'Happiest of all is the conductor Brad Cohen, also making a company debut, who leads a splendidly buoyant, impeccably paced performance.'
Heidi Waleson, The Wall Street Journal, 29/3/2011
'Brad Cohen conducts the endearing score with abundant brio.'
Howard Kissel, The Huffington Post, 7/4/2010
'Brad Cohen conducted Donizetti's famous score with wit and charm, giving voice to sprightly rhythms and ensuring that the chorus was tight.'
Paul Pelkonen, superconductor.blogspot.com, 25/3/2011
'Brad Cohen conducted the orchestra briskly and beautifully.'
Susan Hall, Berkshire Fine Arts, 29/3/2011
'The singing is wonderful, the conducting and playing disciplined, delicate, opulent. For Brad Cohen and the City of London Sinfonia this is a magnificent achievement: a symphonic score played as chamber music.'
Anna Picard, The Independent on Sunday, 6/6/2010
'the City of London Sinfonia sound transformed under Brad Cohen's baton: Debussy's pellucid score flickers with shimmer, seduction and, at times, dangerous menace. It grounds what can be a wispy psychodrama in a very human context'
Neil Fisher, The Times, 4/6/2010
'beautifully conducted by Brad Cohen and often quite wonderfully sung.'
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 3/6/2010
'under conductor Brad Cohen the orchestra brings out all the subtlety and refinement of the marvellous score.'
George Hall, The Stage, 4/6/2010
'Brad Cohen conducted the City of London Sinfonia with urgency and pungency, and the marvellous fifth act came across with unusual dramatic force.'
Rupert Christiansen, Telegraph, 11/6/2010
'OHP's Pelléas, beautifully conducted, against insuperable odds and extraneous noises off, by Brad Cohen'
Hugh Canning, Sunday Times, 20/06/2010
'The ravishing music - superbly delivered by singers and orchestra under conductor Brad Cohen - matches the ecstasy of the action.'
Christopher Gray, The Oxford Times, 3/6/2010
'The effect realizes Debussy's score beautifully, especially with Brad Cohen's delicate work in the pit.'
Warwick Thompson, Bloomberg.com, 4/6/2010
'Brad Cohen had a firm grip of the score - alert to its ebb and flow, every shifting colour and breath, and never once did he allow it to sag or lose momentum, which in an Opera House would be an achievement, but in these circumstances was nothing short of remarkable. He is an undemonstrative conductor, never getting in the way, giving singers and orchestra a great deal of freedom, but also very much in control. Many plaudits to the City of London Sinfonia, which although smaller in number than we might expect in this work (at least as far as the string sections are concerned) gave some truly ravishing playing'
David Wordsworth, classicalsource.com, 1/6/2010
'The success of the evening was the valiant City of London Sinfonia under Brad Cohen with a dramatic coherent account with the music's seemingly natural ebb and flow. This was, I suspect, exactly what Debussy was intending to achieve with writing which is necessarily dependent on the natural speech rhythms of the French language. It was admirable in the prevailing conditions that Cohen could be so sensitive to his cast and that almost every syllable of Maeterlinck's text could be understood.'
Jim Pritchard, Seen and Heard, 20/06/2010
'Brad Cohen, standing tall, is one of relatively few conductors whose gestures are so consonant with the music as to almost constitute a visual commentary and enhancement of what we hear'
Peter Grahame Woolf, MusicalPointers.co.uk, 20/06/2010
'This deserves to fly off the shelves and out of the shopping websites.'
Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times, 7/9/2008
'The big selling point of this new recording is its use of a new critical edition by Brad Cohen, who is also the conductor of the project (and can be seen in the current BBC2 series Maestro)...Brad Cohen is fired up on the podium and draws incisive playing from the London Philharmonic.'
Dominic McHugh, musicalcriticism.com, 23/8/2008
A remarkable recording of the best bits of Rossini's comedy
'Brad Cohen conducts superbly, bringing out the strength and expressive range of music that revels in the thrill of sexual confrontation and the speed and power of the vortex into which so-called civilised society can all too rapidly vanish. Back in the 1820s, English audiences were entertained by The Italian Girl and vaguely frightened by it. This remarkable performance tells you why.'
Richard Osborne, GRAMOPHONE, June 2009
Sensation in Karlstad
'Saturday's premiere was a performance that took your breath away...Brad Cohen leads the Värmland Sinfonietta in music-making as implacable and unsentimental as what we see on the stage. Where melodies are broken and bound together in a seamless flow and where sounds, according to the atmosphere, change from crystalline to veiled. In addition, Värmlandsoperan gives us an ensemble that sings as if their lives depended on it.'
Martin Nyström, Dagens Nyheter, 7/8/2008
Puccini for real
'This is a throbbing Bohème, one that pulls and tears. Purrs and spits, rubs and caresses...Brad Cohen makes his Swedish opera debut, leading the Värmland Sinfonietta in an intense interpretation. I hear qualities in Puccini's music I have seldom noticed before. At some moments it is pure chamber music, at others I am stunned by the force of the full orchestra.'
Per Feltzin, Sveriges Radio/Kulturnytt, 6/8/2008
'Under Brad Cohen, the City of London Sinfonia underlines the suavity and variety of the score, playing with an alluring tone and tight articulation - each section a jewel, from the honeyed clarinets to the incisive upper strings.'
Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday, 8/6/2008
'Brad Cohen's conducting is all fire and steel'
Tim Ashley, The Guardian, 5/6/2008
'Brad Cohen conducts the City of London Sinfonia with sensitive flexibility and rigour'
Hilary Finch, The Times, 6/6/2008
'Conductor Brad Cohen ensured a keen grasp of Italian style and led a brisk and well-sprung performance, decently played by the City of London Sinfonia.'
Richard Fairman, Financial Times, 5/6/2008
'Opera simply does not come much better than this: the Chelsea Opera Group's concert performance of Verdi's Macbeth was an unqualified triumph in musical and dramatic terms.'
Evan Dickerson, Seen and Heard, 1/4/2008
'Best of all...Brad Cohen, who conducted the doom-laden score as if the Apocalypse were in the offing.'
George Hall, Independent, 6/4/2008
'I have seen several expensively staged productions of this work but I have never been as gripped as by the COG performance last week...The orchestra, under Brad Cohen, was in strong form.'
Clare Colvin, Sunday Express, 6/4/2008
'COG's orchestra achieved many fine things thanks to the firm and stylish conducting of Brad Cohen; the strings were particularly expressive.'
Dominic McHugh, Musical Criticism, 1/4/2008
'Brad Cohen gave a strong lead with his impassioned but not hard-driven direction, so that tension was maintained even in quiet passages.'
John T. Hughes, Classical Source, 6/4/2008
May 2011