“…this performance by Marc Taddei and Orchestra Wellington was one of the finest, most focused, exquisitely-detailed and richly-characterised I’ve ever experienced.”
“…what struck me afresh… was a characteristic that it shared with all of the “great” performances I had heard, whether monumental, like Klemperer’s or Barbirolli’s, or swift and incisive, like Toscanini’s or Karajan’s, a sense of an unbroken, vibrant musical line sounding and resounding throughout the whole work. This was brought about less by speed than by a sense of unremitting forward movement, enabled by incisive orchestral attack and clearly-focused phrasings – not a bar, not a phrase, not a musical sentence in this performance reflected anything but the inevitability of the whole, the viewpoint of an eagle’s eye.”
“…I’d like to think that we’ll also equally get behind and support whatever this remarkable orchestra and its inspirational music director, together with its enterprising and progressive administration, will come up with next!”
“…Marc Taddei, carrying his players along with him to big, bold and resolute effect, the final minutes of the work perhaps taking late-Romantic symphonic expression to an apotheosis of sorts matched subsequently only by Mahler in his ‘Symphony of a Thousand’. Heroes all, the Orchestra Wellington players, sticking with their conductor as if their lives depended on the outcome, and together realising a performance whose impact will be sure to resound within the minds of those of us who heard it for many a day to come.”
“Then there was the sheer excellence and accuracy of the lively orchestral playing and Taddei’s very conspicuous attention to the roles of every section and solo instrument, not to mention the overall architecture of the symphony.”
“Though there was long and rapturous applause I was surprised that no one stood to acknowledge Marc Taddei’s achievement. That he conducted the work without the score might not have been so remarkable in the Jupiter Symphony, but it was in the case of this masterpiece nearly three times as long.”
“The Mozart was a total delight: elegant, exuberant, and joyful.”