REVIEWS
Financial Times
May 25, 2004
Music: Philadelphia Orchestra / Eschenbach
By David Murray
A very welcome Barbican visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra, venerable and still excellent, was led by their conductor Christoph Eschenbach on Friday and Saturday.
It is a smoothly, beautifully unanimous band with a reputation for owning the best and most musicianly first-desk woodwinds of any American orchestra, and it was a great pleasure to hear them again. Typically, their advance hype was restrained and genteel but enough London music-lovers knew what's what to ensure them an eagerly appreciative audience.
For the first half of their Friday concert, the Philadelphia strings alone performed Schönberg's late-Romantic Verklärte Nacht, intimate and full-blooded by turns in his second, larger arrangement of the piece. It sounded terrific. … The Philadelphians were acute with it … , making its Sturm und Drang churnings as vivid as its elevated raptures later.
Their main work was
Mahler's more-than-full-orchestral First Symphony, almost as much theatrical
as symphonic. … It showed the orchestra off to perfection. …The
radiant, full-blooded unanimity of the Philadelphia brass in its final
pages was roundly stirring, beyond Mahler's not-especially-inspired writing
and beyond anything we're likely to hear from our London bands.
Orchestra
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