Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Dame Mitsuko Uchida

Two incongruent journeys conclude as Dame Mitsuko Uchida and the Boston Symphony meet in New York. 

While Uchida’s performances showcase remarkable precision and refinement, they occasionally feel restrained, leaving room to explore the improvisatory charm that make Mozart’s music so compelling.

A concert of two halves: the Philharmonia and Dame Mitsuko Uchida light up Beethoven with the essence of Classical style, but the orchestra struggles in Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Suite. 

A Wigmore Hall recital to take the listener from the Belle Époque to the acceptable face of modernism. 

Dame Mitsuko Uchida reveals insights into Beethoven's final three piano sonatas that can only come from a lifetime of contemplation.

Dame Mitsuko Uchida demonstrates why she is one of today's greatest Mozartians, while her MCO players give a virtuoso account of a work steeped in the Viennese tradition.

The last conductor to have led such a superb account of Rachmaninov's Third Symphony was quite possibly its composer.

A more thoughtful and intentional artist is hard to come by today, and one who graces the Musikverein donning fabulous silver shoes on top of her pianistic gifts must be heaven-sent. 

If Purcell’s genius was muted, it was not missing in the Mahler Chamber Orchestra's appearance at London's Southbank.

A concert with a considerable sense of occasion, as the orchestra bids the Finn farewell from his Philharmonia post. 

Mitsuko Uchida feels closest to the music of Schubert. She makes the strongest of cases for the eight Impromptus, long regarded almost as trifles, which in their tragic weight and sense of loneliness embody the age of Coronavirus.

The LSO is reunited with its Music Director for the first time since lockdown for a moving performance from the Royal Albert Hall. 

The British tenor, partnered by Mitsuko Uchida, closed Wigmore Hall’s three-week festival of lunchtime recitals with a peak of the vocal repertoire.

Nelsons and the Boston Symphony  present an American premiere, Shostakovich’s Twelth, and dazzling Ravel with Dame Mitsuko Uchida

Mitusko Uchida’s hypnotic performance of three Schubert piano sonatas made for an enthralling afternoon at Severance Hall.

Franz Welser-Möst thoughtfully paired Schubert’s final mass with Bartók’s final piano concerto, the latter featuring Mitsuko Uchida in her 100th Cleveland Orchestra appearance.

Enigmatic and uncanny piano music from Schubert in an intense recital at the Royal Festival Hall. 

The soul of the composer seems very much alive in her touch, particularly in his most retrospective moments.

Stuart Skelton and Sarah Connolly were the stars of the evening, lifting the performance to a new level in what Leonard Bernstein called Mahler’s “greatest symphony”.

Dame Mitsuko Uchida again brought out her outstanding musicality and special charisma in Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto.

Mitsuko Uchida returned to Cleveland for elegant performances of Mozart’s first and last piano concertos, with selections from Handel’s Water Music interjected between.

Robin Ticciati's final season with the SCO begins with some promising Dvořák. 

On a warm summer's evening in Mozart's home city, Japanese master pianist Dame Mitsuko Uchida delivered a delicately crafted solo recital.

It seemed at times that Dame Mitsuko Uchida and clarinetist Jörg Widmann have been collaborating for decades.

Most of the audience has obviously attended the performance for Uchida’s Mozart. But the exceptional, challenging experience of the evening came from elsewhere.

Mitsuko Uchida’s love of Mozart and Schumann was given vivid expression in the first of a series of recitals in Britain and Germany – but it was Mozart that won the evening here. 

Mitsuko Uchida finds inner depth in Mozart piano concertos while the Mahler Chamber Orchestra revels in Bartók's gritty and languorous Divertimento for Strings.

In a wonderful piano recital, Mitsuko Uchida presented Schubert’s Four Impromptus and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.

As part of their blockbuster festival programme Simon Rattle and his brawny Berliners offered Beethoven’s Ninth in a monumental performance. 

Dame Mitsuko Uchida sources truth, beauty and graceful rebellions in a Carnegie Hall recital of Berg, Schubert, Mozart and Schumann.

After a shaky start, Mitsuko Uchida showed why she is keen to revisit a well-established Mozart repertoire.

An austere yet emphatic Fidelio, focussed and detailed Schoenberg, followed by an affecting, powerfullly bleak Shostakovich Eighth Symphony from Jusrowski & the LPO.

In their recital together Wednesday night at the Wiener Staatsoper, mezzo Magdalena Kožená and star pianist Mitsuko Uchida reminded their audiences that they are wonderfully capable musicians capable of great color, finesse and technical prowess. 

Mitsuko Uchida leads the Cleveland Orchestra in two of Mozart's piano concertos, while Concertmaster William Preucil leads the orchestra in Symphony No. 34, K. 338. 

The Philharmonia's City of Light season goes from strength to strength with an outstanding performance of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges and Dutilleux's Correspondances.

Bernard Haitink and Mitsuko Uchida took a traditional approach to this core repertoire, yet produced performances that sounded anything but dated. 

Each note from the Bavarian RSO was infused with a sort of insistent newness as the musicians poured forth adventurous interpretations of two familiar works.

In her annual appearance at Carnegie Hall, Mitsuko Uchida plays Schubert's G Major sonata and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations.

Mitsuko Uchida and players from the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra played Berg, Schubert and Messiaen at Wigmore Hall, creating moments of sheer beauty.

A hush fell over the auditorium as renowned concert pianist and long-standing friend of the LSO Mitsuko Uchida took her seat for Mozart’s Rondo in A minor for solo piano. A personal tribute to Sir Colin Davis, Uchida opened the Rondo with almost childlike simplicity, the delicate chromaticism of the opening theme played with simplicity and tenderness and a magical connection to the melodic line.

Listening to Mitsuko Uchida at last night’s Prom, it struck me that Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto is the most chameleon-like of works, sounding quite different every time I hear it performed by a different pianist.

A series of three concerts over the course of one weekend, designed to reflect upon and champion the work of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, which has supported a significant number of worthy performers in its first ten years, was always going to present an interesting range of repertoire – if not something of a conundrum for those planning the programming of the concerts.

It wasn’t only Mitsuko Uchida’s hands that were agile. Her arrival on stage was accompanied by the deepest bow imaginable, bending from the waist until she resembled a tuning fork. Such Japanese formality was paired with a warm, glowing smile and a real connection with players and audience alike.

As part of this year’s International Piano Series at the Southbank Centre, Japanese pianist Mitsuko Uchida gave a highly absorbing and exquisitely presented performance of works by Bach, Schoenberg and Schumann.

How do you solve a problem like Schoenberg? Sweetening the musical pill is a good start, and whilst neither the billed Brahms nor Beethoven received saccharine readings, the contrast between the angularity of the programmed modernism and the sheer beauty of these canonical works was all the more acute through their juxtaposition.

If he could, would Beethoven have chosen Mitsuko Uchida to première his final piano concerto? They certainly seem to inhabit the same creative plane, at once revelling in the innovative – nay, revolutionary – features, whilst enjoying the grand connections with their historical precedents too.

With his Piano Concerto No. 4 in G, the centerpiece in the concert with the London Symphony Orchestra on Sunday, Beethoven took the classical concerto format he had inherited into uncharted waters. The work opens with a series of piano chords, which the orchestra takes up, develops and kneads into riveting thematic material before the soloist returns.

Mitsuko Uchida's dress presented a challenge for the colour-blind eye, but she left no unanswered chromatic questions for the ear. From a dramatically exposed initial entry, through the poignant lyricism of the second movement, to the brilliance of the finale, Uchida's playing was marked by an intensity of thought, mastery of colour, and musical commitment.