concert review: Royal Philharmonic

This is what I went out on Saturday for. It was the same hall I went to hear the Vienna Philharmonic in a year ago, and for the same reason, to review it.

Unlike with the Viennese, or a lot of other orchestras that go on tour, I'd never really thought of the Royal Philharmonic as something you'd travel a great distance or pay a lot of money to hear. I had a lot of their recordings, and they seemed like a solid, workaday group. Anyway, they turned out to be fairly good, especially the lower strings, with enough eccentricities to make it really interesting. It seemed to me that their color and style, at least under a French Swiss conductor like Charles Dutoit, was better suited to playing French music that the German and Hungarian stuff we got.

The Liszt concerto, which isn't too froo-froo but which I could live without, was the first time I'd heard a piano concerto in Zellerbach. Holy vibrations, what awful acoustics for that setup.

Later, fought my editorial corner to get added grammatical errors removed again from my review.