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Barry Millington's rating
Reader rating
Description: Jiri Belohlavek conducts the orchestra as it performs Haydn's Cello Concerto in D and Mahler's Symphony No 5. Featuring Jean-Guihen Queyras on cello.
Phone: 0845120 7500
Website: www.barbican.org.uk
Email: info@barbican.org.uk
Trains: Tube/BR: Moorgate/Barbican 
Opening hours: Mon-Sat 9am-8pm, Sun 11am-8pm
Extra info: Food, Pub, Parking
Supporting role: David Zinman conducted the BBCSO
It's quite something to have members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra filing into the auditorium when they could be getting an early train home. The draw was the young German violinist Julia Fischer in the Beethoven Concerto and she brought to it a star quality the rest of the programme had conspicuously lacked.
Fischer has an imperious stage presence that translates into a reading of the Beethoven that is technically flawless, intermittently eloquent but ultimately lacking humanity. What this performance, aided by David Zinman's supportive conducting of the BBCSO, did offer was long, arching phrases: a seamless unfolding of lines - notably in the first-movement cadenza.
The Larghetto had an undeniable rapt quality that came closest to finding the human heartbeat. Yet the phrasing, for all its elegance, was never truly melting.
At last in the cadenza of the finale was a flash of temperament: the drama we had been waiting for. A little late, but evidence of a more complete artist still to be revealed.
The title of Alasdair Nicolson's The Broken Symphony (receiving its world premiere) alludes both to its two parts, one heard in each half of the concert, and its evocation of a "broken", conflictridden world. In the first part, Endless Laments, those tensions are depicted by nagging muted trumpet figures and percussive assaults on full orchestra, but building to a more sustained protest. Ghost Dances continues the elegiac mood before achieving closure in atmospheric quiescence.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Utterly superb. Five standing ovations. The finest performance of this concerto I have ever heard.
- Robin Smith, Bedford, UK
I was at that concert and I literally had goose pimps all over me during the violin concerto. I was sitting pretty close to the stage and it seems to me that the violinist was pretty taken by the music herself. The audience seemed to be pretty enthusiastic too.
- Sandrina, London
