Reviews
When the fiery conductor Stuart Stratford is whipping up the city of London Sinfonia to a storm tossed frenzy – then you can expect your goosebumps to swell to the size of golf balls. Stuart Stratford's music direction is one of the strengths of this production. Michael Church, The Independent Opera Holland Park 2011, Rigoletto Conductor Stuart Stratford was consistently alert to the musical details, coaxing beautiful solo playing from his principal cello, clarinet and oboe. He skilfully controlled the subtle shifts of pace, volleying rhythmic rises, and swelling instrumental furies followed by anxious descents, which characterise Verdi’s melodramatic score.
Opera Today Opera Holland Park 2011, Rigoletto The City of London Sinfonia, under conductor Stuart Stratford, were sensitive to all the nuance of Verdi’s score, raising the grand-scale choral passages with richly Italianate élan while also underpinning the immense tragedy of softer, more intimate moments.
John de Wald, Opera Britannia Opera Holland Park 2011, Rigoletto
The City of London Sinfonia plays with blissful suavity, and Stuart Stratford conducts Mascagni's score as though it were the greatest ever written. Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday Opera Holland Park 2011, L'amico Fritz
Gavin Dixon, Seen and Heard International Opera Holland Park 2011, L'amico FritzMake haste to Kensington because the moment Stuart Stratford launches the prelude with pristine and piquant articulation from the City of London Sinfonia there’ll be a smile on your face. Ed Seckerson, The Independent Opera Holland Park 2011, L'amico Fritz
A charming show with an often delightful score to match. Best of all is conductor Stuart Stratford, who fires up the score’s genuine passion and conveys its subtle delicacy. Stuart Stratford conducts Mascagni as if he believes in every bar of the score, and conveys his belief to the excellent City of London Sinfonia. Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times The City of London Sinfonia played with silky grace under the sensitive baton of Stuart Stratford. Rupert Christiansen, Daily Telegraph
An opera that can be interminable, with endless changes of set, is here an unusually coherent, dramatically taut and almost Shakespearian drama; the 3 hours speed by. It helps that 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. Overall, this is the hit of the Holland Park season, and perhaps the company’s best-ever show. Not to be missed.
Hugh Canning Opera Holland Park 2010, La Forza del Destino  Anna Pickard Opera Holland Park 2010, La Forza del Destino Their epic presentation is sustained by Stuart Stratford's immensely stylish conducting, and by orchestral playing that never falters, as well as by a cast whose members hurl themselves at roles demanding Maserati voices, firing on all cylinders.
George Hall Opera Holland Park 2010, La Forza del Destino The Telegraph Opera Holland Park’s manages a production which overall is far more coherent than those I have seen in living memory at Covent Garden, English National Opera and the Met. Holding the performance together with some thunderously exciting and vivid conducting was Stuart Stratford. His swift and electric account of the score offered much to enjoy.
Rupert Christiansen
Opera Holland Park 2010, La Forza del Destino Il Giornale della Musica
Bravissimi il protagonista Alan Oke e la soprano Elena Xanthoudakis, sotto la bacchetta sicura di Stuart Stratford che ha fatto suonare in maniera eccellente l'orchestra della ENO.
Stuart Stratford conducts this time around and makes the score seem more ravishing than ever, every phrase beautifully balanced, every chord immaculately spaced, a reminder that before minimalism was invented, Glass studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and has maintained the craftsmanship he acquired there. It's a must-see for anyone who missed the first run, and a landmark in recent London opera.Carlo Boccadoro English National Opera 2010, Satyagraha Andrew Clements English National Opera 2010, Satyagraha classicalsource.com
An equally vital element of the production’s great success is the terrific musical performances by singers and orchestra. Whatever its effects on the listener, the relentlessness of Glass’s music places immense demands on musicians. Yet the ENO cast and musicians are not just technically near-faultless, for their performances bristle with incredible verve and commitment. The ENO Orchestra, under the tightly-controlled but inspiring direction of Stuart Stratford, played brilliantly; the chorus has rarely sounded so together. This outstanding production is, once again, highly recommended; no doubt it will be a stalwart at ENO for many years to come.
Graham Rogers
English National Opera 2010, Satyagraha musicalcriticism.com
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 (the flautists and keyboard players deserve special credit for this). The many shifts into Gorecki-like elegy in the work were handled with just the right degree of beauty, never too syrupy in phrasing or inflection.
Stephen Graham English National Opera 2010, Satyagraha I was caught and held by the sheer beauty of the staging, singing, and playing in the pit. This show as a whole is a masterpiece. Book now.
Michael Church English National Opera 2010, Satyagraha The Telegraph 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
Opera Holland Park 2009, Kát'a Kabanová 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. The Stage
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 Opera Holland Park 2009, Kát'a Kabanová 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. The Telegraph
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 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. 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. 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 Opera North 2008, A Midsummer Night's Dream 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. 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
Opera North 2008, A Midsummer Night's Dream
…the City of London Sinfonia…. under an efficient conductor, their playing is stylish, secure, and warmly blended. Under Stuart Stratford, it is utterly thrilling. Stratford's Jenufa is powerfully argued: brutal, searing and caustic, meticulously accented, abrupt, yet softening into the sad, slow intimacy that is, as much as rage, the subject of this opera. We've been spoilt for good Janácek in the past few years, yet this is the first Jenufa I have heard that has had such a sharply defined Janus face, looking back to Dvorák and forward to Bartók. Perhaps inevitably, Stratford's reading seems darker and stronger than that of director Olivia Fuchs, whose most persuasive and perceptive ideas in what is ostensibly a careful and conservative production, are to be found in the small differences of behaviour between those who are conscious that they are being observed and those who are not. Anna Picard 
Conductor Stuart Stratford led an impulsive, faultlessly paced account of this riveting score and the orchestra played as though their lives depended on it. The result was shattering, and I have to say that I've heard less secure, impassioned playing at far posher operatic addresses than this. Keith McDonnell  ……conductor Stuart Stratford milks the haunting score for all its tenderness as much as its high drama…. Anthony Holden  Stuart Stratford, having studied at St Petersburg, knows what this music is about - witness the hint of portamento in the first three notes of the string tune in the prelude - and he drew spirited and idiomatic playing from the City of London Sinfonia, and full-throated sing from the chorus. Rodney Milnes  Stuart Stratford's conducting combines detail with passion, and the City of London Sinfonia's playing is all oily sensuality and brooding menace. Tim Ashley … Stuart Stratford knows how Tchaikovsky's music should go, and it makes its mark." George Hall The City of London Sinfonia captures the yearning for an unattainable happiness. Anthony Holden … Stuart Stratford's photographic realisation of this painterly score underlined how perceptive a conductor he is. Anna Picard |
