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Stuart Stratford Reviews
Biography | News | Stuart Stratford Website
Opera Holland Park - La Forza del Destino
"Their epic presentation is sustained by Stuart Stratford's immensely stylish conducting, and by orchestral playing that never falters"
George Hall, Guardian, 28 Jul 2010
"Holding the performance together with some thunderously exciting and vivid conducting was Stuart Stratford. <...> ...his swift and electric account of the bumpy score offered much to enjoy."
Rupert Christiansen, Daily Telegraph, 28 Jul 2010
"the musical performance matches the dramatic breadth and momentum of the staging. Stuart Stratford’s conducting of the City of London Sinfonia is inspirational, easily the most thrilling performance I have heard at Holland Park. It is viscerally exciting in the blood-and-thunder passages, but wonderfully nuanced, too."
Hugh Canning, Sunday Times Online, 1 Aug 2010
"Thrust so often to the front of the stage, the Opera Holland Park chorus throws off its inhibitions and performs with high spirits, while conductor Stuart Stratford sets hell-for-leather speeds, as if pursued by demons of his own. The result is an exciting performance with some rough edges – the best way to play this tortured masterpiece."
Richard Fairman, Financial Times, 29 Jul 2010
"Conductor Stuart Stratford's suave, urgent reading of Verdi's overture sets, the scene for a production that riccochets between naturalism and exageration, held together by a searing performance from the City of London Sinfonia and the chorus."
Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday, 1 Aug 2010
"In the pit, conductor Stuart Stratford's obvious enthusiasm for the score results in a reading that displays affection and ardour in equal measure."
Edward Bhesania, The Stage, 30 Jul 2010
"Conducted by Stuart Stratford, who encourages excellent work from the orchestra"
Christopher Gray, Oxford Times, 28 Jul 2010
English National Opera - Satyagraha
"Stuart Stratford conducts this time around and makes the score seem more ravishing than ever, every phrase beautifully balanced, every chord immaculately spaced"
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 28 Feb 2010
"Stuart Stratford is the conductor and the ENO orchestra deserves a pat on the back for dealing with an opera that invites every muscle to break out in repetitive strain injury."
Richard Fairman, Financial Times, 28 Feb 2010
"Gandhi's philosophy was based on individuals taking responsibility and, collectively, bringing about change. This was dazzlingly mirrored in the exhaustive workings of the ENO orchestra, conducted by Stuart Stratford, with each player contributing their thousands of scales and arpeggios to the seamless, ever shifting whole."
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 28 Feb 2010
"All praise, however, to a sterling and committed cast (led by Alan Oke as the Mahatma), conductor (Stuart Stratford) and orchestra, who do a brilliant job of counting the bars and keeping their composure."
Rupert Christiansen, Daily Telegraph, 27 Feb 2010
"the conductor Stuart Stratford finds the pulse points and draws each passage to its glowing climax."
Neil Fisher, The Times, 27 Feb 2010
"Performed with great skill and assiduity by Stuart Stratford and the house orchestra, the musical elements of the show are of the highest quality. The precision exuded by Stratford and his players (the quality perhaps most demanded by the incessant metric shifts of the score) has if anything become more solid, more firm, in the three years since the first production. As such the threat of awkwardness of line and form which hangs over the music was held off with flair. Instead, all the irregular accent shifts and metric modulations sounded utterly natural to the expressive palette of the drama, even giving a sheen of finesse to the stasis of movement and development outlined within"
Stephen Graham, Musical Criticism
Opera North 2008 - A Midsummer Night's Dream
"To this visual and vocal bewitchment conductor Stuart Stratford and Opera North's orchestra add something so finely and sensitively achieved that Britten's opera sounds as good as it looks.
George Hall, The Independent, 2008
"Capping the company's success, Stuart Stratford gets playing of extraordinary detail and colour from Opera North's orchestra...Rarely has Britten score sounded clearer or tauter. That is a tribute to Stratford, but also to Duncan's productions team, the superb ensemble and the wonderful children's chorus. A triumph."
Hugh Canning, Sunday Times, 2008
"But Martin Duncan's new production for Opera North, though apparently done on a shoestring, is a delight. So is Stuart Stratford's conducting, which encourages the players in the pit to characterise their lines as pungently as the singers on the stage.... The trumpet, for instance, scampers as virtuosically as Tom Walker's mesmerising boy-monkey Puck while the strings slither and shimmy as hypnotically as the groovy floating balloons, translucent plastic screens and psychedelic rainbow glows in Johan Engels's sets."
Richard Morrison, The Times, 2008
"Stuart Stratford's conducting is supple and responsive to the work's shifts in tonal colour, from the gamelan-inspired, percussive textures of the fairy kingdom to the roistering folk music of the rustic characters"
Alfred Hickling, The Guardian, 2008
Opera Holland Park 2009 - Kát'a Kabanová
"The tragic force of Katya’s story blazes through Duprels’s interpretation, and the pungent playing of the City of London Sinfonia, conducted with total authority by Stuart Stratford (a name to watch, I feel)."
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 2009
"Kát'a Kabanová, Janácek's harrowing examination of sexual guilt, has always tended to bring out the best in British opera companies. Few of its recent stagings, however, have so unflinchingly probed its moral and emotional complexities as Olivia Fuchs's exceptional new production for Opera Holland Park: this is the company's greatest achievement, and arguably Fuchs's as well. Their final catastrophic encounter, in which the gestures of desire can only trigger the bitterest of memories, have a veracity and emotional nakedness that is disturbing in the extreme. Stuart Stratford's conducting, lyrical yet violent, adds immeasurably to the intensity of it all."
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 2009
"Once again the cast, conductor and orchestra, together with the production team, hit all the right buttons. This Kat’a Kabanova is a triumph. But it’s in the choral singing, the orchestral playing and in Stuart Stratford’s comprehensively excellent conducting that the show rises to pure greatness."
George Hall, The Stage, 2009
"Under Stuart Stratford, the City of London Sinfonia plays with absolute engagement, relishing the febrile and furious lurches of this glorious, urgent tragedy. There are no weak links. Every characterisation is thorough, every note sung with meaning, Randle's ardent Boris and Duprels's immersion in Kat'a's guilt, longing and terror, like her Butterfly and Rusalka, sensational. Not simply the highlight of Holland Park's season, this Kat'a Kabanova is the highlight of the summer."
Anna Picard, The Independent, 2009
Opera Holland Park 2008 – Iolanta
"Anniliese Miskimmon's staging avoided the bathos that the oddities of the libretto invite, and the rapturous score, with its exquisitely refined orchestration and supple melodies, was imaginatively conducted by Stuart Stratford."
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 2008
"The music is better than the story, though even that comes across touchingly in Annilese Miskimmon's simple but darkly atmospheric and character-focused production. It is beautifully conducted by Stuart Stratford, who makes the City of London Sinfonia sound sumptuous in arias and propulsive in conversational passages, so the pace never sags."
Erica Jeal, The Guardian, 2008
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