was-revelatory-s2rqh6g6m

Andreas Scholl, Tamar Halperin
27 January 2020

Ancient melody, distant song and soft laments. Lullabies, soliloquies and farewells. Skilfully constructed and exquisitely performed, this “Twilight People” recital charted ambiguous moods, half-states of remembrance and forgetting, places of neither here nor there. The mesmerising beauty of Andreas Scholl’s voice sounded as if from some other world; the pianist Tamar Halperin’s contemplative approach paved the way to it

Full Review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/andreas-scholl-review-languid-tempos-allowed-us-to-luxuriate-in-the-sound-h5xqxkptq

Usk Castle

On an impromptu trip to Wales, I came across a castle that felt like it had stepped out of the imagination of Dodie Smith. 'How strange and beautiful it looked in the late afternoon light!' wrote Cassandra Mortmain in I Capture the Castle, a novel in which she chronicles the life of her family amid the crumbling ruins of their castle. It's a mouldy, mouldering place, its vestigial grandeur just intact enough to allow the place to be romanticised. 'I was too young to know much of history and the past,' noted Cassandra, 'for me, the castle was one in a fairy-tale.'

Entering Usk Castle, which sits just up a path with a gateway crowned by lions, past a still-inhabited house with a fine topiary duck in the garden, it was as if I, too, had wandered into a storybook. Around the lush green carpet of lawn rose the grey stone walls, covered in ivy so that they seemed almost to merge into the hills beyond. The place had a charm of its own: a topiary cross to mark the chapel, chickens running free, and a tree with a branch that had grown downwards, bent and twisted, forming a perfect seat. In the derelict banqueting hall, a fireplace was beached halfway up the wall, above the line of the floor, which had long since fallen away, like the disappearing sea.

And in another corner, reached by walking along the top of a wall with rather rickety fencing, stood the round tower, its stone green with moss, its walls roofless and open to the sky and trees. Just the kind of place that Cassandra might have locked up her creatively-blocked father, in order to force him to write his next novel.

August 2019 reviews for The Times

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Thomas Dausgaard
5 August 2019

First thoughts aren’t always the best. When Sibelius’s Symphony No 5 was premiered in Helsinki in 1915, the audience liked it, but the composer wasn’t happy. Drastic surgery was required. Four years and two revisions later, the bold orchestral work that’s become a concert-hall favourite emerged. So why bother digging out that original, rejected version?

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bbc-sso-dausgaard-review-the-familiar-sibelius-made-to-sound-strange-hvxj6j5tx

National Youth Orchestra of the USA/Antonio Pappano
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Semyon Bychkov
12 August 2019

When Joyce DiDonato was singing Le spectre de la rose from Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été (Prom 32) — her voice so tender, so poignant, so full of meaning — it really was hard to imagine anything more perfect. Every word of French was finessed, every phrase unfurled naturally. Sentimentality could swamp this glimpse of an exquisite dying rose, yet DiDonato made it human and transcendent.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/proms-32-33-reviews-nyo-usa-pappano-bbc-so-bychkov-didonato-triumphs-gansch-falters-tkq8l27lz

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Daniel Barenboim
13 August 2019

There was no time for nerves, second thoughts, or even getting comfortable. As soon as an almost reluctant-looking Martha Argerich had sat down, the orchestra struck up and she was away, whipping up an already heightened Proms atmosphere with the unstoppable striding chords of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/west-eastern-divan-orchestra-barenboim-review-martha-argerich-is-a-musical-legend-for-a-reason-nrkqgm0gf

London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle
21 August 2019

There aren’t many pieces that can make the capacious Royal Albert Hall feel small, but Varèse’s Amériques is one of them. It’s not simply the huge orchestra; it’s the depth and scale of the head-spinning, modernist urban soundscape, which teeters on the edge of cacophony and feeds off the energy and rhythms of a city that never sleeps. Stories suggest themselves for the deluge of sounds: the wail of a police siren, the squeak of a subway train on metal rails, the clank of a bolt through a steel girder. This is music in which the world is constantly being remade.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/prom-44-london-symphony-orchestra-simon-rattle-review-urban-soundscape-meets-sonic-jungle-5jgpqf3cd

January 2018 reading

Lullaby Leila Slimani
Everything I Know About Love Dolly Alderton
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine Gail Honeyman 

Welcome to 2018

Today I went for a swim. A New Year’s Day swim. In a pool with waters clear and icy, sharp on the skin. Cleansing. The earlier heavy rain had turned into blue skies and a lemon sorbet sun. The first length was bracing, the second refreshing. One after the next – touch the end, turn, push – the lengths added up until my fingers and toes seemed to have reached the same temperature as the water and it was time to get out, shower and head into 2018.

December 2017 reading and listening

To be updated…

Postcards from the Edge Carrie Fisher
Apple of My Eye Helen Hanff
The Dark is Rising Susan Cooper
A Manual for Heartache Cathy Rentzenbrink
The Ship Antonia Honeywell

Last Leaf Danish String Quartet

November reviews for The Times

After ten good years, my laptop finally decided to give up and head into retirement. And after several months of denial, I've finally given in and accepted that it's not going to come back to life. I'll admit I'm rather enjoying the novelty of actually being able to type, copy, paste on my new computer without it being a complete headache. Time for some blog housekeeping! Here are a few of my recent reviews for The Times. Links included. They are all paywalled (go on, subscribe!) but you can sign up for two free articles a week.

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Mariss Jansons
27 November 2017

Just before the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra arrived in town, its chief conductor Mariss Jansons went on record saying that women conductors weren’t his “cup of tea”. Cue outcry, particularly as the Latvian was also at the Barbican to be awarded the gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society. 

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/concert-review-bavarian-rso-jansons-at-the-barbican-ptghg0sk6

The Rake's Progress at Wilton's Music Hall
14 November 2017

There may be a more atmospheric and appropriate theatre in which to stage Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, but I wouldn’t bet on it. The intimate Wilton’s Music Hall is right in scale and feel. 

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/opera-review-the-rakes-progress-at-wiltons-music-hall-e1-6d6g6w3s2


The Riot Ensemble
14 November 2017

Less traditional concert, more experimental music laboratory, this BBC Radio 3 Open Ear event showcased the quite new, the new and the made up on the spot. It’s an interesting formula. That I felt the results were mixed is almost part of the point 

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/concert-review-the-riot-ensemble-holloway-nahum-at-lso-st-lukes-ec1-xlbdcx7rs

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra/Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla
10 November 2017

Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No 1 has already become Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s calling card, after he played it to win BBC Young Musician in 2016. This was the second time I’ve heard the 18-year-old cellist play the piece live this year, and if I was secretly expecting a carbon copy, then shame on me. Even in a matter of just a few months, Kanneh-Mason’s interpretation has grown in maturity and stature, and here he gave a thrillingly memorable performance.  

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/concert-review-city-of-birmingham-symphony-orchestra-mirga-grazinyte-tyla-at-symphony-hall-birmingham-rwk07rx07

London Symphony Orchestra/Gianandrea Noseda
1 November 2017

It is hard to say who is more of a speed merchant, the pianist Khatia Buniatishvili or the conductor Gianandrea Noseda. Either way, they are kindred hotheads. Luckily, they both have the knack of pushing tempos to their limit and, just at the point of no return, managing to keep the music from free-fall.

Full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/concert-review-london-symphony-orchestra-noseda-at-the-barbican-7cs3vbbv0