LSO/Gergiev – review

Barbican, LondonValery Gergiev chose Stravinsky's 1948 Mass setting to fire the starting gun for his week-long Stravinsky festival. An interesting choice for portraying variegations in the composer's diverse stylistic spectrum, the Mass isn't really a concert piece, and is anticlimactic when performed as such. Its main source of interest is the range of textures achieved with the very particular mixture of double-reed instruments and brass, which lends an exhilarating shrillness to this otherwis...

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