Shakespeare400 Gala: LPO/Jurowski ***
Royal Festival Hall, 23rd April 2016
“If music be the food of love, play on, give me excess of it.” There was certainly plenty of Shakespeare-inspired music on the bill for the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s celebration of The Bard. Masterminded – or “curated” – by Simon Callow, the evening interspersed operatic chunks with orchestral works and brief excerpts from the plays themselves. Galas like this are necessarily piecemeal affairs, but the programme was intelligently constructed to provide a sense of flow without the need to provide a Reduced Shakespeare-type nod to all the plays.
Vladimir Jurowski
© Matthias Creutziger
Read the full review on Bachtrack.