Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Riccardo Chailly

Anna Netrebko chews the scenery as Floria Tosca… and there’s a lot of it to get her teeth into in David Livermore’s busy staging in Milan.

This lightweight, combustive account lacked bluster, sourcing tension from its forward momentum.

In an all-Rachmaninov evening, Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra open the 2019 festival with a brilliant exploration of the relation of music to power.

Outstanding vocal and orchestral performances light up La Scala's season opener, matched to a conservative but visually arresting staging from Davide Livermore.

Fail to inject the composer's cathedral-sized symphonic structures with a sense of rapt wonder and they can sound dull.

Works by Stravinsky and Mozart launched this year’s Lucerne Festival, whose theme is “Childhood”.

Director Davide Livermore sets the story at the time of the Dolce Vita, including the motorbike from the film Roman Holiday and the roadster from The Easy Life.

The Filarmonica did not play with the polished sheen for which it is often known, but let the raw power of the music speak on its own terms. The results were utterly captivating.

A truly magnificent evening from Chailly and his Milanese orchestra.

The big season opener at La Scala offers few surprises in a traditional staging, although Yusif Eyvazov proved his worth in the title role. 

A sizeable contingent of curious musicologists and critics gathered for the Milan première. It was a gifted a performance with plenty of insights to offer.

Chailly is beefing up the orchestra's sound and honing its style through an intensive collaboration that has borne tours, recording projects and frequent appearances in Milan.

Riccardo Chailly and the Filarmonica della Scala give a wonderful account of two of Respighi's travelogues; Leonidas Kavakos plays Brahms with refinement – perhaps too much so for the Albert Hall.

Conductor Riccardo Chailly launched this year's Lucerne Festival with a riveting programme of three late 19th century works by the great orchestral explorer, Richard Strauss.

If Chailly’s recent Beethoven’s Seventh was notable for its originality, particularly for the conductor's choice of tempi, here he opted for a straighter reading free of idiosyncrasy.

La gazza ladra celebrates its 200th anniversary with a new production at La Scala, an earthbound effort from director Gabriele Salvatores, but it was Riccardo Chailly who drew the wrath of sections of the Milanese audience. 

On the basis of its recent appearances, Chailly's varied musical diet is doing the Filarmonica a lot of good

A beautiful production by Alvis Hermanis of Madama Butterfly to open La Scala's new season, but it was Riccardo Chailly's presentation of Puccini's original 1904 score which caught the ear. 

La Scala might not have had all the right cards in its garter Tuesday night to prevent ending up holding aces and spaces, but it’s hard to play without a full deck in the first place.

Verdi's take on the Joan of Arc story may be thin on drama, but outstanding playing from Riccardo Chailly and the La Scala orchestra and top notch singing from Netrebko, Meli and Álvarez make this a wonderful Verdian evening.

In this last concert in the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Riccardo Chailly’s brief residency at the Barbican, all concerned were on top form. 

The Leipzig Kapellmeister Riccardo Chailly and his Gewandhausorchester demonstrate style and substance in two tone poems by Richard Strauss, with Christian Tetzlaff as the soloist in Mozart's K216 concerto.

The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra began its latest London residency with an impressive concert of Strauss and Mozart.

Riccardo Chailly kicks off his interim role as Principal Director at La Scala with Turandot, featuring Luciano Berio's ending, a score he knows like the back of his hand. 

Martha Argerich makes a triumphant return in her first concert with the Berlin Philharmonic in seven years. 

Despite Richard Strauss' few connections with Leipzig, the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly offered a vivdly characterized tribute to the composer on his 150th anniversary, from an affectionate Don Quixote to a witty - and furiously paced - Till Eulenspiegel. 

Mahler’s Symphony no. 8 had not been heard in Milan for 27 years. Tonight, Riccardo Chailly returned to perform the “Symphony of a Thousand” with his former band, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi.

I sat down to hear the last concert of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s Brahms cycle under Riccardo Chailly at the Barbican with high hopes. Having heard the hype, it seemed that the restrained autumnal shades of the Violin Concerto in D major (with superstar Leonidas Kavakos) and the sheer compositional majesty of the Symphony no.

For anyone lucky enough to have witnessed the last Barbican residency from Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the striking, thoughtful and vivid accounts of Brahms they gave here should not be a surprise. In Brahms’ Piano Concerto no. 2, however, orchestra outdid soloist.

In an era in which orchestras are supposed to have lost their distinctive 20th-century sounds, the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig is one that retains its characteristic dark hue, with fascinating wind timbres that simply refuse to blend into a homogenised whole. And yet there is refinement and virtuosity to match the world’s best orchestras.

Arguably the highest-profile visiting orchestra of the season, Riccardo Chailly brought his Leipzig orchestra to Birmingham for a duo of 20th-century Russian works. The large audience was not disappointed, Rachmaninov’s second symphony in particular shining in a magnificent performance.

Two fine concerts from Riccardo Chailly’s Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra filled part of the space between end-of-season Proms from the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics. They brought Mendelssohn of refinement and poise to Prom 67 and dark, fateful thrust in Messiaen and Mahler for Prom 69.

The first of the two Proms by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra featured an all-Mendelssohn programme. The orchestra has a long tradition of performing Mendelssohn’s music, as he was their Music Director from 1835 until his early death in 1847.

Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos was first performed in 1912, in a production directed by Max Reinhardt. Unlike the version usually seen today, this first Ariadne was a long-winded play-opera-ballet hybrid, incorporating a full production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme with dances to incidental music by Strauss followed by the short opera.

Riccardo Chailly was much loved as prinicpal conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, a position he held between 1988 and 2004. And even though tonight he played with his own Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, he received a hero’s welcome at the Concertgebouw.

If you watch one of Alfred Hitchcock's better movies (The Birds and The Man Who Knew Too Much are good examples), the timing and pace has a strange effect. The first half hour passes pleasantly enough: you meet the characters, and nothing too much happens. An hour in, and the action is running at break-neck pace, your pulse is racing, and your brain is straining to keep up.

La Filarmonica della Scala était invitée à la Philharmonie de Paris pour jouer le Concerto pour orchestre de Bartók sous la direction de Riccardo Chailly, ainsi que le Concerto pour violon de Chostakovitch en compagnie de Maxim Vengerov.

Riccardo Chailly articuló una Sexta de Mahler con elemento inapelable del destino como guía y los músicos della Scala respondierton a sus gestos con un sonido ejemplar.

Son la orquesta de la Scala, elegantes por definición, y tras escucharles, quedamos seducidos y complacidos, aún sin salir demasiado de nuestra zona de confort.

Nach dem begeisternden Ravel-Abend bieten Riccardo Chailly und das LFO auch bei Wagners Ouvertüren und Bruckners Siebter Hervorragendes.

In einem reinen Ravel-Programm demonstriert das LFO einen Farbenreichtum sondergleichen, kombiniert mit Riccardo Chaillys untrüglichem Sinn für dramatische Entwicklungen.

L’« opéra en robe d’ecclésiastique », s’est trouvé des voix de collection, un chef et un orchestre fabuleux ! Puissent Riccardo Chailly, son choeur et son orchestre nous en livrer encore, et longtemps !

Riccardo Chailly et la Filarmonica della Scala étaient de passage à la Philharmonie de Paris, pour un concert entièrement consacré à la musique russe. Analyse d'une interprétation inégale.

Zur Eröffnung des diesjährigen Festivals gab der neue Leiter des Lucerne Festival Orchestra Riccardo Chailly seinen bejubelten Einstand mit einer grandiosen Aufführung von Mahlers Achter Symphonie.

La venue à la Philharmonie de Paris pour trois concerts de l’Orchestre du Gawandhaus de Leipzig et de son directeur musical, Riccardo Chailly, était un événement très attendu. Comme les deux précédents, ce dernier concert était consacré à Richard Strauss et Mozart. Cette troisième soirée fut tout à fait exceptionnelle.

Le 27ème concerto pour piano, en sandwich entre deux mastards symphoniques. Pires dont la justesse de ton n'a d'égal que la discrétion s'est jointe à son partenaire de longue date, Riccardo Chailly, pour une demi-heure de très grande musique.

Nueva lección de dirección de Chailly en Ibermúsica: un Mahler de timbre italiano y contenido alemán.