“I get the feeling that they would come to see him if nothing else. Marc is enormously popular with audiences.”
“…it was Taddei’s decision to obey the composer’s metronome markings, rather than follow performance tradition, that made this a bit special. Not that things were all that different – just an extra thrust and movement in places where we have come to accept an emotional lingering – the last movement for example, where Tchaikovsky’s death five days after he conducted the work’s premiere has added an extra musical programme to the work. But Tchaikovsky himself didn’t name the work Pathetique but, rather, Passionate – and that is what Marc Taddei gave us.”
“The Ravel … was sublimely performed, gorgeously impressionistic…”
“…it’s all part of what we’ve come to expect from an Orchestra Wellington occasion! In other words there’s nothing routine about what happens, even when there are no such extras or “frills”, but always a real and vibrant sense of a concert’s uniqueness and its attendant music-making joys.”
“Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony is immensely well known to the point where saying something new would seem impossible, yet Marc Taddei, by going back to the composer’s original metronome markings brought this war horse to life….one felt like having heard the symphony for the first time.”