The first LPO "paying" concert at the Royal Festival Hall. Jurowski conducted a fun and witty performance of Schnittke's (K)ein Sommernahstraum. Imogen Cooper played in Mozart D minor piano concerto. I was not entirely at ease with her somewhat masculine playing of the flowing runs. I wonder what Mitsuko Uchida thought of it (she was also in the audience). The Alfred Brendel cadenza was interesting though. The last piece was Prokofiev Fifth - a humanistic and positive symphony without too much of the cynism one find int his music. The LPO rose to the occasion with tight strings and brass, effective percussion and fantastic woodwinds.
Those of us London-centric folks easily forget there are great concert halls in other parts of the world. I remember as a young kid buying DG LPs with von Karajan on the front cover conducting the Berlin Philharmonic. So as my first visit to the city, a visit to the Philharmonie to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra was a must. Ivan Fisher started the evening's concert with Haydn Symphony 88. A light and delightful work. As I'd expected, the acoustic of the hall was amazing - probably a good 2.5 second of reverberation - and much more generous than the Royal Festival Hall in London. The strings sounded sweet and the timpani came through clearly with definition. The audience was then treated to Béla Bartók's Seven Pieces for Choir and Chamber Orchestra: the Berlin Phil reduced in size occupying only half of the stage while the Netherlands Youth Choir took the other half. These young performers (all female) sang in Hungarian from memory - not easy at all - and rea...
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